The Republicans’ allergy to the 50th anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech commemoration, and particularly to the unreconstructed liberals who spoke at the commemoration, really is quite telling. It shows just how far the party has moved away from its 1960’s incarnation. In some abstract way, mainstream Republicans wanted to honor Dr. King’s most magnificent speech, even to the point of falsely claiming King as a member of their party. But, confronted with people who sounded a lot like the speakers who appeared that day fifty years ago, they felt that the whole thing was being politicized. Well, if you don’t like the politics of the Civil Rights Era and it’s leaders and proponents, then why commemorate them? Why not condemn them?
But to ask people to take the politics of social justice out of the commemoration is to try to appropriate to yourself something that doesn’t belong to you.
But to ask people to take the politics of social justice out of the commemoration is to try to appropriate to yourself something that doesn’t belong to you.
……Oh, wait…….
Republicans are so busy trying to convince everybody that THEY have always been African-Americans’ bestest friends (Hey, it was Republicans that freed the slaves [whispers] 150 years ago…), why they were just too busy <strike>denying people the right to vote</strike> to attend the 50th anniversary of a seminal moment in civil rights history.
It was a total GOP “blackout” as it was, including the ONE AND ONLY AFRICAN AMERICA SENATOR in the GOP Tim Scott.
Drudge had been flagging this as Scott not being invited, then after it was confirmed that not only was he invited, but he declined and in fact chose to decline cause he was instead was gonna be in South Carolina.
Tim Scott Didn’t Speak At MLK Event Because He Declined Invitation To Attend
How would one even begin to “depoliticize” social justice? The whole idea is absurd!
One depoliticizes it by pretending that all of the social justice MLK called for has happened, and everybody is equal now, so we can do a bipartisanly round of handshakes and back slaps for a job well done. The end.
(Ignore anyone who points out that we still have a long way to go. They’re obviously lazy whiners who are racist against white people.)
I suppose there is that. We’re a post-racial utopia now at the end of history. On second thought, I should stop trying to imagine how these folks think – it makes my head hurt.
I don’t actually know a whole lot about the March on Washington, but it seems pretty obvious that the choice of the Lincoln Memorial was not accidental. And as the I Have a Dream speech itself shows, it wasn’t lost on the participants that 1963 was the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
So it’s kind of astonishing, really, because at the same time that they’re distancing themselves from the legacy of the Civil Rights Era, the Republicans are also distancing themselves from the legacy of the first Republican president.
I’m inclined to think that this was a pretty big mistake.