You\u2019re so angry!<\/em> The white person accuses.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t support Black Lives Matter<\/em>, the white person complains.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t have the moral leadership of Martin Luther King.<\/em><\/p>\n Or\u2013my (least) favorite: What would Martin Luther King think of what You People are doing?\u00a0<\/em> (To which the rational answer\u2013which I have seen made\u2013can only be, \u201cWe\u2019ll never know; You People killed him.\u201d)<\/p>\n And the definition of non-violence gets extended, almost infinitely, to mean no disrupting political rallies, no blocking traffic, no making unpleasant scenes at the mall.\u00a0 \u201cNon-violence\u201d has become code for white people refusing to listen to live black voices, in the name of a distorted version of a man whose actual words we rarely bother to hear, beyond a sound-bite or two from the \u201cI have a Dream\u201d speech.<\/p>\n Are we \u201chonoring\u201d Dr. King?\u00a0 Or are pretending that his death marked the end of racism in America?\u00a0 What are we really celebrating here\u2013his non-violence, or our hope to continue our lives without being inconvenienced by protests, shamed by justifiable anger, or disturbing life inside our comfortable white bubbles?<\/p>\n Nonviolence\u2013real non-violence\u2013can be assertive and disruptive as hell, something I notice a large number of us white folks don\u2019t want to acknowledge. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Peacefully, non-violently\u00a0pissed. But I sure wish we wouldn\u2019t make Martin Luther King into the patron saint of tone-policing black activism.\u00a0 Because that\u2026 is completely messed up. I wish I had never seen this, but I’ve actually seen it more times than I care to count: a black person speaks out against present-day racism and violence, and a white person attempts to shame him into silence by invoking Martin Luther King and what the white person is pleased to call “non-violence.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1904,"featured_media":1472,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[98,159,158,97,83,64],"class_list":["post-1457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cats-posts","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-jr","tag-martin-luther-king","tag-non-violence","tag-racism","tag-social-justice"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"seriously-white-people\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/441\/2016\/01\/seriously-white-people.jpg\")
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