Is Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream Ending?
Dear race baiters,
Do you remember that American Christian minister who had a dream? This letter is to tell you that dream is ending.
I was born in a time that made us believe we were all equal, and that our skin color was irrelevant. A time that swore to never repeat the worst catastrophes humanity had endured: slavery, colonialism, segregation, the holocaust i.e. the collective demonization of people on the grounds of supremacist ideas, religion, or ethnicity.
We are now starting to realize that identical doctrines that lead to those catastrophes are resurfacing hidden behind the benevolent mask of “progress”.
At first, we were told we must fight against white supremacy, a dogma promoted by a dangerous minority, the last barrier before social harmony. But then, your ideologues have devised the concept of whiteness, the supposed disproportionate power held by white people, their entitlement or sense of entitlement.
Whiteness has the merits to offer you an everlasting antagonist. And despite claiming it does not encompass all white people, this manipulation of the language to obscure the meaning of the belief system known as “white supremacy” factually created a concept that defines the state or quality of being white.
You have collectively demonized Caucasians as villains, rendered them the cause of oppression with this abstraction, and like every totalitarian, you endeavored to eradicate this antagonist.
The Russian communist party fought against capitalism sending dissidents to the Gulags. Hitler exploited the fear of a Bolshevik Revolution deporting those considered as “inferiors” to the concentration camps. Mussolini promised to end corruption and a “revolutionary nationalism” that transcended class lines while reintroducing the death penalty for “serious political offenses”. Your activists and academicians required the abolition of whiteness, a sickness, a societal disease of some sort that needs to be cured.
Your remedy is a grand revolution to ravage and pillage the purported privileges of an ethnicity and remove from society a racial identity deemed oppressive. Therefore, you have pined all social ills on the back of a scapegoat and I pray that your promise of a permanent treatment won’t be dubbed the final solution.
You hold me responsible for what my ancestors supposedly did to yours without knowing my history. So allow me to talk a bit about myself.
My forefathers neither owned any properties nor any slaves. They were serfs and peasants in Sicily trying to survive in a land raided by Greeks and Romans (276-241 BC) then Vandals (440), Ostrogoths (447), Byzantine (535), and Muslims Arabs (827-1067).
Undoubtedly, none of those conquests were made with flowers and folk guitars. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that more than a few of my ancestors were killed, raped, or enslaved.
Under the Normans occupation and the King Roger II (1095–1154), the region was relatively at peace until invasions from the German royal family Hohenstaufen (1194), the Angevins (1266) and the kingdom of Aragon (1282).
Through the following century, Sicily was at war against the Kingdom of Naples controlled by the French Angevins. The Spanish ultimately took over Naples. During the Napoleonic Wars, the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were combined into the kingdom of the two Sicilies (1816–1861) under the rule of the former. My ancestors residing in Sicily were second-class citizens.
In 1861 Garibaldi unified Italy. Still, people in the North, richer thanks to the Industrial Revolution, thought of themselves as superior, and more civilized, compared to the so-called barbaric South, the land of farmers.
Many in Sicily traded their rustic and agrarian existence to work in factories dreaming of a better future for their children. For my grandfather, it was working in the sulfur mines from a very young age, the skin burns, and a life expectancy that would not exceed 50 years.
When Mussolini came into power my grandfather decided to take refuge in France right before the war was declared. There, he worked in the coal mines, slowly filling his lungs with black dust while striving to put bread on the table under German occupation. He died when I was a young boy.
In turn, for diverse motives, I moved to the UK where I started a life at the bottom in a job paying the absolute minimum wage.
My family history is not uncommon. There are millions of white people who never held any form of authority or privilege but have been mistreated over centuries by the military or financial power of the time.
Those are the people you demand to feel guilty because of their skin color, ask them to cure their whiteness and apologize for their supposed privilege.
The real oppression comes from the financial institutions, the multinational capitalist companies, and the minorities who exploit the majority of (white) people. Those who sold us the idea that our submission to their economic system would be the ultimate freedom.
Similarly to the British Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789, your revolution served the interest of economic liberalism and your narrative sustained the elite power.
This elite divides us to reign and assert their dominance hidden behind a virtuous mask. While our societies are becoming economically unequal, they campaign to promote your ideology.
If race hustling were not profitable, do you think they would give you platforms, open institutions’ doors, and hand you a microphone? They have transformed genuine social and political activism into a lucrative business.
They offered you to build a career on hatred, paid you to do their bidding, and demonize white working class to bring civil war among the masses while they watch us fight against each other from their ivory tower.
You make your bed with the bourgeois elite whose imperialism substantiated by nationalism justified the plunder of resources and exploitation of millions in the colonies.
By claiming everything in society is tinted with whiteness, you don’t do any favor to your community. You set up black people for failure by promoting deviance in opposition to norms perceived as oppressive and created only for whites.
Working hard is whiteness, showing up on time is whiteness, having good grades is whiteness … you supported the opposite standards of what makes success, condemning countless children to never escape their social condition.
You have developed in them an aversion to intelligence, let them revel in their debasement, contempt for Western culture, and authority. You made them unable to articulate ideas, the only recourse to pure emotion. You maintained the fiction that their situation is due to poverty and prejudices, that they are victims. The comfortable fiction that whiteness, and only that, is holding them back.
Above all, you forbade them to assimilate. You pressed them to detach themselves and mark their distance from this society you love to hate, a society that gave you most of your success.
You fed them a narrative in contradiction with your history and accomplishments, promoting appearance over substance, the never-ending status of victimhood over the possibility to make it in life despite obstacles.
Dear race baiters, you will certainly never read this letter and we will never have a conversation. And this is why the dream a great man once had is coming to an end.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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My Grandfather arrived from Germany in 1917. He began work in a grey iron foundry. At some point he decided he could do it better, found an investor and built his own. My wife’s Grandfather arrived from Yugoslavia approximately in the same year. He worked underground in iron ore mines on the Iron Range for over 40 years. Neither asked for anything or were given anything...no handouts. They took root and had families. They succeeded through sweat-equity, perseverance, pride and personal honor. These two, and the other two Grandfathers of equal stature, laid the foundation our families succeed on today. We look back with pride at what they accomplished and the manner in which they did. These two stories, like millions of others, are what helped build the USA.
Am neither white nor western, but agree 100%. Grew up in my own culture inherited from parents who had left their country to seek better opportunities. I adopted the two other cultures that I lived, went to school and then eventually worked with because that was also part of my heritage. None of the 3 are superior or inferior; all are as special and wonderful as the other.
I believe I and my siblings feel that way because our parents engendered in us a sense of confidence in our own cultural background, which allowed us to deeply respect and appreciate other cultures. When you lack that confidence, you feel “less than”, and hence you feel you have to fight in some way to feel “more than” - not that such a fight ever makes you feel truly victorious.
All the traits you attribute to whiteness of working hard, showing up on time, having good grades is shared by many an Asian culture as well; and is probably inherently universal if everyone had the same opportunities - which is what King fought for. MLK’s speechwriter in a recent interview had a message for young blacks asking them to commit to the pursuit of personal excellence, being the very best - out of which they would truly demonstrate ‘black is beautiful’, vs some empty slogan; as black is beautiful, he says, because of its commitment to personal excellence, which has no colour.