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Where we (must) go from here: A brief reflection on MLK Jr Day
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Christopher Harris, UCI global and international studies assistant professor, offers perspective
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"I should confess. I'm not much for holidays. Particularly those whose primary function is the maintenance of American mythmaking, myths that are often cynically deployed to justify imperial encroachment abroad, and mask, however tenuously, techniques of domination at home.
Over time, I've come to think that my aversion to holidays might explain, at least in part, why every year when Martin Luther King Jr. Day rolls around, and we’re once again forced to endure the vapid platitudes of politicians eager to sing his praise, I'm struck by a stinging sense of ambivalence.
To sit with this ambivalence on the annual celebration of King's birth, to wrestle with the contradictions intrinsic to a "holiday" honoring his life and work, has yielded a curious sensation of consciousness and commotion, one of relatively recent vintage - within the last decade or so - but that has nevertheless become increasingly acute and often paired with a rush of something like anger, maybe even disgust.
These emotions - anger and disgust - suggest there could be something deeper, perhaps personal at play. In this suspicion, I'm reminded that, to borrow from the Guyanese radical activist and thinker Andaiye, "the political is always personal," and not the other way around."
Continue reading:
https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2024/2024-01-15-christopher-harris-reflection-on-mlk-jr-day.php
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Christopher Harris, UCI global and international studies assistant professor, studies Black political thought, Black culture, Black aesthetics, and Black social movements. His work aims to understand the political lives, thought, and cultures of the Black diaspora and the underlying social forces that shape them. Harris earned his Ph.D. in politics and historical studies from The New School for Social Research. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University before joining the UCI faculty in fall 2021. He’s the author of To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain and Care (Princeton University Press).
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