In honor of Martin Luther King

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 03:36 AM

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 08:21 AM

Yeah but you're a white dude...

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 09:08 AM

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 09:15 AM

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 09:19 AM

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 09:27 AM

Stupid Mike Douglas asks King if he's a communist sympathizer...

**Hardrock69** · 01-17-2011, 09:58 AM

?????!!!

What a fucking moron!

Speaking of which, I cannot name names but I have no choice but to listen to someone (in real life) today making jokes about it being "James Earl Ray" day.

Goddam how I hate fucking racism!

My only major shortcoming....I am intolerant of intolerant people.

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 10:03 AM

Originally Posted by Hardrock69

Speaking of which, I cannot name names but I have no choice but to listen to someone (in real life) today making jokes about it being "James Earl Ray" day.

Now THAT is real racism!

Not me saying the N-word just to watch these pussies around here get their panties in a wad...

**Jagermeister** · 01-17-2011, 10:14 AM

Originally Posted by ELVIS

Now THAT is real racism!

Not me saying the N-word just to watch these pussies around here get their panties in a wad...

Fuck you mean that is a joke? My calendar must be wrong.

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 10:23 AM

Hmmm...

**VanHalenFan5150** · 01-17-2011, 12:48 PM

"I have a dream, that one day, my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character."

Timeless words that will forever repeat themselves in the halls of Civil Rights history. Amen.

**FORD** · 01-17-2011, 01:40 PM

This applies to Iraq & Afghanistan too.

**FORD** · 01-17-2011, 01:53 PM

His last speech, given the night before he was assassinated, in Memphis......

**FORD** · 01-17-2011, 02:57 PM

Tim Wise: We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare

Monday, January 17 2011, 8:00 AM EST
Remembering MLK: The Things We’ve Forgotten Would Guide Us

It’s been a rough year for Martin Luther King, Jr., and for his legacy.

First, as has become an annual ritual, politicians went to church or some other civic gathering for last year’s King Day celebration, even as they continued to support public policies that he found abhorrent. Whether continuing to prosecute a seemingly endless and most definitely murderous war, or by supporting cuts to vital social programs, there is no shortage of hypocrisy when it comes to proclaiming fealty to King’s vision in words, while besmirching it in deeds, all at once.

Then of course came the venal cooptation of King’s crowning public moment—the 1963 March on Washington—by Glenn Beck, this past August. Insisting that it was time to “reclaim the civil rights movement,” because conservatives were the ones who “did it in the first place”—an inversion of history so grotesque as to confound the imagination—Beck inspired a gathering of tens of thousands of disaffected (mostly white) reactionaries, likely none of whom had been involved with the civil rights movement, but who now would be encouraged to see themselves as the inheritors of King’s “dream.” This, even as they clamored for more tax cuts for wealthy folks and the repeal of health care reform, all at the behest of a guy who once said he would like to kill Rep. Charlie Rangel with a shovel. I will leave it to others far more creative than myself to determine how one might square any of that with the teachings or beliefs of Dr. King. Then again, given the recent statement by a Defense Department spokesperson who asserted that King would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, anything is possible.

And this is especially true in a nation that has so thoroughly sanitized and compartmentalized King’s message, and King himself, within the pantheon of national heroes. We have turned King into a milquetoast moderate whose agenda went little beyond the ability to sit next to white people on a bus. We’ve stripped away from the public remembrance of this man his calls for income redistribution, his insistence that the United States has become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and his proclamation that poverty, racism and militarism are the “triple evils” that America’s rulers have not the courage to confront.

When conservatives can effectively twist King’s singular line about judging people on the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin into a reason to oppose affirmative action, even though he openly supported such efforts in his writings and interviews in 1961, 1963, 1965 and again in 1967, it ought not surprise us that folks are a bit confused about who King was, and about the principles for which he stood.

The way in which we have forgotten or been misled about King’s legacy is never more apparent than when asking children what they know about his message. Sadly, when I have done so, the most typical answer given is that King stood for not “hitting people,” or “not hitting back if they hit you first,” or that his message would be, were he alive today, “don’t join a gang.” While all these things are true I suppose, they rather miss the point.

After all, King’s commitment to non-violence had a purpose larger than non-violence itself. Non-violence was, for King and the movement, a means to a larger end of social, political and economic justice. Non-violence was a tactic meant to topple racism and economic exploitation, and lead the world away from cataclysmic warfare. That so many young people seem not to get that part, because teachers are apparently loathe to give it to them, renders King’s non-violent message no more particularly important than the banal parental reminder that we should “use our words” to resolve conflicts, rather than our fists. Thanks, but if that message were all it took to get a national holiday named for you, my mother would have had her own years ago.

