Imagine if you were starving and someone gave you a beautiful picture of food, or if you were dying of thirst and they gave you an empty crystal glass. That is the essence of symbolic victories and how little they help us.
While Dr. King’s efforts and achievements for civil rights and revolutionary activism should never be overlooked, giving him a holiday had only proved to be a hollow, weak, half-assed gift, acting as a symbolic victory.
Symbolic victories mean nothing when the system eventually invalidates the symbol. Today is MLK Day. A fascist was just inaugurated. What does that say about today’s holiday? What does that say to all the symbolic victories revolutionaries have received in the past 60+ years? They feel like they mean something in our hearts, but mean nothing to our concrete lives.
Turning Martin Luther King into a holiday gave the neoliberals free rein to misconstrue his message for their selfish capitalist agenda. To dangle the keys to freedom in your face as they pick your pocket with their other hand, robbing you of your dignity, self-determination, and liberation.
Dr. King wasn’t the milquetoast liberal that our education systems make him out to be. Black figures are often mischaracterized by the elites in three ways:
Turned into symbols for keeping us in line
They are characterized as terrorists so we disagree with them
Refuse to acknowledge them, hoping we forget them
These are often done after state-sanctioned assassinations of these figures mind you.
Dr. King was a revolutionary. The only way we can honor the memories of revolutionaries like him, Malcolm X, Chairman Fred, and others is by simply being revolutionaries ourselves, not through holidays, street naming, and other symbolic distractions.
While our love for symbolic victories goes deep into the physiology of Americans, and how subservient and forgetful we are as long as the government gives us treats, we can at the very least attempt to do better.
It’s neither realistic nor feasible to destroy our past symbolic victories. Instead, we must shift the focus from celebration to diligence. We must do the hard work.
While spending the day admiring and appreciating the achievements of MLK Jr., think about how we can honor his memory now and every day after through action.
Peace
