As we honor the 38th celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I feel a deep burning sense of unspeakable sadness in my soul — at other times, horror. Not much feels right in the world. To be a person who truly longs for collective justice, universal peace, shared love and compassion, and the end of hatred, it is not possible to remain content with the status quo, to be indifferent to oppression wherever it raises its ugly head, to see the results of poverty and remain silent, to remain unresponsive to the murder of innocent children around the world, ethnic cleansing and the march toward fascistic rule, as we see here in the United States and abroad.

Dr. King’s dear friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King and who also powerfully spoke against social evil with prophetic passion, reminds us: “The prophets’ great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.”

MLK Day should not be reduced to a day of rest but should be lifted up as a day of active interrogation, a day where the U.S. finds itself in tears because of its monumental failure to address systemic injustice. As Dr. King said during his presidential address at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, “Let us be dissatisfied.” In other words, along with Rabbi Heschel, King was aware of just how being “pious” and “decent” can function to conceal the deeper realities of social, political and unethical stench. To be dissatisfied is to be ethically intolerant of the pervasive cruelty of this world. Dr. King knew that injustice was “like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up.” It “must be opened with all its ugliness … to the light of human conscience.”

To help galvanize our collective conscience, to nurture a form of dissatisfaction that demands justice and agape, and to better understand and appreciate the complex and radical work of Dr. King, I turned to eminent scholar Josiah Ulysses Young III, professor of systematic theology at Wesley Theological Seminary. It is Young’s clarity and courageous speech regarding the importance of Dr. King that we need in this moment. His scholarship critically engages theological implications of African American experience and spirituality, and his most recent book is entitled, Black Lives Matter and the Image of God: A Theo-Anthropological Study.

George Yancy: Most people are enamored by Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on Agape love, which is a form of love that overflows and “makes no distinction between friend and enemy.” Each year this nation celebrates the King who had a dream. And while agape love is a fundamentally powerful concept in the face of anti-Blackness, and King’s dream spoke to an aspirational “post-racial” U.S., it is important to name the enduring ugly realities that have outlived King. He referred to them as “the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.”

Pulling from the work of philosopher Martin Buber, King understood that racism, materialism and militarism reduce relationships to an “I-It,” where human beings are reduced to things, where an “I-Thou” relationship ceases to flourish. King wasn’t just concerned with racial prejudices, as I have heard from many white liberals, but with deep forms of violent structural white power, white privilege and unconscious racism; he wasn’t concerned with valuing trinkets but with profound wealth inequality, where people in the U.S. languish in poverty despite the fact that the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world. He wasn’t just concerned with minor skirmishes but with military power that leaves thousands dead in its wake and where military might makes “right.”

Like Socrates (to whom King compared himself), King spoke with parrhesia/courageous speech and refused to allow ethical and epistemic mediocrity to dominate the polis. In fact, King was clear that what is most important is “restructuring the whole of American society.” That is radical! As we know, because of their radicality, Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock and King was murdered by an assassin’s bullet. Both were deemed threats to the status quo. I am interested in the fact that King was seen as a “threat.” The more that he passionately critiqued the perpetuation of injustices within the U.S. and abroad, the more King became a threat to those in power in the U.S. King could not be silent in the face of social evil, as he believed that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” Moreover, his resistance had to be global, as he held that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Many have too quickly accepted a sanitized version of King. It is important to keep in mind that it was just before his death that, “public opinion polls showed 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of African Americans disapproved of his opposition to the [Vietnam] war and his campaign to eradicate poverty.” Given the continued existence of vicious racism, unrestrained materialism and brutal materialism in the U.S., we are in desperate need of King’s voice........

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