So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African-American history; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man, locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.

Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels—abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation—merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.

For instance, were it not for the indifference to black and brown suffering that animated much of the early non-response to the subprime mortgage crisis (which manifested initially in the mid ’90s, but received little attention and even less government action), perhaps steps would have been taken to prevent what has become, now, a full-blown housing collapse. But rather than seeing the exploitation of low income folks of color as a national emergency, most politicians and media ignored it, or blamed the victims of predatory lending for being too stupid to read the fine print on their loan documents. As such, the lenders branched out, unregulated for the most part, into whiter and middle-class communities, where they took advantage of folks there, too. Now, millions of middle class white folks find themselves on the verge of economic catastrophe, precisely because the suffering of the other was ignored for so long, and eventually, as suffering is wont to do, metastasized.

Likewise, if double-digit unemployment had been viewed as the emergency it is, when only people of color were experiencing it (as they typically have been, in good times or bad, year after year throughout this century), perhaps lawmakers might have seen fit to address the problem. But it wasn’t, and so they didn’t. And now whites are experiencing double-digit joblessness as well, for the first time in over three generations.

And if we had not long ago racialized the “have-nots” as undeserving people of color, thereby allowing racial bias to block government actions that might have been taken on their behalf—like universal health care or massive investment in job creation—perhaps we would not today have tens of millions of people, including millions of white folks, lacking access to medical treatment or job security. But we did, and so we do. And now we can witness white folks running around, speaking against health care reforms from which they would personally gain, all because of a fear that some of the benefits might go to “undeserving” immigrants of color, or lazy folks (typically perceived as black and brown) who don’t want to pay for their own care.

In short, by not understanding the fundamental truth of King’s message that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, we have created a society, 43 years since his death, where injustice and suffering are rampant. And one in which the dreams of the civil rights movement appear the fantastical products of some Ambien-induced haze. Only by putting away, forever, the safe and sanitized version of this man and his compatriots, might we ever awaken from the stupor and become worthy of that which we celebrate this week.

Tim Wise is the author of five books on racism, including his latest, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010).

link

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 06:27 PM

Everyone likes to complicate what Martin Luther King stood for. What he stood for was simple. The US Constitution applies to EVERYONE regardless of their color or race. Martin Luther King was an honorable man and a man of law. He wasn't a radicle dangerous rebel rouser and in my opinion saved a lot of lives because the situation could have gone off like a powder keg and that is what the communists would love to happen. Communists bring order out of chaos and King avoided the chaos.

King pointed to something higher than laws themselves. He pointed to the fact that we were all God's children and we needed to be decent to each other. King was a religious man and believed in a higher source. He wanted us to behave better simply for the fact that it was a more dignified and godlike way to live.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 06:33 PM

Originally Posted by ELVIS

Stupid Mike Douglas asks King if he's a communist sympathizer...

King talked about God way too much to be a communist. There is no god in Communism. God is the state. Religious freedom is not allowed in communism.

**Seshmeister** · 01-17-2011, 07:29 PM

Did you know that the Pentagon has 284 restrooms because they built separate ones for blacks to go to?

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 07:38 PM

Originally Posted by Seshmeister

Did you know that the Pentagon has 284 restrooms because they built separate ones for blacks to go to?

I did not know that. Did you know I was refused service in a Georgia restaurant because I have a Yankee accent or was refused entry to the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club because I was not Chinese?

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 07:39 PM

Originally Posted by Seshmeister

Did you know that the Pentagon has 284 restrooms because they built separate ones for blacks to go to?

But the Pentagon is over in Arlington, Virginia (the south) right next to Robert E. Lee's old plantation. Yeah. Those black people were lucky to get any restrooms at all in those days.

**VanHalenFan5150** · 01-17-2011, 07:46 PM

I may not be one to have much of a say in anything, but, even though I was not born in the right generation I am very thankful of what MLK did throughout his life to make all of ours better, and equal. If it wasn't for him and a select few others, we wouldn't be where we were today as far as race equality goes. Now, i'm not saying he did everything, but he helped spark the movement...

**chefcraig** · 01-17-2011, 07:49 PM

Originally Posted by Seshmeister

Did you know that the Pentagon has 284 restrooms because they built separate ones for blacks to go to?

I was completely unaware of that. SNOPES has an interesting article on the subject:

The Pentagon was built with extra bathrooms to accommodate racial segregation laws.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 07:49 PM

Segregation in the military started to break down during WWII. I think the reason is when you were in a bomber and the German Luftwaffe was after you, you didn't care what color the pilot of the P-51 escort was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU_2XqDombc

**chefcraig** · 01-17-2011, 07:53 PM

Originally Posted by Nitro Express

Segregation in the military started to break down during WWII.

