'No Looting, No Shooting': The Martin Luther King Jr Myth and Australia’s Prime Minister
When Scott Morrison invoked Martin Luther King Jr after seeing a “good meme on the weekend” he indulged a conservative fantasy. That King, through the power of Christian virtue and individual courage, changed the world. All. By. Himself.
This fable, as noted by historians such as Jeanne Theoharis, is used to undermine collective resistance to racism and economic oppression today. Since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, accelerated by the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, US conservatives like Mike Huckabee have depicted BLM as unworthy successors to King. They argue that King was so peace loving and respectful that he would have disapproved of BLM. King would never have “taken a highway,” that is marched in the streets and disrupted traffic, to make a point. It is an ahistorical argument.
Yes, King believed in nonviolence to his last breath. But he was disruptive. When the Kennedy brothers urged King to move slowly on civil rights, he and the movement pressured the Kennedy administration with a campaign in Birmingham. When President Johnson urged King to not protest in 1965, King and the movement protested in Selma and forced Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Although he received most of the credit, King did not do this all by himself. He acted in concert with women, youth, unions and many others. They did not wait. In fact, King’s second book was entitled “Why We Can’t Wait.”
Protestors in America cannot wait today. The times are desperate. More than 42 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past 2 months. Over 100,000 people have died due to COVID-19, which has hit African American and other minority communities disproportionately harder, as does almost any destructive event.
The far-right (mostly white) is armed to the teeth with military weapons, and yet African Americans are stereotyped as violent. And extraordinarily, President Trump is urging that guns be turned onto the...
