America's Curated Philosopher

  

  I’ve written before about the sanitization of Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy as a radical philosopher, Christian, organizer, and activist that establishment culture has reduced to a man of meaningless platitudes. The bastardization of his legacy and how his thought and politics relates to today is always a question on my mind, especially around this holiday now venerated by the very U.S federal government that persecuted him while he was alive. Reducing a figure like MLK down to a palatable cliche turns him into an opiate for social and political change rather than a dynamic piece of dialectical radical history. His reduction to a figurehead of a toothless liberal resistance is a crying shame. 


  Social and political change is about mass movements, organized democratic change by regular people, but even so, human psychology naturally sees in individuals the qualities in which we wish to embody within ourselves, so inevitably individuals will always stand as a way for movements to reflect on essential philosophical questions. MLK could stand as a truly powerful American pillar of intellectual and moral fortitude to build a humanist American identity upon. Instead his memory is used as a cudgel against the very people and causes he supported. His life was a living example of *counter hegemony (working class people powered cultural resistance) in important American institutions like the Church, academia, and organized worker movements. His life now has become a hegemonic project (ruling class cultural control) that uses his name to cloud many people’s capabilities to question change and human agency. He has become America’s Curated philosopher. 


  In a way his manicured memory is indicative of how many great Americans and great world peoples images have been scrubbed of their supposed unseemly radicalisms. Martin Luther King is no longer a socialist who opposed the Vietnam war, lambasted capitalism, and said that “Violence is the language of the unheard”. He is instead rolled out as a narcotic to lull people into inaction for fear of a taboo encounter with the limits of non violence. The virulent attacks against organized labor and left wing movements in the U.S and their interconnecting partners internationally are the cause for this black hole that has consumed a more socialistic and humanistic culture that could’ve been for the USA. 


  Reflecting on the true history of MLK and his radical legacy as well as other transformative philosophical figures of his same mold constantly reminds us that time is circular and that we are very much prone to social, political, and even philosophical regression. By remembering this ever present possibility of regression may we honor the names of great humanists like Martin Luther King Jr. by living out their admirable actions and continuing to grapple with the questions of their times that inform and intertwine with our own. 





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