But the U.S. armed forces were not desegregated by Harry Truman until 1948, three years after the war ended.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 07:54 PM

With the globalists breaking the independent businesses and farms, now we are all equally fucked.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 07:58 PM

Originally Posted by chefcraig

But the U.S. armed forces were not desegregated by Harry Truman until 1948, three years after the war ended.

Officially on paper but prejudice is a mental condition that tends to be multi-generational. In the old south they were scared to death of the black man because there were more slaves than free white people. They hated Lincoln for invading the south with a military and resented the blacks getting their freedom from him. When you are a kid and you grow up in this environment you tend to be that yourself until you are put in a situation where you are shown maybe your parents and grandparents were wrong.

Also, the black soldier went over to fight and many were heros but had to come back and use the separate bathroom and get no recognition until decades later.

It's fucked but that's the history of it.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 08:02 PM

But then when I lived in Hong Kong the Chinese didn't even consider anyone from the Philippines human. Boats full of refugees were coming into Hong Kong harbor and they were not allowed on shore. Jokes of shelling the boats and putting the people out of their misery were the norm. I mean prejudice is not just an American thing and it's quite wide spread actually. Oh and that was a British territory and the British could care less, they just wanted the trade money.

**Seshmeister** · 01-17-2011, 08:05 PM

If you define your target on human rights and morality to 'not be as bad as people in SE Asia' then you have lost already.

**Seshmeister** · 01-17-2011, 08:08 PM

Originally Posted by Nitro Express

Segregation in the military started to break down during WWII. I think the reason is when you were in a bomber and the German Luftwaffe was after you, you didn't care what color the pilot of the P-51 escort was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU_2XqDombc

http://www.acepilots.com/usaaf_tusk.html

March 29, 1941 - Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt visited Tuskegee and met Charles "Chief" Anderson, the head of the program, Mrs. Roosevelt asked, "Can Negroes really fly airplanes?" He replied: "Certainly we can; as a matter of fact, would you like to take an airplane ride?" Over the objections of her Secret Service agents, Mrs. Roosevelt accepted. The agent called President Roosevelt, who replied, "Well, if she wants to do it, there's nothing we can do to stop her."
With Mrs. Roosevelt in the back seat of his Piper J-3 Cub, Chief Anderson took off and flew her around for half an hour. Upon landing, Mrs. Roosevelt turned to the Chief and said, "I guess Negroes can fly," and they posed togeher for an historic photo. Not long after Mrs. Roosevelt's return to Washington, it was announced that the first Negro Air Corps pilots would be trained at Tuskegee Institute.

**chefcraig** · 01-17-2011, 08:24 PM

Originally Posted by Seshmeister

http://www.acepilots.com/usaaf_tusk.html

If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend a film called "The Tuskegee Airmen", which was produced by HBO several years ago.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 08:35 PM

Originally Posted by Seshmeister

If you define your target on human rights and morality to 'not be as bad as people in SE Asia' then you have lost already.

You can't change history. What happened happened. White Europeans with advanced technology went out and exploited the world's resources. The British and the Dutch seemed to be the most successful. The Germans and French got bogged down into wars and the Spanish just raped things. At least with the British you got railroads and canals.

In the US the form of government gave the average person a better shot at making it rich. In Europe you had to have connections.

So my family immigrated here from Scandinavia to escape the potato famine. Are you saying I'm to feel guilty about people escaping starvation and trying to make a better life for themselves because some rich European plantation owners exploited Africans? What? Many Americans immigrated here way past that fact but somehow we are made to feel guilty of it and better yet, pay up for it in the name of fairness.

Hell if all of us had to pay up for something that happened in the history of the country we all currently live in, we all would be fucking broke.

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 08:37 PM

Wait until the Chinese come after you Brits for repayment of the opium wars.

**Va Beach VH Fan** · 01-17-2011, 09:33 PM

Originally Posted by ELVIS

Now THAT is real racism!

Not me saying the N-word just to watch these pussies around here get their panties in a wad...

What an Internet tough guy you are....

**Nitro Express** · 01-17-2011, 10:21 PM

Everything on the internet degrades into a fight. People can't even make comments on anything on You Tube without getting in a piss fight. I just got done listening to an economics seminar where the speaker said that when politicians have no answers for the economy they start wars as a distraction and power grab opportunity. The bankers love it because they can make interest funding the wars.

