One of the interesting things about Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy in scholarship of race is the way in which he has been positioned as advocating assimilation. White scholarship and white supremacist articulations of King’s history tend to position his rhetoric as arguing for the assimilation of African-American subjects into dominant white culture. To this end, King’s message of equal opportunity becomes reinterpreted as a call for African-American subjects to adopt habits culturally coded as white as a metonym for the expansion of social, economic, and political power. Under this reading, to be “free at last” means to be free to become like the dominant power majority.
On the other hand, African-American scholars have been just as quick to articulate and interpret King’s legacy to suit their own aims. Anti-Assimilation thinkers tend to position King in ways similar to their white counterparts as a methodology to push back against white supremacist valorization of King’s legacy. In general, Anti-assimilation writers read King as desiring the privileges of whiteness for African-American subjects, rather than as desiring an expansion of opportunity for African-American subject. Further, they view King as presenting assimilation into white culture as the way forwards. Under this view, the desire for greater possibilities, possessed initially by whiteness, becomes the desire to become white.
Cornel West, for example, has taken up King’s legacy in order to launch a polemic against the Black Bourgeoisie. West famously invokes King’s anti-poverty stance in order to demonstrate how the Black middle class has abandoned the Black lower middle class in their rush to attain the possibilities afforded to them by the Civil Rights Movement. In doing so, West accuses the Black middle class of betraying the spirit of King’s legacy by ignoring the way in which he positioned himself as an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinker, both of which West claims the Black Bourgeoisie have bought in to. In short, the attainment of some of the opportunities for Black people by the Black middle class has led to an abandonment of the totality of King’s dream by the Black middle class, in West’s view.
In as much as West and others, claim to be defending King’s legacy against individuals who would seek to use that legacy, they also seek to twist and manipulate King’s legacy for their own ideological ends. To that end, I am wary of any modern invocation of King’s legacy, his rhetoric from any thinker, Black or white: it never comes without strings or manipulation to suit a particular ideological agenda, no matter how progressive or benevolent. So while it is nice to see images like the above that present a different side of King than we are used to, I would caution anyone who is rebloging, posting, writing, or even thinking about writing on King’s legacy to consider both the why and the how of their presentation of King’s legacy. It is often the case that we are not content to let King’s work speak for itself, we (and I include myself in this) seem to need to speak for King.
Thus, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday comes to a close, I’d like to remind us all to cast a wary eye at all of the celebratory remarks, all of the soon to arrive essays and articles, all of the interviews given in the name of and invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. We should all consider why this person, white or Black feels empowered to speak for or about King’s message, and we should most definitely cast a critical eye at how that legacy is being used by that particular speaker.
