Friday was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s. birthday and today is MLK Day. Mind you, not every U.S. company/business observes this day, but many will turn around and observe the rapist and genocidal white colonizer, Columbus. Many of those companies that do observe MLK Day, or recently started acknowledging it as a holiday, only use certain misinterpreted quotes as a means of absolution and denial of the violent transgressions of their ancestors and themselves.

Where were you on Wednesday, January 6, 2021…?

You will rarely catch a white person sharing an MLK quote from Letter from Birmingham Jail, an important Civil Rights text, because those were the words of an unforgiving Black man jailed while fighting for civil rights and calling out white people for their apathy and inaction. Black people who share quotes from this letter are often censored. Let me be clear:

Quoting MLK does not make you non-racist. And policing those who quote the full scope of the man puts your racism on full display.

One of the Black, female activists and authors I follow on Instagram shared the following MLK quote:

Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Her post was removed for HATE SPEECH OR SYMBOLS because the evil of systemic racism and white supremacist delusion permeates every nook and cranny of society. From shipping drugs and crack cocaine into Black communities and then convicting Black males at exponential rates to AI technology and algorithms. Just look up Timnit Gebru, one of the few Black women in AI Ethics Research, who was fired by Google for speaking out about diversity issues last Fall.

Part of why I deactivated my Facebook account and created my own website was because I refuse to solely rely on a Zuckerberg platform to give me a space when my voice, the voice of an outspoken Black woman, is shadow-banned on Instagram faster than you can say “Vanilla Isis”.

In spite of the continual discrimination, let’s remember and honor the true meaning of today while acknowledging the exponential amount of work still to be done. And, if we’re being honest, most of that work needs to be white people calling out and holding other white people accountable. Black people aren’t here to save you from yourselves when we’re out here just trying to survive. I’m hoping that this new administration is a big step in a better direction.