01-20-2022, 10:27 PM
(01-20-2022, 09:08 PM)Dill Wrote: Not sure that "all white people killed MLK" was the message of Dino's meme.
The opening address "Dear White People," is figural, an allusion to a movie and a tv series which aired black grievances, but also represented something of the complexity of race relations in the U.S. today, including denial that racism continues as a social problem. It cues us how to read the meme--figurally.
The "message" in the meme, as I understood it, referenced recent usages of MLK to shore up anti-anti-racist positions. Vilified as a "communist traitor" by conservatives in the '60s, since the '80s King, safely dead, has been recast by conservatives as a conservative. He was a "bad negro" back then, making whites uncomfortable. Now he is a "good negro" who only wanted people judged on the content of their character, a safely dead civil rights icon and martyr deployed to check those currently addressing the continuing problem of civil rights in the U.S. by pushing for voting law reforms. Multiple ironies here.
I'm betting the people who created the meme knew that only one white man fired the shot that killed king. And I don't see any goal served by making the easily refuted claim that some 2.5 billion whites were in Memphis that day, all with their finger on the same trigger. I was 16 years old then, and I wasn't there. Nor was anyone I know, mostly white people.
Seems more likely the point was to remind those anti-anti-racists who would revise the historical King into a "good negro" that he was killed--i.e., not a "good negro" at all to a great many white people back then.
So the meme was not about some "collective guilt" but continued denial that racism is a problem in the U.S.
For someone who's "not sure" you sure have a lot of definite positions. Me, I'll stick with what was actually said in the picture instead of wading into supposition. Maybe, just maybe, if you're trying to make a point don't assign collective guilt to an entire race based on the actions of one person? But hey, that's just me. You feel free to engage in that trope all you like, I'm sure no group you have an affinity for will suffer under such comparisons.
