What Was The Phrase I Like Girls Used- "'Something' Kill"?

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The above is from a speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave at a church a year before his murder. You probably don't know it. Saying stuff like this makes you less cuddly and gets you killed.

So there's a rash of MLK-Obama merchandise hitting the streets and following that is a move by the King estate to make sure they get paid. I suppose that seems right. I suppose it also seems right to tie the two men together. Actually, it must seem right because folks all over the place were using some sort of "content of character" "color of skin" "dream this or that" construction to color the historic significance of Obama's election.

Sure, I am all farklempt by Obama's election. I think it marks the possible end of one world and the dawn of another. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but try to imagine this happening a generation ago. There is something significantly different about America simply because of the color of our president elect's skin. But at the same time, Obama's not magic simply because of the color of his skin. To be more pointed, he did not/will not, as the convention goes, come along to magically make "white people" better for the sake of their narrative. White people still largely went for the erratic, intemperate, injudicious McCain over Obama. Was it because McCain was white? Maybe. Was it because Obama was black? I want to say "yes". But that's only slightly here or there.

The symbolic significance of Obama's victory is not in the magical transformation of racist folks to not racist folks but it is in the transformation it portends for the face of a nation. Nationally, white people voted more often for McCain. I am not saying every white person that voted for McCain was a racist (not any more than the average American anyway). I am saying, the majority of white people did not vote for the brown guy. The election of a person with dark skin to the White House does not indicate the end of racism (duh), so let's not be too back patty about what Obama's election means in that regard. But there is a transformation worth mentioning: the old, rural, white people that voted for McCain are dying and the browns are participating in greater numbers. Simply stated, the group among whom Obama did the worst is not long for this world. That, along with the conceptual shift does signify a change worth noticing. Still, white folks voted for the white guy, brown folks voted for the brown guy- not really a "dream fulfilled" moment. But, there was a brown guy for brown folks to vote for, so...

But to the Martin Luther King, Jr. point. Again, though there were obviously plenty of people who could look past skin color to some type of content, it's hard to describe this as a dream fulfilled. I recognize that it is something new and in a world of "at leasts" it is something good. But that seems a bit secondary and we ought to be careful about how much MLK dust we apply in this case.

It was not King's goal to get a dark-skinned person elected president. While that occurrence could mean something to and for what we might call the soul of our nation, King's call was to the revolutionary power of the Gospel, not the attrition of racists.