{"id":31750,"date":"2017-01-17T17:49:25","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T21:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=31750"},"modified":"2017-01-17T20:25:29","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T00:25:29","slug":"martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

According to the Washington Post:<\/a><\/p>\n

Ohio\u2019s governor says Americans shouldn\u2019t focus so much on the highest-level people when there are ways to tackle many societal problems at the local and individual levels.<\/p>\n

Republican Gov. John Kasich (KAY\u2019-sik) spoke Monday in Atlanta at the King Center on the holiday honoring its namesake, Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

Kasich says King got the attention of people in power through a \u201cbottom-up\u201d approach worth emulating. Kasich says efforts such as addressing drug use and improving education need people committed at the community level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree that action at the community level is important on any issue, including things like drug use and education. But I am all sorts of tired of seeing the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., used in\u00a0convoluted\u00a0and ahistorical ways. King was a radical. He was widely disliked, not just in the South but by whites nationwide. Simply inviting him to visit your town could mean putting your life at risk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But can we\u00a0talk about bottom-up for a moment? Because it wasn\u2019t the local cops who protected the Little Rock Nine or flanked Ruby Bridges as she walked to school through screaming mobs. It was federal marshals who did this\u2014because the local cops refused. The local cops were on the other side of the picket lines.\u00a0When King came to Chicago, he was attacked by white mobs hurling projectiles at him. He wanted to end housing discrimination in the city. The city\u2019s white residents objected\u2014strongly. What does working bottom-up mean in a context like this, exactly? Daley only came to the negotiating table to end the explosive protests<\/a>. Ultimately, the challenges King faced in Chicago led to the creation of the Fair Housing Act<\/a>, a federal law.<\/p>\n

I worry that using\u00a0King\u2019s memory to underscore an\u00a0argument\u00a0that \u201cAmericans shouldn\u2019t focus so much on the highest-level people\u201d because \u201cthere are many ways to tackle many societal problems at the local and individual levels\u201d obscures the role federal intervention played in achieving the objectives of the civil rights movement. While King engaged in community activism, fixing problems at the local level isn\u2019t always an option\u2014it was the local level that was a problem. The most lasting successes of the civil rights movement were put in place by federal legislation or Supreme Court decisions, not through changing the minds of local whites.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0his remarks,\u00a0Kasich participates in\u00a0a line of conservative thought that that downplays the importance of federal intervention in favor of local solutions, but the successes of the civil rights movement\u2014the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act\u2014were imposed top down. Without federal intervention, it is probable change would have happened much more slowly, if at all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m completely\u00a0behind Kasich arguing, say, that local and state officials matter, and that voters should pay attention to more than just federal races. Amen. I\u2019m totally\u00a0with Kasich in arguing that we need community commitment to things like drug abuse prevention and quality public education. Absolutely. It\u2019s downplaying the role\u00a0top-down intervention played in the civil rights movement on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that bothers me, especially in the wake of the gutting of the federal Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, there were other civil rights figures who focused on bottom-up change, arguing that top-down change was unhelpful, or that it would never happen. These individuals tended to argue for finding strength in community, for solving your problems yourself,\u00a0without asking the government to do it for you (so to speak). But these civil rights figures are the ones white people erased in their ironic eagerness to make King the non-confrontational face of the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re the scary<\/em> ones.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not trying to pick on Kasich here. He was the only Republican presidential candidate who refused to fall in line behind Trump and I don\u2019t think\u00a0he was trying\u00a0to silence anyone. My concern is less with\u00a0Kasich than it is with\u00a0a general pattern of remembering\u00a0Martin Luther King Jr. Day in a way that erases important aspects of the civil rights movement. It\u2019s worth paying attention to what the civil rights movement tells us about\u00a0the limits of local action in defense of minority rights, and the need for federal intervention. If we have a federal justice department that signals an unwillingness to review cases where white police officers shoot unarmed black men, how far will local action by Black Lives Matter get\u00a0in fixing endemic police bias?<\/p>\n

The more common erasure, of course, comes from those portraying King as a moderate, non-divisive civil rights figure when he was anything but. All in all,\u00a0I\u2019m starting to think that official Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations should consist of nothing more than reading King\u2019s Letter from a Birmingham Jail<\/a> out loud.<\/p>\n

[Note: This post was edited for clarity.]<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate to sound like I’m picking on Kasich. He was the only Republican presidential candidate who refused to fall in line behind Trump, and based on my reading, he wasn’t appealing to King in an effort to silence people. Still, he followed a pattern set by all too many white people—he used King’s memory in an ahistorical way to make a point unconnected from King’s lived actions.<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":31760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-31750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-uncategorized","tag-race"],"yoast_head":"\nMartin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I'm starting to think official MLKJ Day celebrations should consist of nothing more than reading King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail out loud.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Martin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I'm starting to think official MLKJ Day celebrations should consist of nothing more than reading King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail out loud.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Love, Joy, Feminism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-01-17T21:49:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-01-18T00:25:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-393870_1280.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"762\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html\",\"name\":\"Martin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2017-01-17T21:49:25+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-01-18T00:25:29+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\"},\"description\":\"I'm starting to think official MLKJ Day celebrations should consist of nothing more than reading King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail out loud.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2017\/01\/martin-luther-king-jr-shape-shifter.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Martin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/\",\"name\":\"Love, Joy, Feminism\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\",\"name\":\"Libby Anne\",\"description\":\"Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. 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