Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I find myself asking “What would Dr. King have thought about…?” and reflecting on some timely issue or event. (This is an exercise that Baratunde Thurston calls “Hypothetic King” in his really excellent post, “What Would Martin Luther King Think of Twitter?” over at Vanity Fair.) This is, of course, a total exercise in projection on my part. I’m no scholar on Dr. King, I possess no credentials to presume about his legacy, and I was born well after he was murdered. But still, I wonder. And this year I can’t help but wonder what he would have thought about the devastating situation in Haiti today.
I can’t imagine, really. But I do believe that he would have provided a clear, strong, and much-needed reflection on poverty and foreign policy, two issues at the heart of Haiti’s recent history and two issues that almost always seem to get lost in familiar narratives about Dr. King’s life and work. It’s always been alarming to me that Dr. King’s interest later in his life on fighting poverty and his critiques of American foreign policy get lost in so many of our celebrations of him. His speech, “The Other America”, is such a stirring call for economic justice, and it gets so little airtime. It seems clear that Dr. King would have done tremendous – and, strictly speaking, much more radical – work on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign and other similar movements had he not been assassinated.
I’m heartened, then, to have seen more and more discussion of Dr. King’s thoughts and work in these areas over the past couple of years. Postbourgie has a fantastic post on this today: “Martin Luther King, no matter how people remember him now, was not nearly so safe as most of us believe.” I also really appreciate the insights from this 2008 article in The American Prospect:
…When a white mob hurled bricks and cherry bombs at marchers in Chicago, King told reporters that the scene outdid anything below the Mason-Dixon Line. “I have never in my life seen such hate,” biographer Taylor Branch quotes him as saying. “Not in Mississippi or Alabama.” Today, we hear little about the ideas that experience provoked for King: His deathbed blueprint for changing America’s caste systems included a three-pronged attack on racism, poverty, and war.
It seems right to me, then, to spend a few moments reflecting thoughtfully on Haiti, switching off the coverage of disaster and death and instead focusing on the fact that we have the opportunity (I will avoid using the words “responsibility” or “obligation” here, even though I believe them to be correct in my heart, because they are so fraught) to help the poorest country in the Americas. And not just in the short-term. Not just because we see people suffering. We can help in the long-term on many fronts, including infrastructure and economic development. For in our part of the world, Haiti is surely The Other America.
Opportunities to donate abound. There’s the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, Doctors Without Borders, Yele Haiti, and so many more. I also really appreciate this post from the Feminist Peace Network on how to support the needs of Haitian women in the aftermath of the earthquake.
It is inspiring to see so many people reaching out to donate and help. But especially today, let’s not let those donations make us feel as if we’ve done enough – not for Haiti, and not for economic justice in our own country and worldwide.
