A Wake
For most Americans, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a day of dreaming. For me, it is a wake.
(Originally published in Witness on January 16, 2023; updated for January 20, 2025)
“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
— The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is a day on which a particular performance is expected of every Black American.
It is believed that we should join hands with everyone, including those who mean us harm. In this joining, we are supposed to close our eyes, sway, and sing sweet gospel songs in the name of Jesus—not Jesus of The Rock, but Jesus of The Plantation; though I believe that there is not much difference, if any difference at all, between the two, for neither of them are Jesus of The West Bank.
We—the Black Folk shipped, like cargo, from the Door of No Return to the Unnerving Schemes of Apathy, and forced into centuries of toil for centuries of death—are called upon to be respectable, conciliatory, and most importantly, civil representatives of the man shot down by the very nation that, with a flick of the proverbial wrist, transformed him from full human being to hollow holiday platitude. A man whose face they put on coffee mugs, postage stamps, t-shirts, and even underwear to sell back to us at a premium. (Quiet as it’s kept, Black people have long been required to scrounge up the money to buy our loved ones back from our masters.)
For us, today is supposed to be a day of forgiving, certainly; but most importantly: of forgetting.
This day inspires peculiar theatrics from white Americans, too. In their case, they use it to convince themselves, and the world, of their own “inherent goodness”; their supposed “godliness” and “innocence”—even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is the day that they pat themselves on the back for deigning to grant Black people the right to vote. Because the unreal is the unreal, this arrogance is, of course, based on a lie of omission: The majority of white folks regard Lyndon B. Johnson as a race traitor for signing the Civil Rights Act; and have, as a result, never voted for another Democratic candidate ever again. But since they don’t, for the most part, have the courage of their convictions; because they find both strength and unity in deceit, and are in no way ashamed of their hypocrisy, they swear ‘fore God that they “don’t have a racist bone in their bodies.” Their hearts, minds, blood, and prayers, however, tell an entirely different story.
These are the people who are anxious to remind anyone who questions their veracity how they, or someone they knew, “marched with King.” They often leave out the fact that they also marched, in hooded cowl, with the Klan. While they can no longer openly trade lynching postcards, they can watch and share the videos of Black people being murdered by police, soldiers, and frenetic deputized citizens, all while proclaiming, in their at-home or on-line town squares, without shame: “They must have done something to deserve it.” What they mean is that by virtue of being Black, we deserve it; and by virtue of being white, they do not. And that, my people, is how whiteness is defined. By their own deeds, they reveal themselves as the moving parts of a machine dead set on replacing every gentle, living dream Ancestor King had with a screaming, murderous nightmare.
This day is also one of displacement: where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is remade, under the auspices of the white imagination, into a kind of timid minstrel; a bible-toting, nigger-pacifying yes-man, alternately sexless and sex-crazed depending on the underlying agenda; a spook-version of his actual Black self, wherein his complexities are whittled down to a simplistic deification/demonization binary; his strategies for nonviolence interpreted as compliance, cowardice, and surrender. And his radical spirit—the one that sat winged, but terrified; caged, but gallant inside many a white folks’ jail—is rendered invisible.
Indeed: Whether for Black people or for white people, the design of this day insists upon cursory glances instead of thorough examinations. It hides a nefarious evangelism beneath a blanket of ephemeral aspirations. It pulls words out of their context and discourages thorough readings of the source text. It despises memory because it is afraid of what we will remember. These are the schemes devised to make the masses thoughtless, which is to say: patriots.
This day—this constructed day, my dear family—is a pathological liar.
If it is to be of any real use to anyone, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day can only be a day of mourning. Especially on this particular occasion of observance, with the dystopian world order that is being ushered in by a reckless American cult.
Everyone, everywhere, who hears the name Martin Luther King, Jr. should feel…not guilt because guilt is useless…but haunted. Not just by the ravaging attack dogs, flesh-rending water hoses, massacre bridges, or ketchup bottles smashed against the heads of teenagers at lunch counters. Not just by little boys strapped into electric chairs, little girls blown up in churches, grown men strung up like kites, or grown women tossed into alleyways like trash.
But also by burning crosses, splattered blood, and the balconies of cheap motels.
Those fingers pointing yonder? They just might be pointing at you.
What haunts me on this day is knowing that my Ancestor was about to start a poor people’s movement; and Americans, shaking in their designer boots at the very thought, saw him as, finally, too dangerous to the established hegemony and had to be rid of him. In the name of the cellular-level sadism that animates them, they chose the goriest possible way to do it. One hand may have pulled the trigger, but millions of them held that gun.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
—The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York, N.Y.
This is a day of mourning. That is all it can be. And the mourning should be endless because this country’s crimes are endless. Chief among them is how it blames Black people, especially Black men, for all of its sins. No. More than blame, this country positions Black people as the sin.
Sadly, even some Black people agree with this existential distortion (a demonstration of how effective American programming is). We turn our noses up at each other. We are embarrassed by each other. We mimic the cruelties we endure and direct them toward each other. We try to climb out of our own skin. We abandon our ancient pact of community and declare war on each other—all to stake claim over the scraps thrown from the same tables we are not invited to dine at.
We clamor to be seated, but do we ever ask what is being served? It is us. We are being served (and not in the aristocratic way). And we are not cannibals too, are we?
Are we?
My intuition says no, but also recognizes that diets are subject to change.
And innocence is a joke.
It shocks the senses to know that they tried on several occasions to murder Ancestor King. And when they finally got him, he was only 39 years old.
We all know that he had a dream. But let me tell you what I know:
America consumes Negro dreams.
It consumes Negro dreams and replaces them with visions of endless subjugation. And soul-consuming currency. And star-spangled nooses. And amber waves of death.
We had to watch as white America shattered Ancestor King to pieces and tossed those delicate pieces across a blasphemous Tennessee. It is a wonder (a wonder, you hear me?); a real-life miracle; a grueling testament to the will and determination of Black people to survive that no matter what horrors we are made to endure and witness; no matter how beaten, betrayed, gutted, humiliated, loathed, split, stunned, and wounded; no matter how body-worn, broke-down, turned-around, and war-weary—for generations: We still here.
Not always intact, as Ancestor Morrison noted. But here.
This is why I insist that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is mourning time.
It is a wake.
It is the moment when we enter the parlor, dressed in the ceremonial garbs of our fare-thee-well traditions, and commence to weeping and wailing. Afterwards, we gather ourselves, if we can, and prepare for the long and impossible work of, first, remembering, then liberation, and then, because it is the only way to go on: healing.
Liberation and healing. You cannot have one without the other. Ancestor King knew that better than most. Let there be no peace until we know better, too.
But in the meantime:
Middle fingers all around.
Recommended Listening
Recommended Reading
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
