Indeed we have sugarcoated and deodorized King. Every year this time I grow weary of hearing about his dream. Those on the right use this dream language as a pretext to talk about colorblindness without talking about justice and the enduring legacy of American apartheid and structural racism. Those on the left go to marches or sponsor a day of mercy while eschewing the hard work of justice.
It is hard to say what King would be doing and saying if he were alive. But preachers traffic in imagination. So let me imagine based on my study of the man’s life and legacy. He would not be very popular among the educated black middle class because he would remind us of our entanglement in the trappings of success and material excess while neglecting the dire educational and economic straits faced by millions upon millions of our people. He would not be popular among the corporatocracy (the powerful oligarchy of corporations, banks, and governments that control finance and economics and therefore politics) because he would call out their unchecked greed, astronomical salaries, and their erosion of the protection and prosperity of workers. He would not be popular in the White House because American muscular militarism has not yielded to peaceful ways to resolve conflict and the era of government by and for the haves to the exclusion of the have-nots seems uninterrupted. Neither Democrats nor Republicans utter the word poverty and the middle class they fetishizes with rhetoric and neglect with policy shrinks every second. He would not be popular with the self-centered, culturally accommodated American church. He would remind us that we exist to serve, not to be served.
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