And this is what really got Dr. MLK killed.  (via black-culture)

This is the kind of thing that we get taught a lot in progressive circles. We hear that Dr. King was assassinated not because of his liberal-pacifist-[sic] views on racial equality [sic], but because of his truly threatening socialistic politics. And it’s not untrue, and it is these things (the interrelationship between racism, war, and poverty) that are the most erased from our MLK narratives even though they’re the most important. We don’t talk about how he was in Memphis to work with the sanitation strikers, that’s for sure.

But saying that he really got killed because of his views on distribution of wealth and not, you know, racism, is reductive. It’s like a progressive take on the But The Civil War Wasn’t About Slavery It Was About Economics! bullshit. Is it really that hard to imagine that MLK was assassinated, yes, because he was challenging capitalism but also because of, um, you know, racism? Because he was challenging how capitalism both relies on and props up white supremacy? Can we have a discussion about Dr. King’s views on poverty which doesn’t completely erase the fact that he was still talking about race? I think deracializing his socialist discourse is as damaging (and racist!) as whitewashing/decontextualizing his antiracist discourse.

tl;dr, what about the poor white people??

(*less a comment on the original poster, because the post made more sense in the context of their blog. more a comment re: every white history professor we’ve all ever had and the giddiness with which white-centric feminist/sj blogs have been saying this same thing all day.)

(I mean, it’s not like the government assassinated Dorothy Day, and what she did wasn’t that much different in terms of class from what Fred Hampton was doing)

(via fuckyeahfeminists)