MLK Day reminds us to harness ‘urgency of now’ as the US grapples with crisis
People across the US are moving on from the empty platitudes MLK Day often evokes – and embodying King’s wordsThis year, the Dr Martin Luther King Jr holiday forces Americans to grapple with the crisis and protests that have spread across the country, particularly in Minneapolis. Each year on this holiday, we reflect on King’s life and legacy. We wonder about what he might make of this moment. Though civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 60s were repeatedly met with extreme state violence, Americans are now facing a president who is troublingly more powerful than past figures such as the notorious segregationist and Alabama governor George Wallace.Militarized and masked federal police forces, abetted by a corrupted justice department, are expansive and employ far more deadly weapons against protesters today. Civil rights leaders often sought federal intervention to combat localized racial violence in the south. But now, local and state officials, along with ordinary citizens who have been galvanized by federal violence, are combating government crackdowns against immigrants and their neighbors. Over the span of a week, ICE agents killed an American wife and mother of three, Renee Good, and shot a man from Venezuela during a traffic stop. They have arrested and detained American citizens and have terrorized neighborhoods, businesses and schools. Their irrational, unprofessional and unconstitutional actions have caused chaos, panic and harm throughout American cities. This is far from the progress King dreamed of, and he used his last years to warn Americans to refuse comfort, the status quo, and bring oppression to an end. Continue reading… More
