He had a Dream

By Patrick Hall

“Every great cause begins as a movement and becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket”  Eric Hoffer

I believe I had skipped out of track practice that April day and was listening to WBBF on the front porch, when regular music programming was interrupted to announce that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. My mom and one of my sisters had just walked home from the local Star Market carrying bags of groceries. We did not have a family car at that time since my father passed in 1963. So, it was a typical evening when my mother arrived home, and I followed her into the kitchen and told her that Dr. King had been killed. I can remember my mom throwing the bag of groceries onto the kitchen floor, and my sister just stood there, comatose. But despite the tragedy of that day, I recall that I had never seen my mother so shaken and overcome with anger. Also, it was one of the few times that I ever saw my mother cry. But after a few minutes, she regained her composure and tried to explain to my sister and me what Martin Luther King Jr. believed and gave his life. It was a difficult message to want to take in at that moment. But Doctor King was about healing this nation’s horrible track record on race and replacing it with hope, forgiveness, and reconciliation. That our country, despite its flaws, could overcome the ugly spectrum of racism that still existed in some parts of the nation. Once again, my heart at the time wasn’t in the mood for forgiveness because of what some racist did to Dr. King.

My mother, born in a segregated America at the turn of the century, had gone through a lot more than I had ever experienced at the time. She and my dad, along with some of my older siblings born in the 1930s and 40s, had a front-row seat to a lot of “real racist behavior” under the auspices of unfettered racial segregation.  However, because of Dr. King’s movement for Civil Rights, mother had confidence, a God-centered belief, that this nation was more than what one disturbed individual or group could affect.

When we hear the familiar words uttered by Dr. King during the March on Washington in August of 1963, “we would live in an America, where the Negro and all Americans would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. It was more than inspiring. It was at the heart or very core of the Civil Rights Movement. King sought a colorblind society, but not through the distorted lens that many of today’s race-industry entrepreneurs interpret. Colorblindness has little or nothing to do with not being aware that I am black or you are white, Asian, or Latino. Race industry quacks like Critical race theorists, BLM, and NAACP, the DEI crowd, deliberately confuse “awareness” with obsession, mania, phobia, or preoccupation with outside appearances. When King spoke of a colorblind society, it was a cultural inculcation or mindset that one’s external appearance becomes the least important thing about a person.

 My spouse is a native-born German who grew up as a little girl in the bombed-out rubble of Post-War II Germany. Her upbringing and what she experienced couldn’t have been more different than mine as a semi-washed little Negro-boy, who came to maturation in a stable urban environment. We “never” obsess about, hey, you're white, and I'm black. It just isn't the focal point of who we are.  Listening to the idiocy of today’s influential race merchants, you would think that when my wife and I got into one of our misunderstandings, the first words out of her mouth would be to call me a nigger. Ach du meine Güte….

Alas, somewhere along the line, the groups and individuals who have supposedly taken up King’s legacy have, for the most part, completely abolished the spirit or nature of the Civil Rights Movement. Today, the BLM Global Foundation, Antifa, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, White Fragility acolytes, and other race-obsessed constituencies have taken the nation in the opposite direction. A direction where everything is now about race, gender, or class. Beginning primarily in the late 1970s, the push for multiculturalism and diversity took center stage. Focusing on one’s race, ethnicity, and gender became paramount. Later, the antecedents for Critical Race Theory (CRT) were spun, and the black community has pretty much forgotten King’s creed about judging by character and not the ephemerals of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. Multiculturalism and diversity have turned out to be little more than neo-tribalism, balkanization, or the new segregation, all dressed up as congeniality. They are just discriminatory practices that one agrees with. It’s racism under new management. It has encouraged many Americans to sit in their little hyphenated, racial, gender-specific, ethnic, and/or identarian enclaves, waiting to be offended by God knows what. It is Postmodernist thinking at its worst. It has followed the practice of stuffing the complexities of political science, history, and economics into bottles labeled race, gender, and class. To paraphrase, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, this has led to the erosion of analytical standards across the board.  We as a nation have become incredibly arrogant and humorless.
 
We quickly categorize our fellow Americans as racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, climate and science deniers, anti-vaccines, transphobic, etc. We have cadres of individuals who believe that America is intrinsically racist and must atone for our terrible history.  Unfortunately, these individuals also include the first black President, Barrack Hussein Obama. A man whose unique gift in retrospect was his uncanny ability to “say and do nothing quite well.”¹

Each year we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. But do we, as Americans, really believe any of what Doctor King was about? Quite honestly, I don't know the answer to that anymore. There is a profound pathology or cultural sickness afoot. It is a mass informational psychosis. I frequently refer to this as the “America is Bad” catechesis. I want to keep hope alive and live out the philosophy of Dr. King’s Civil Rights Movement, but I'm not sure how to confront this growing cultural anomie.
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I See., Why are you so awesome?  et al, Offend me……. Please!  et al, Intellectuals were the worst peddlers of Tribalism