Now Listen Maxine,
If you got problems with BLM, don’t you dare go quoting MLK.
Greetings friends,
I planned to write this newsletter after yesterday’s Chiefs game, but omg my heart rate didn’t return to normal until about 9 o’clock at night. The good news - the Chiefs will play in the AFC Championship next Sunday. The less good news - folks at Arrowhead Stadium are still doing the tomahawk chop, so whatever half measures the front office took to make themselves feel better about not changing the name are clearly working. Countless American Indians have spent decades asking for a name change that could be SO COOL AND SO POSITIVE, and I’m sorry but wtf kind of recalcitrance is it that the team’s leadership hasn’t budged?
Have you ever thought about how weird it is that the majority of the violence in this country has happened at the hands of white people and yet they’re the ones who clutch their purses when Black people come close or when they drive through a “bad” neighborhood? Look at the violence inflicted on the civil rights movement. Look at the brutal yet entirely pedestrian violence contained in this news clipping.
Y’all.
These white women in the year of our Lord 1918 were so mad about not having household help that they sought to make it illegal for Black women not to work. Do not tell me the past is past because these sins are in our bloodline.
I had some things I was planning to share today but they all went out the window because on this national holiday we must recognize a man who was reviled, oppressed, jailed, and terrorized by a government that would one day honor a version of him so watered down it would be unrecognizable. In honor of Dr. King, who sought to organize the poor, resist the capitalist machine, and serve God all the while, here are some things to keep us uncomfortable.
It’s 2:20 long. Watch every second and then find the whole sermon and set yourself on fire.
“We have expected you to be our greatest allies in the struggle against injustice. We wanted you to use your influence with your governors and your politicians, to end the long night of systemic injustices.”
Not long ago a friend told me something a therapist said, “If your husband has really changed, you’ll know by how he handles the divorce.”
The way Donald Trump and his cronies have handled this divorce showed us all we needed to see about who they really were. If you hear people talking about stolen elections and Q-anon nonsense and you don’t speak up, you are complicit and enabling white supremacy. Period. End of.
And when you hear anyone mention BLM protests in the same breath as the violent treason so recently on display in the Capitol, remind them of this.
Michael Harriot’s Twitter threads are full of life and info you don’t read anywhere else. Read this one and remind yourself that to the FBI, Dr. King was an enemy of the state.
Derecka Purnell’s threads are full of hard truth and an insistence on action.
Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California lost his recent election due to a campaign of disinformation waged against him. He was a classmate and friend of my daughter’s at Stanford and so, having watched his first improbable post-grad run for city council, we felt the sting of this loss. I have no doubt that he has a bright future ahead of him, but in the meantime, his wife Anna, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, is doing her own work. Here’s her piece on Dr. King’s mother, a snippet from her upcoming book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.
Read it and remember how many Black women have had to bury their sons in this country.
The next time I write, we’ll have a new President, which changes nothing except that there’s now an actual human grown up in charge and not a criminal. The rest is up to us.
I too have been meaning to watch One Night in Miami- Netflix?
Kate this was good. The way people throw around MLK’s name for their personal gain is disgusting. Anyone ever notice how some of your most conservative Facebook friends who post the Why I Love President Trump commentaries on Facebook also always post references to something MLK said. Something just doesn’t compute. Is it out of guilt or do they truly believe in what MLK stood for?
Love all your writings but this is one of the best! And yes, Trump's behavior the last two months have shown his true colors to anyone who still, despite all evidence to the contrary, still chose to follow and believe. Thanks for sharing. (We watched "One Night In Miami" this weekend. Powerful. Sad.)