MLK’s Three-headed Monster Remains
Exactly one year before his assassination, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a searing critique of U.S. international and domestic policy to those gathered at Riverside Church in New York City. The critique came in the form of a lecture, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
King believed his God-given ministerial calling required speaking “for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of [the U.S.], for those it calls ‘enemy’ . . .” This, he reasoned, necessitated speaking up for oppressed Blacks in the U.S. and oppressed Vietnamese in the former French colony Vietnam. Thus King globalized the image of mutual dependence he championed in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds
Whatever injustices plague Blacks in Atlanta or Birmingham inevitably plague brothers and sisters in Vietnam, too. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
King identifies three causes of injustices that are bedeviling Blacks and the Vietnamese: “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” For King, this triplet functions like a three-headed monster. Though racism, materialism, and militarism are distinct, since the colonial area they have acted in tandem—always coming as a combined or fused dominating force. English colonialists rabid for land and agricultural capital racialized the Indigenous as non-white savages (for them, this phrase houses redundancy) without rights to their ancestors land. Armed with the backing of the English crown and military, these colonists drove the Indigenous off fertile land, and brought stolen Black bodies to do the arduous work of growing crops like tobacco while under the ever watchful eye of armed soldiers or militias. Similar examples of this three-headed monster’s oppressive and exploitive structuring of the globe liter world history. Read Aimé Césaire, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Howard Winant, Lisa Lowe, or Erika Lee. You’ll see.
But you don’t need to stick to history books to see this three-headed monster in action. Just look around. Consider Brazil. Meditate on the United States. Reflect on the humanitarian disasters in Libya and Yemen. Examine Puerto Rico (a U.S. colony) and the Philippines. Do you see it? Do you see the monster? Do you see it surfacing amid the recent U.S. riots? It’s there. It’s in all these places. This construction of human hands is a grotesque creature, isn’t it?
Lord have mercy—and give us wisdom and strength to confront this centuries-old Leviathan your servant King exposed. For where it strikes one directly, it strikes all indirectly.
