I stopped sending out emails for Martin Luther King Day a couple of years ago. I didn't want my message, with its constant theme of liberation and pleasure, to get mixed up in the white washing of his quotes and capitalist ventures. Using the name of anti-capitalist revolutionaries to sell something should come with grave consequences anyway. Especially since they often spoke against the very idea. We don't get these quotes in our emails, as non-profit organizations need much cleaner, white friendly quotes to ask their donors for funding.
“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power”. —MLK Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a radical Civil Rights hero, who advocated for civil disobedience as a means of achieving liberation, and his speeches were anything but the fluff we have been served up by the global minority today.
“…the price that America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro and other minority groups is the price of its own destruction.”—MLK Jr.
As a Black led non-profit organization, today got me to thinking though. What if we spent more time shuttering our doors to honor, celebrate and lift up the names of the freedom fighters and pleasure activists in our lineage. I am dreaming up a new calendar for our future. One that allows us to enjoy personal time off on the days that we uplift our ancestors. I am including folks like my grandmother, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Sojourner Truth, and Malidoma Some on my list. I am curious, who would you have on yours?
“White Americans must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”—MLK Jr.
Ancestral veneration is the practice of showing respect, honor, and reverence to one's ancestors. As we honor our revolutionaries and work hard to make sure their fight was not in vain, I hope we all can take a moment and remember that to venerate them means to show respect to their traditions, not changing them to fit the scope of our needs. They said what they said, every last one of them and we can all benefit from the TRUTH of their wisdom, guidance, and protection.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
—Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963
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