Americans invoke a sanitized King to avoid frank racial discussions.

Evidence

That’s hard to do when the model for talking about racial justice in this country is a sanitized, cherry-picked version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Every year when we celebrate his holiday, every Black History Month when we recognize his accomplishments, every time we dare take up the thorny issues of racial inequality, people invoke Dr. King, his commitment to nonviolence, and his dream as the best example of black struggle. One day after returning home from his fifth-grade Black History Month program, my son said, “Daddy, it’s like Dr. King is the only person in black history.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader discourse on the whitewashing of King’s radicalism; resonates with political science on commemorative myths.