MLK Day

I remember when he died, though I often get Martin Luther King's funeral on TV confused with Bobby Kennedy's. It was also right around that time that I learned the word "nigger", which a bad boy in the neighborhood taught me to shout at the black lady while we were crouched behind the bushes. I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it was bad because the lady hung her head low after I said it, "again", louder. When my parents heard me shout it later from underneath the tent I had made out of sheets and chairs, they were shocked and told me to come out and tell them where I had learned that word. They still didn't tell me what it meant.

Thinking back upon those times and all of the newsclips they play on TV, I was wondering why there were so few white voices of equivalent passion, eloquence, and righteousness. The easy answer was that it was because white people were in general the beneficiaries of the system as it stood at the time. But something tells me this is insufficient explanation for why there was no white Martin or Malcolm.

Perhaps the real answer was precisely because Martin Luther King spoke out of a power that originated from somewhere far deeper than mere guns, money, and politics. He was in fact "speaking truth to power" and in this expression (and others throughout the ages like it) was humanity's highest calling and deepest aspiration for ourselves as a species. Only someone without any temporal power could have spoken the words of Martin Luther King Jr, because only someone who was so right yet so opposed by the powers that be could have tapped into this deepest current of our highest calling as a species.