Trump said Obama wasn’t born the the United States. He said Mexicans were rapists. He encouraged violence at his rallies. He calls the press the enemy. His fellow travelers in the GOP, stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama. They said they would not allow Hillary to make an appointment for four years. Babies were kidnapped and now we are told that families will be held in immigration internment centers (tent cities). We are told to be calm and be “civil” because we might upset our fellow citizens and lose votes. If our fellow citizens are so sensitive that calling out what is in front of our eyes results in electing more Republicans, we have already lost.

We are in uncharted waters. “How Democracies Die” shows that we are in dangerous territory. The is no blueprint for digging out of our current situation. In the past, we had people who spoke truth to power. We cannot put away these voices from the past. King spoke out to moderates who said say calm. King became more radical as time went on. 

In King’s final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, drafted in early 1967, he argued in part that white supremacy stood in the way of America’s democracy, that it was an ever-present force in frustrating the dreams of the nation’s darker-skinned citizens. At the heart of it was a distorted understanding of the meaning of racial justice. He wrote

Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America … proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap–essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain i

This is a devastating judgment about our so-called national commitment to progress. It reduces racial justice to a charitable enterprise by which white people “do good” for black people. This, in turn, provides white Americans with a necessary illusion that preserves the idea of innocence and insulates their conscience or, perhaps, their soul from guilt and blame.

King did not craft this conclusion from thin air. This was a lesson learned from experience. The brutality of the South and the hypocrisy of the country led him to conclude that the view of racial equality as a charitable enterprise distorted the principles of democracy itself and disfigured the moral character of those who believed the lie.

Nearly a year after his refusal to leave his bed, in August 1967, King stated plainly “that the vast majority of white Americans are racists, either consciously or unconsciously.” Eight months later, he would lie dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Those are the words of King. We cannot afford to put him away, because we only accept a superficial version of the man. We are not in normal times. Would King hesitate to call Trump and his supporters authoritarian and supreamacists?

http://time.com/5220093/the-whitewashing-and-resurrection-of-dr-kings-legacy/