Paul Thomas on the Radical Dr. King

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1. kippdawson says:

   January 18, 2016 at 12:11 pm

   This discussion is necessary. Now. Thank you.

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2. kippdawson says:

   January 18, 2016 at 12:14 pm

   My perspective. This I believe. “Race” is a lie. A lie deliberately created and used to keep “white” people from feeling themselves in the lives of people of color. To keep “white” women identifying more with the likes of Hillary Clinton than with Sandra Bland, or the mother of Tamir Rice, or the woman serving them food at the restaurant down the street working two jobs to feed her kids, worrying every morning that her son may not be alive at the end of the day, having to teach her children how to avoid police bullets and constraints. To keep the poorest “white” men rallying behind politicians who despise them as they feel stronger because others are even weaker than they. To keep “whites” immune from the natural instincts which would have us open our arms in solidarity with the people like us fleeing horrors, seeking safe harbor for their children — “like us” except that their skin has different tones than ours. Because if “white” people felt — felt — themselves (ourselves) in the words of James Baldwin or Alice Walker and looked not with abhorrence, or even “sympathy,” to the young people of the Black Lives Matter movement, but, instead, looked to them for leadership, this whole house of cards which is the system which keeps a few wealthy and safe while the great masses of us are not ok — well, it just could not stand. Today our society honors Martin Luther King, Jr., while not calling out the reality that he, along with Malxolm X, was murdered just as they were beginning to help bring this understanding to us. Let us turn to this work As if our children’s lives depending it. Because they do. And thus, we must.

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3. stevenmsinger says:

   January 18, 2016 at 12:18 pm

   This is a very important reminder for all of us. And thank you, Kipp, for that amazing comment, too! Wow!

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4. SomeDAM Poet says:

   January 18, 2016 at 2:25 pm

   I suspect that “AN ECONOMY FOR THE 1%”
   is one of the things that Dr. King would object to most vehemently if he were still with us today

   “The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. The richest 1%
   now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and
   privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the
   gap between the richest and the rest. A global network of tax havens
   further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion.” — Oxfam

   “Oxfam has calculated that:
   • In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people –
   the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as
   recently as 2010.
   • The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years
   since 2010 – that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars
   ($542bn), to $1.76 trillion.
   • Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars
   in the same period – a drop of 41%.
   • Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population
   has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth, while half of
   that increase has gone to the top 1%.
   • The average annual income of the poorest 10% of people in the world
   has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century.
   Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.”

   ///end quotes

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