MLK’s most famous line not politically correct enough on campus
U. Oregon students considered removing call to judge others “not … by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”
While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had many well-known speeches and quotes, I think it’s fair to say that his “I Have a Dream” speech is his most famous.
And in that most famous speech, the following line may be the most famous:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
In a campus world of affirmative action based in part on the color of one’s skin, and a hyper-sensitive microaggression mania, I’ve wondered how long it would take for Dr. King’s most famous line to be repudiated.
There is an irreconcilable tension between Dr.King’s call to not base the evaluation of people on the color of their skin, and the modern progressive demand that skin color (and other immutable characteristics) be a central focus of everything.
It’s why Black Lives Matter protesters and supporters are infuriated by the counter-demand that All Lives Matter. And it’s enough to cause a near-riot or riot on campus.
So, with that said, the first shot has been fired in the exorcism of Dr. King’s most famous line from campus.
Mediaite reports, U of Oregon Debates Removing MLK Quote For Not Being Inclusive Enough:
Student leaders at the University of Oregon debated removing a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. from its student center, arguing that the quote was not inclusive enough for modern understandings of diversity.
Oregon’s Erb Memorial Union, which is currently under renovation, had the following famous King quote on the wall: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream…”
But as renovation continues, the Oregon Student Union seriously considered replacing that quote. “The quote is not going to change,” reports student paper Oregon Daily Emerald, “but that decision was not made without some hard thought by the Student Union Board.”
When the student union considered the question, some students asked, “Does the MLK quote represent us today?” The problem wasn’t so much the message, but the fact that it only focused on racial diversity instead of gender identity.
“Diversity is so much more than race,” said one sophomore architecture major. “Obviously race still plays a big role. But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that.”
Impossible to parody. Impossible. via @jneeley78 https://t.co/7P0fk9QyaF pic.twitter.com/hKnyyPjVJy
— Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) January 26, 2016
The quote will not be removed after all, but the mere fact that the suggestion was taken seriously shows the wisdom of Dr. King’s words.
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Comments
How tiring it is to listen to current college students stuck in perennial outrage.
Almost as tiring us as adults doing the same 🙂
(I also agree with you.)
Would you hire one of these hypersensitive thin-skinned little precious snowflakes to work in your company? Time to build a ban-list.
That student has a safe home at Twitter, Google, or Facebook.
Am I to understand that it would have been more politically correct if in his speech he also shared with us his wet dream too.
Eeewww!
Out: “I have a dream that one day little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
In: “I have a dream that one day little black boys and black girls will be rape rob assault and murder little white boys and white girls as predators and prey.”
Well, MLKJr was an amazing, liberal Republican, back in the day when liberal meant liberal, not socialist/fascist.
Maybe the King family did not get the royalty check for the copyrighted speech and shut it down?
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/copyright-king-why-the-i-have-a-dream-speech-still-isn-t-free
Progressive/liberal/post-modern literature has been reinterpreting what MLK ‘really’ said and meant for decades.
Judge an individual human life not by the content of her character, but by her class in a diversity scheme, and planned return with her abortion.
Neither individual dignity nor intrinsic value, just a semblance of religious or moral development. Progressive corruption was both a predictable and inevitable outcome.
Since Michael King Jr’s days, science has shown that it is reasonable to prejudge people by their race and culture.
And it depends on the definitions of vague words like science, reasonable, race, and culture as well as the fact that these vague words have no clear boundaries and are not mutually exclusive.
One can start with a conclusion and then reasonably support it with fog.
Ok, OK. We won’t judge you by the color of your lipstick and eye-shadow either.
Sorry but the MLK “I have a dream” speech is a bit difficult to appreciate when we know know that the not-always-right Reverend lifted the “let freedom ring” ending to the speech from his good friend Archibald Carey’s speech given at the GOP convention in 1952.
We also know that he spent the entire night before with several women including Georgia Davis Powers. She wrote about a conversion she overheard between King and Commie apparatchik Stanley Levison:
I didn’t hear all the conversation, but I heard Martin repeat something [advisor Stanley] Levison said to him. After he hung up, he was still repeating this phrase. “Cowardice asks, is it safe? Expediency asks, is it political? Vanity asks, is it popular? But conscience asks, is it right?”
I asked, “Will you use that in your speeches?”
He smiled, “I will use it when it is appropriate.”
I said, “M. L., is anything we do and say original?”
He replied, “Originality comes only from God. Everything else has, is, and will be used by someone else before you.”
So what if he copied it from another speech? Speeches are not expected to be original. Good lines are routinely recycled, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Plagiarism is only an offense in academic writing, where there is an expectation that everything one writes is original, unless it’s explicitly attributed to someone else, and where ones work is judged on its originality. In oratory, legal briefs, etc. there is no such expectation, so the concept of plagiarism doesn’t apply.
It’s OK in a political speech to lift someone’s rhetoric; what’s not OK is to lift someone else’s life. If Biden’s grandfather had been a coal miner, there would have been nothing at all wrong with him using Kinnock’s line about it. The problem wasn’t that the line wasn’t original, it was that it wasn’t true. Kinnock’s grandfather was a coal miner, but Biden’s wasn’t.
Biden’s culpable plagiarism was back at college, and it almost got him expelled.
Being inspired by something is not quite the same as plagiarism…
Goethe’s Maxim #441 (ca. 1833)—All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
“…some hard thought by the Student Union Board.”
Why do I think this is funny?
I wonder how much support the Student Union Board would really have if being a member of the Student Union was voluntary.
“The problem wasn’t so much the message, but the fact that it only focused on racial diversity instead of…” me.
The wrapping paper has become oh so much more important than the God-given gift of life. Hence, the utter lack of gratitude toward God and toward others.
I think Dr. King was not focused on racial diversity. He was focused on treating people as individuals. He wanted to remove the practice of putting an individual into a box, racial or otherwise.
The leftist wants more boxes. I think that is why Dr. King is such a problem to them.
BTW, a leftist is not a box to me. It is a pattern of thinking that a person freely chooses to engage in and can change when he so chooses. It is short for a person who chooses to engage in a pattern of behavior or thinking that appears to be pure nonsense to me at best and evil at worst. It is a logical test and a personal decision not an assignment based on a physical charateristic.
MLK was a philandering womanizer. That said, one simply must respect his courage and commitment to abolishing racial barriers. Unfortunately, the one thing that came from MLK’s efforts was the original race hustler Jesse Jackson. Wiping his hands in King’s blood to ‘prove’ he was beside King when he was assassinated (he wasn’t even on the patio at the time).
The “judged by character” thing ain’t working out for most of them, so they wanna go back to the old way.
Ah Char Char Binks, saying what nobody else had the guts to say.
Can we go around demanding his name be taken off everything because he was bigoted against LGBTQ community?
Diversity of ideas is not part of the equation.