“I’m boycotting MLK Day this year”
I uttered these words just a few days ago while talking with a friend on their last day at a predominately white institution in our area. My friend recounted her hurt and dismay at how the organization treated her after announcing her resignation. My friend identifies as an Afro-Latina woman. Her manager is a white woman. So, what’s the connection to MLK Day?
Well, it’s no secret that every year colleges, businesses, and just about every institution recognize the federal U.S. holiday MLK Day on the third Monday of January. These commemorations take the form of in-person events and celebrations, keynotes, presentations, and panel discussions.
Colleges and cultural institutions spend a lot of money to secure famous guest speakers to give presentations on Dr. King. There are parades and galas all claiming to celebrate his life and legacy. In the age of social media, we see an overabundance of banners, quotes, and retweets of the musings of Dr. King. He is arguably one of the most recognizable and famous civil rights activists in the world.
Coopted legacy every MLK Day
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, and was assassinated by a fatal shooting at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968 by a white man. Since his untimely death, our society coopts and whitewashes MLK’s life’s work, words, and activism ad nauseam. MLK’s actions decontextualized, misquoted, and weaponized against the communities that he worked tirelessly to support and advocate for.
These communities were Black women, men, and children. Communities that marched beside him from Selma to Montgomery and the March on Washington. Folks who demanded access to their constitutional right to vote, equal access to education, and economic reform for Black Americans.
Celebrating MLK Day while denying privilege
Every year white-led institutions post their words of wisdom from Dr. King while simultaneously expounding microaggressions, covert racism, and discrimination that he routinely called out in his speeches and writing. The irony sends me near the edge of going insane every single year.
In 2020 after the death of George Floyd school districts, legislature, mayors, governors, and police departments vowed to do better, reciting the quotes from Dr. King’s famous I Have a Dream speech. One year later many of these same schools were banning books by Black authors and pushing legislation to ban what they have deemed ‘critical race theory’ with not even the slightest hint of irony.
White politicians and pundits decry terms like antiracism and critical race theory as being divisive. They make preposterous claims that concepts like “white privilege” are reverse racism. It’s almost as if they conveniently forget that Dr. King also called out white privilege. A simple google search would tell you that Dr. King called out and acknowledged white privilege as a real issue.
Yet, his letters and words are routinely quoted out of context, cherry-picked and weaponized against Black and brown scholars, historians, and teachers. They are used against those who tell the full and whole truth about the racist roots of this country and how this racism is embedded within every single institution in the country including our constitution. A review of this Letter from a Birmingham jail will clear up any misconception one has about where he would stand on Nikole Hannah Jone’s 1619 project.
The hypocrisy is equal parts damning, enraging, and exhausting. Every MLK Day many white-led organizations misconstrue the life’s work of Dr. King and put on a metaphorical “Blackface” performance while they do immense harm to Black and brown bodies throughout the year.
This harm takes many forms
From big tech giants like Google and Pinterest dismissing Black women who dare to call out the racist policies and practices in their organizations to colleges like Dartmouth (and many others) refusing to create a formal Asian American studies program after 25 years of student activist demanding this education.
It looks like Tesla standing against hate and racism online while letting Black contractors endure acts of racism and violence.
It’s Black women being paid less money for the same work as their white male peers and Black workers being pushed out of jobs for wearing their natural hair, talking too loud, or being intimidating.
Harm is local Rochester area colleges ignoring the voices of Black students that feel unseen and unprotected on predominately white colleges, hiring very few if any tenured track Black faculty, and little to nothing being done to change these outcomes after decades of demands.
This violence hits close to home as both I and my friend have experienced hurt and pain at the hand of passive-aggressive white supervisors that made us feel like they own our talent, our time, and our bodies. White-led administration questions the validity of the claims filed by Black workers. The same white-led organizations do little, if anything, to make the environment less toxic. These are the same white leaders that supported Black Lives Matter in 2020 and quoted I have a dream in 2021. The lies, manipulation, and gaslighting are very real and very violent.
We Tired Ya’ll
I am tired. And so is the Black collective. We want white-led organizations to stop using MLK for clout and use that same energy to drive real institutional change and equity at every level of their organizations. Celebrating and remembering Dr. King and his legacy is important but it should not be performative. Most of Dr. King’s vision and dream remain unfulfilled and we need white people and white-led organizations to fix the racism that they benefit from and are complicit in on a systemic level.
So please stop the performance.
I will never boycott the work or legacy of MLK but I will boycott white-led performative activism and bullshit.
Sources
- Nazareth College students stage protest over racism, diversity concerns | Rochester First
- Black women say Pinterest created a den of discrimination — despite its image as the nicest company in tech | Washington Post
- It’s not just Nikole Hannah-Jones: Black women are underrepresented among tenured faculty | USA Today
- Google’s star AI ethics researcher, one of a few Black women in the field, says she was fired for a critical email | Washington Post
- The Fight for Asian American Studies | New York Times
- Tesla must pay $137 million to a Black employee who sued for racial discrimination | NPR
- #BlackWomenAtWork Highlights the Racism Black Women Encounter in the Workplace | Payscale
- Calls to Ban Books by Black Authors Are Increasing Amid Critical Race Theory Debates | EdWeek
- Black women make nearly $1 million less than white men during their careers | CNBC
Reading Resources
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail | Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- Right Within: How to Heal from Racial Trauma in the Workplace | Minda Harts
- Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit | Mary Frances Winters
- Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health | Rheeda Walker
About Calvin Eaton
(he/his/him) Calvin Eaton is a disabled community educator, content creator, and social entrepreneur, whose area of expertise includes antiracism, equity, justice, instructional design, and program development. In 2016 Mr. Eaton founded 540WMain, Inc. a virtual non-profit organization and antiracist education brand that promotes justice for all.
