Martin Luther King Jr. and the courage of universality |
To speak seriously of Martin Luther King Jr. today is already to enter into conflict with the form in which he is publicly remembered. King survives as a moral icon precisely because his thought has been stripped of its antagonism. He is invoked as a patron saint of patience and civility, a figure used to discipline protest and reconcile injustice with order. In this sanitized form, King functions as an ideological device: proof that freedom can be achieved without structural rupture, redistribution, or confrontation with power.
This King is a fabrication. The question, then, is not how King should be honored, but why his most radical commitments have become structurally unreadable within liberal memory.
The historical King—the King who matters—emerges only when we follow the trajectory of his thought beyond civil rights reform and into a direct confrontation with capitalism, imperialism, and the social totality that sustains both. By the end of his life, King no longer fit within the coordinates of American liberalism. That is why his legacy had to be neutralized. King was not merely a moral critic of injustice. He was becoming a theorist and practitioner of systemic antagonism, a figure whose fidelity to universality could not be reconciled with liberal capitalism without falsification.
From the beginning, King rejected the liberal fantasy of gradualism. Liberalism tolerates injustice so long as it proceeds slowly, legally, and politely. King refused this temporal logic. Nonviolent direct action was not a plea for recognition but a strategy of disruption. Birmingham was not persuasion but crisis; Selma was not dialogue but exposure.
In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King does not ask to be included. He indicts the very idea that justice can be deferred without consequence. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied” names a structure, not a sentiment. The demand for patience is itself a technique of domination, converting suffering into an administrative problem and freedom into a promise endlessly postponed.
Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between subjective and objective violence........