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"Too many conservatives have twisted MLK's dream deliberately.'
I'd say toomany liberalss have twisted MLK's dream deliberately.
They fought and won, justifiably, for EQUAL treatment and GOT it. Then the first thing they do is implement Affirmative Action which is just the OPPOSITE of EQUAL treatment.
I see your point. But affirmative action was justified as a way to right the wrongs of the past, which kept blacks out of places of employment simply because they were black.
The affirmative action program specifically applied people of the 1960s were directly impacted by current events of racial discrimination of the time. It would be just as justified as giving blacks reparations for slavery, the very moment when slavery was abolished.
Transition to today, fifty years after the passage of the civil rights laws, and almost 150 years after slavery was abolished, and reparations and affirmative action are no longer justified.
In Dr. King's "Where do we go from here" speech Dr. King notes several of the achievements of Operation Breadbasket most of which in today's parlance would be labeled Affirmative Action.
Nope.
Affirmative Action = Racial Quotas Forced By Government Action
Operation Breadbasket did not require the government to be involved and it did not force anything on anyone. White businesses could choose to join or be boycotted. Nothing wrong with this at all. People making choice in a free market. The smart businesses see green before any other color. This is how it's supposed to work.
Both examples that Dr. King cited in his speech involve Blacks taking responsibility for their station in life instead of goverment doing it for them at the expense of everyone else. This is the difference in what he spoke about and Affirmative Action which I don't think he would have supported.
I see the Leftists are now going to try and change the history of MLK so they don't look like violent thugs who are going against his words.
I've listened to several of MLK speeches and I believe if he were involved in BLM, it would be all black lives, not just the .000001% that are killed by cops. So I think this is a classic thread fail...the thread should be "how Liberals are misinterpreting and/or lying about what MLK stood for and Conservative Republicans are on the right path."
Here we see Prof. "Skip" Gates, a man with obvious difficulties in walking, due to his advanced age. A man whom Obama said was his friend. With the police officer that Obama characterized as stupid and racist, is the person holding Skip's arm, and helping him down the stairs, while the unsympathetic Obama leaves them both in the dust.
It is a waste of time because many just blame whites for everything, They don't want to have an honest discussion at all.
The thread was ruined from the beginning. The OP equates people who use the word "*******" as racists. So if I'm black and I use the word *******, am I racist against whites?
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here?" that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. (Yes) There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. (Yes) And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. (Yes) But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. (All right) It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" (Yes) You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" (Yes) You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?" (All right) These are words that must be said. (All right)
First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.
Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man’s scientific ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
How do Dr. King's sentiments align with the concept of American Exceptionalism or American Individualism? Where do you suppose Dr. King would stand on accepting refugees or immigrants?
One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."
There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."
I won't claim Dr. King would support everything that the BLM movement or other current civil rights organization have done, but Dr. King is addressing in the above statements some of the complaints heard about those civil rights movements. Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.
They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.
In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.
...
But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
Many conservatives have expressed support for the bootstrap philosophy.
There is more in this speech on poverty. There are also plenty of other speeches I could quote from. If you are truly interested many of Dr. King's writings and speeches are available at the following location.
It is a waste of time because many just blame whites for everything, They don't want to have an honest discussion at all.
Exactly, they don't want a "discussion". “Having a discussion” is liberal progressive for shut the heck up! Or even better “stop thinking what you are thinking and start thinking what I tell you to think". Sermons and monologues have been the left’s definition of “discussion” on race for half a century now.
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