Are We Done Talking About MLK?

It's been 8 days...

Dear Troublemakers,

I’ve gotten quite accustomed to spending most of MLK Day offline. I’ll often post or tweet something to acknowledge the day and the man many of us have gotten off work or school for, then go hang out with my family or watch something that makes me laugh or take an extra long nap. This is not because I don’t care about the day. As a Black woman with her masters in social justice, the life and legacy of Martin Luther King is extremely important to me. Which is why I’ve created a boundary for myself to not see post after post reducing his dream and his words to hollow shells of their original and radical meaning.

In the days before the pandemic I sometimes got invited to speak at events on MLK Day, at places I wasn’t always sure mentioned his name other than annually. At one such event I got the idea to simply piece together a bunch of writings and speeches into one, leaving out only indicators that would reveal its author and location in time. I watched as the room bec…