The "Social Justice" Attempt to Portray a Gandhian Pacifist as a Class Warrior

Melinda D. Anderson, in Teaching MLK's Life—the Man, Not the Myth, implies that his was a "social justice" (i.e., class warfare) message, not the "mainstream" message it is made out to be:

The Chicago teacher Gregory Michie says his lessons on the social-justice icon are designed to upend what he views as a simplistic and clichéd image often presented in schools. Since many of his students know King’s famous excerpt hoping for a day when no one is judged by the color of their skin, Michie’s social-studies class zeroes in on lesser-known sections of the “I Have a Dream” speech, like the “fierce urgency of now” and “tranquilizing drug of [white] gradualism.” The youngsters quickly realize that they’ve never really heard the full message of the speech, he said, and “it’s a lot more nuanced, and more fiery, than they’d thought.”

As the country observes the federal holiday named in King’s honor, it seems that schools are increasingly coming under sharp criticism from educators and activists for their approach to teaching King’s life. Some question a sanitized teaching of the black civil-rights movement, its leaders, and other struggles for social justice that denies students an accurate and complete account of history. These debates are complicated by the inherent professional dangers in teaching through a social-justice lens.

In her book Language, Culture, and Teaching, the multicultural educator and author Sonia Nieto writes that schools in attempting to make King “palatable to the mainstream … have made [him] a milquetoast.”

But King cites Lincoln, who emphatically rebuts the class warfare skepticism about the sincerity and legitimacy of the Declaration and the Constitution. (Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) ) More to the point, this is the speech where MLK himself affirms the mainstream:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." ...

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 these passages King rejects the social justice dogma that the principles in the Declaration and the Constitution are hypocritical; and the dogma that assigns ineradicable class based on skin color.

Ms. Anderson's implied argument—that portraying King as a great American who employed peaceful democratic persuasion to achieve his ends is a "myth"—is deeply dishonest and maliciously divisive. Her article's appearance in The Atlantic is another example of the way class warfare ideology corrupts the editorial judgment of "progressive" journalism.

Well may Anderson complain about "the inherent professional dangers in teaching through a social-justice lens." In King's case, doing so is morally wrong not because it makes the mainstream uncomfortable, but because it is untrue.