Martin Luther King Would Hate Much of Today’s Social Justice Movement

I hate racism. I hate everything that reflects hate and inferiority of another person or ethnicity. I hate homophobia, sexism, elitism, ageism, hobophobia, sizeism, lookism and aporophobia. Even if my mouth has never articulated the words, my thought life is guilty of harboring all of these things at one time or another.

I have written extensively on the topic of racism since discovering forty-two years after moving to my hometown that it had been a sundown town. And I’ll continue to write about it by exposing it when I see it, but will also spotlight anyone attempting to manufacture it.

I am glad to see the progress America has made in the area of racism. And we’ve made much progress since slavery ended. But there is more progress to make. Always will be.

Even if America had never practiced slavery, racism and everything I listed in the first paragraph would be a problem today. Why do I say that? Because human beings are foremost in the business of measuring ourselves against others. It’s what we do. It’s what we do constantly during our waking hours.

Whether we are at the store, at work, at a festival or anywhere there are people, we are, minute by minute, making snap judgments of others, if only in our minds. And these judgments are based on a person’s appearance, e.g., their face, their hair, their shape, their style ~ and in most cases, simply the way in which they were born. And we are all guilty whether we want to admit it or not. Without knowing anything about a person other than how they appear to us, we slot them into an unjust categorical ranking of our choosing. Unbeknownst to them.

Remember these words in Martin Luther King’s iconic I Have a Dream speech:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Powerful words that would transform America into a utopian nation if all its citizens strived to do just that: judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

King’s dream wasn’t just for his children; it was for all Black citizens ~ who had been judged by the color of their skin since the first Africans involuntarily arrived…