I will not be on the net to blog on MLK Day, so this is why I am doing my MLK blogging now. Here's is an article about Martin Luther King Jr that I have been saving for some time. Here's a taste:


Martin Luther King III, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said he is offended when opponents of affirmative action quote the line from his father's "I Have a Dream" speech that Americans should be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." His father delivered the speech at the culmination of the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington.


Also, I hate packing, so here's an awesome excerpt on racism, classism, and Dean Esmay:

As a fellow member of the working-class, white man secret society, shut the hell up. If your life, or the lives of people you care about, are fucked up, deal with it. Ask us and we'll try to help. Share and we'll cope with you. But don't blame black people. And certainly don't blame Oliver, especially when your "evidence" of his privilege was hand-delivered to you by the voices in your own head.

Ooh,smackdown. But it really annoys me when white men try to use class problems as a way to ignore racism. Like they'll act like they are really the same problem, but it's not so. If you're white, and lower class, you have a problem. If you're black and lower class, you have two problems. I tend to see sexism and racism as connected- like I'll be reading some feminists and be like "well, that's like being black" or be reading some black thinkers, and be like "that's like being a woman", but I don't say that the problem for women is really race, or the problem for blacks is really sex, that's just dumb.

oppressions do combine and stack on each other, and may even manifest in similar ways. That however doesn't make any oppressions disappear. I can't say that the problems that transpeople go through is really essentially sexism, or homophobia is just a problem of sexism, because even though sexism is an element of those oppressions, it's not like it's the only one- they have unique characteristics.

Of course this is a bit indepth since the white guys complaining don't really want to go indepth into fixing any of this, they just want excuses, but the rest of us might be enriched by this discussion. I guess they are like men's rights activists, plenty happy to try to tear down what gains others have made, but not willing to do the work to make any real gains of their own. If they are unhappy about being dirt poor, they need to see why they are dirt poor, and work to fix those mechanisms instead of sitting around bitching about blacks.