The western economies are collapsing and our politicians are selling us off to China or stealing assets from the people who still have something to steal from. Right now in the US the FDA is regulating small farms out of business so the corporate farms can have it all or politicians are making deals with China to come in and run things.

It's all crazy. I had a friend go over to China to teach English and he was making good money but couldn't take the pollution there and there are no women to date. He found money loses it's luster when the air fucking hurts your lungs.

This whole internationalism thing we were sold over the years is a bunch of bullshit. It's great for investment bankers and multinational corporations and rotten for everyone else. Slavery still continues and imperialism is alive and well. I think China plays along until they get powerful enough they can mop up the west and impale it on it's own greed as a belated thank you for getting them strung out on opium.

Ironically, the US CIA is dealing the opium now instead of the British. As Ford would say, the BCE is alive and well.

Face it, yeah there was slavery and it was wrong, but it's still going on in China and other places and we all enable it by buying their goods. Maybe we want an iPOD or Nike shoes more than to stomp slavery out for good.

The mess is way more international and complicated now than Martin Luther King ever could have dreamed. Slavery has gone international and the plantations are corporations.

**ELVIS** · 01-17-2011, 11:34 PM

Originally Posted by Va Beach VH Fan

What an Internet tough guy you are....

What an internet dork you are...

**Va Beach VH Fan** · 01-18-2011, 09:47 AM

Originally Posted by ELVIS

What an internet dork you are...

Another witty comment....

So if we're pussies for enforcing Sarge's rules, you're basically saying the Sarge is a pussy for making that rule....

**Blaze** · 01-19-2011, 12:01 AM

Originally Posted by Nitro Express

Officially on paper but prejudice is a mental condition that tends to be multi-generational. In the old south they were scared to death of the black man because there were more slaves than free white people. They hated Lincoln for invading the south with a military and resented the blacks getting their freedom from him. When you are a kid and you grow up in this environment you tend to be that yourself until you are put in a situation where you are shown maybe your parents and grandparents were wrong.

Also, the black soldier went over to fight and many were heros but had to come back and use the separate bathroom and get no recognition until decades later.

It's fucked but that's the history of it.

This is not fully true.

Not ALL enterprises (families) were afraid. I resent you portraying all people black and white from such a harsh background.

Yes, some enterprises (families) had complexes that lead them to follow racial slavery. However, there were many enterprises that also indebted any color of man, woman, or child.

Not all plantations were heathen hell hole. And not all slaves were dysfunctional when slavery was outlawed (per-say).

Also is false is what the war was actually about.... but you can look that up.

Not all families of the South were adverse to the labor class, irrelevant of their color.

**Blaze** · 01-19-2011, 12:08 AM

Moreover, there was fine upstanding noble people from fine noble enterprises granted freedom that survived even though the corruption that was rampant after the horrid conditions left from the civil war.

Most of the "support" from the "poor-whites" was because they were mislead by corrupt enterprises. Not the enterprises that developed their "stock"

**TongueNGroove** · 01-20-2011, 01:37 AM

Originally Posted by ELVIS

It's amazing how bad TV looked in 64...

**Nitro Express** · 01-20-2011, 02:20 AM

Originally Posted by Blaze

This is not fully true.

Not ALL enterprises (families) were afraid. I resent you portraying all people black and white from such a harsh background.

Yes, some enterprises (families) had complexes that lead them to follow racial slavery. However, there were many enterprises that also indebted any color of man, woman, or child.

Not all plantations were heathen hell hole. And not all slaves were dysfunctional when slavery was outlawed (per-say).

Also is false is what the war was actually about.... but you can look that up.

Not all families of the South were adverse to the labor class, irrelevant of their color.

Sure there are individuals who differ. Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis despised slavery. The Civil War broke out for many reasons the main being a dispute over how the South's exports were taxed. That being said wars and how society moves in general is based on the overall picture of things. The South wanted to systematically get rid of slavery. Many wanted to set up a situation where the slaves could be moved back to Africa or settled in an area where the potential for possible backlash would not be a worry. Many wondered where the slaves would go or what they would do. When you have more people that were slaves than free people in your area and all a sudden they get their freedom, it's frightening to many because they fear reversed violence and payback.

It created a nasty situation for another hundred years and nothing about it was simple or black and white. It was a very ugly situation and yes I realize there were good plantation owners and such but overall, it was horrid.

**Nitro Express** · 01-20-2011, 02:24 AM

In the south only the rich owned slaves. A good male slave was $1000. The working class couldn't afford them. I always wondered why the working class fought in the war when it seemed to be just the rich who had a bone to pick with the Federal Government. It's because Lincoln invaded the south with an army. That blew the lid off. That was the glue to the Confederacy.

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