A Muse on Martin Luther King Jr

This morning was filled with dread. Like, straight up doom and gloom "the world is going to end" dread. America elected a horrible racist misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, r*pist to our highest governmental office. LA is still on fire and are still utilizing slave labor of prisoners to put out the fires, caused by corporate greed an an inability to cap emissions. 

And yet today is a day celebrating someone who worked hard AGAINST literally everything our current country represents. Martin Luther King Jr. was an individual who stood up against the fascism and tyranny of the world to proclaim that BLACK LIVES MATTER. Some folks - not y'all reading this but definitely some of y'alls relatives - will be real mad to hear it, but truly that's what MLK was preaching way back in the 60s. And yet we move onward. 

So today, my ass decided to sit down and listen to some of MLK's lesser known speeches. Like this one, at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia in October 1967. 

He starts with what he laters calls the "commercial" talking about all the talent that's going to perform after him - folks like Aretha Franklin herself and Harry Belafonte! I'd kill to be in that audience TBH. An ideal night out! Anyway anyway anyway. . . this speech morphs from general "yay graduation yay young people" into a celebration of blackness. MLK states "Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody, Always feel that you count, Always feel that you have Worth and all always feel that your life has ultimate significance." 

Well Marty, that's easier said than done. (Can we call him Marty?! I feel like I just sinned.) We're all out here hating ourselves because of a society that squashed anything or anyone that doesn't fit into a cookie cutter mould of white supremacy and binary bullshit. But he reminds us, "You need not be lured into purchasing cosmetics advertised to make lighter, neither do you need to process your hair to make it appear straight, good, because it's as good as anybody else's in the world."

So, he's *specifically* speaking to Black liberation here, but it's translatable for so many marginalized peoples. I can hear that move into Trans folks, saying "You need not be lured into purchasing cosmetics advertised to make you PASS, neither do you need to process your GENDER to make it appear straight." 

This can be applied to literally every individual marginalization because, say it with me, everything stems back to white supremacy! And what a powerful statement when our current federal government is seeking to eradicate Trans folks from everyday life. With tactics that are eerily similar to the ways in with our federal government was trying to eradicate Black folks and Blackness from our society. And the ways in which our ye olde colonizer federal government pushed to eradicate Indigenous folks from our country. It's all rooted in a westernized white cis straight binary view of the world that most of us have *no interest in participating in.*

So why not get ready to fight for our collective liberation today? With a fascist-in-chief at America's helm (again), we've got to fight for our right to be ourselves (again). We can always look to Black liberation and the blueprints of powerful folks like MLK, like Malcom X, while studying the movements of their contemporaries like Qween Jean and Angelica Ross. 

Thank you, Martin Luther King Jr., for your words that are just as true today as they were 55 years ago. Now let's go protest some shit.