I

“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. 

II

Beginning in 1983, the year President Ronald Reagan signed the bill that made King’s birthday a federal holiday, his name, and a carefully airbrushed chronicle of his political legacy, have gradually risen to near messianic status, heights that were unimaginable while he was living.

It’s been well documented that the actually existing King did not enjoy the kind of widespread public support one might assume he’d have, given his present stature. Just as importantly, if not more so, during his time as a prominent activist, government agents and officials derisively labeled King a “communist,” and subjected him to surveillance and threats, believing that the man who would later become virtually synonymous with moral clarity, and get credited with helping to redeem “the soul of our Nation,” posed a fundamental threat.

In the eyes of the FBI, to say nothing of others in positions of power, King was the country’s “most dangerous man,” despite his unwavering belief in the “promise” of the American project, and that, according to Cornel West, he understood his dissent to be “a high form of patriotism,” a patriotism that political elites have been all too eager to fold into a narrative of King’s contributions to American progress in the decades after his death.

Such blatant hypocrisy by the state is not surprising, but that doesn’t make the manipulation any less craven or predatory, and a worthy catalyst for the previously referenced anger and disgust. After all, King’s contributions to Black thought and Black struggle have become cogs in the wheel of what is perhaps best described as a long campaign of counterinsurgency waged by the US government, watering down his radicality and weaponizing his image in service to state propaganda. Included in this repertoire of disinformation, I’m suggesting, is the federal holiday celebrating his life.

That he now has a statue on the National Mall in Washington D.C., arguably the quintessential site of American agitprop, is all the evidence one needs.

III

Today, those called to the struggle by #BlackLivesMatter are not only fighting for a liberated present and future; they are also fighting to liberate the past. For nearly a decade, organizers and cultural workers in the Movement for Black Lives have used Martin Luther King Jr Day as an opportunity to “reclaim the radical MLK,” by rejecting the state-sponsored version of his life and legacy through public events, direct actions, and media campaigns.

The importance of reclaiming the King that believed we needed a “radical reconstruction of the entire society” and “a revolution in values;” the King that was anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist, is not just about destabilizing and correcting narratives that conveniently leave these aspects of his political thought and activism blowing in the wind.

It’s also about allowing King to be a three-dimensional person with flaws like everyone else. Someone whose respectability politics, hierarchical approach to organizing, and sexism may have been characteristic of the conjuncture in which he lived, but that would nevertheless conflict with the present movement’s political culture and ethics. As I write in my book, To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain and Care, the movement’s culture, and ethics is, amongst other things, an explicit refutation of those characteristics.

The tensions do not end there, unfortunately. Despite his firm anti-imperialism, King, the lover of peace, supported the colonial-Zionist project in historic Palestine, as well as the purported “right” of the so-called State of Israel to exist. As you can imagine, this has been exploited by the purveyors of genocide in Gaza; the same cast of war-loving criminals at the helm of our government who invariably bore us with trite speeches commemorating the holiday bearing King’s name.

The current Black liberation struggle abhors antisemitism as much as King did, but the movement also detests settler colonialism and genocide, which is how both the U.S., and the State of Israel came to be – what American and Zionist mythmaking attempt to hide. We know better now, and we expect it to stop. It’s in the interest of the many.  

But beyond being able to critically engage these dimensions of his political thought, facets that, just like his radicalism, are brushed to the side when the sanitized King is embraced, reclaiming the radical MLK is also about reclaiming the movement of which he was but one, albeit significant part. By venerating King in the manner that we do, we distort what ought to be a collective legacy with Black women at the center, reducing victories secured by community action to the talent, will, and sacrifice of a single man.

King was propelled by a movement already in motion, and without it, we may have never known his name.

Reclaiming the radical MLK, then, is about doing away with the tendency to blindly glorify King at not only the expense of the larger movement, but what we might otherwise learn from a fuller picture of the man himself. The weaponization of King by the American government and similar forces of reaction blur our collective vision, allowing both his radical politics as well as his flaws to fall from view, doing a disservice to Black struggle and everyone who wishes to stand on the side of justice and liberation.

Captured by the imperial hands of the political class, in other words, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the version of the late preacher it has helped promote, is a key culprit and primary enabler.

IV

In retrospect, perhaps I’m not so ambivalent about the holiday as a “holiday” after all, but instead caught between a deep personal desire for us to acknowledge and study the contributions that King and less “palatable” revolutionaries have made to Black thought and Black struggle without the propagandistic distortions a holiday facilitates, those crass manipulations that, for me, inspire anger and disgust. 

Once more we’re returned to clarifying simplicity. As Andaiye so poignantly noted, “the political is always personal,” and not the other way around.

For whatever reason, King wanted to repair America, and believed that dissent, that “breaking the silence,” was both a strategy and a moral imperative towards this end.  There’s no real evidence to suggest that he ever wanted to see the American Empire fall. Had he lived, however, it’s possible he would have arrived at that very conclusion, as many of us in, around, and beyond the movement have.

I know I’m not alone when I say that we seek the end of the American Empire, of Empire as such, because we insist on building a Black future, a Palestinian future, a liberated future for all, which will require, as King suggested, a “radical reconstruction of the entire society” and “a revolution in values.”

In other words, it will require abolition, the undoing and remaking of the world.

I’m convinced that this is where we must go from here, away from the chaos produced by war and the pursuit of capital accumulation, away from anti-Blackness, away from racialized and gendered categories of difference that lead to hierarchy and domination, towards a borderless community where the means of production are held in common, a sociality prefaced on a radically inclusive ethics of care.

More than what could be achieved by the celebratory distractions of a holiday, what I’ve outlined is precisely how we can and should build on the legacy left by the freedom fighters of not only the Civil Rights Movement, but the names, known and unknown, that tell the centuries-long  story of the Black radical tradition, and the revolutionary struggle of oppressed people everywhere: a legacy of bravery, of sacrifice, of disobedience, and the collective withdrawal of consent.”   

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).

-----

UCI School of Social Sciences perspective pieces offer faculty an opportunity to share their expertise and opinions. Read more at https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/index.php.