Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr is a common racist defence of White Americans.

How can quoting one of the greatest civil rights leaders be racist? TransGriot put it this way:

Far too many times people are fixated on or like to quote the pre-August 28, 1963 words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. People also have this irritating tendency to hurl pre-1963 MLK quotes at POC’s when they get nervous about POC’s venting about their battles with whiteness and white supremacy.

Whites quote MLK to silence.

The quote they most often use:

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.

King is seen as pushing a see-no-evil, kumbayah colour-blindness as the way to bring people together and end racism. So when people of colour are see-evil, race conscious and not properly kumbayah, whites use this quote to shut them up as being “divisive”, as going against the true spirit of Dr King (as sanitized by white people).

Yet King saw the evils of American society quite clearly – not just against blacks but in general. And he was hardly the sort to keep quiet about it to make peace with whites, which is what MLK-quoters seem to expect from people of colour. King:

Racial segregation must be seen for what it is – and that is an evil system, a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity. … When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. … John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth. … A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. … Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. … It’s an evil war. No matter where it leads, no matter what abuses it may bring, I’m going to tell the truth. … We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. … We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

And far from pushing colour-blindness, King saw black pride as necessary:

We must stand up and say, “I’m black and I’m beautiful,” and this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.

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