King was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-17/critical-race-theory-martin-luther-king

No paywall
https://archive.fo/LPuda

For the first time, we’re observing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday under new laws in multiple states that ban the instruction of “divisive” interpretations of our racial past. The assaults have given new weapons to an enduring faction in American society that has long resisted the reckoning that his life’s work demanded.

In King’s day, this faction was known as the “Massive Resistance,” an effort to organize and frustrate the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and efforts to build multiracial classrooms. Today, this faction is known as the “anti-CRT” effort, which seeks to proscribe race-related curricula, books or trainings that offer a discomforting view of our past and its current implications.

Teachers, public officials and students are in a particularly unsustainable bind. They’re charged with honoring King as a figure while disavowing the ideas that he lived and died to advance. They’re being asked not merely to defer King’s dream of racial equality but to decommission it altogether.

King would likely take bitter note of the all-too-familiar dynamics behind today’s backlash. After the 2020 global movement for racial justice in the United States and beyond in the wake of the savage police killing of George Floyd, legislatures in 32 states have relied on what is patently a lie — that antiracism is antiwhite — to fuel the antidemocratic crusade against what they call “critical race theory.”

*snip*

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[radius777]

2. Of course he was, and was not liked in his day,

despite the attempts of some current media figures to portray his quest for civil rights and desegregation as an inevitable and logical progression of American freedom. This country was built on colonialism and slavery as much as it was upon ideals of freedom, and so both forces are always in constant struggle. Social justice for blacks, women, gays etc only happened because liberal activists fought for it - not because of 'the Constitution'.

Yes he did stress non-violence and was viewed more favorably than say Malcolm X was. But make no mistake about it, MLK and his movement was nonetheless viewed by most whites as a danger and a threat to the American way of life.

[brooklynite]

3. And giving it a name was a mistake.

Just call it "history".

[Hoyt]

4. Clearly. Hopefully rube states trying to ban CRT, don't get away with history bans.

I know the GOPers will try if it makes their constituents happy.