Service as a Substitute: The Sanitizing of Martin Luther King Jr.

This article is available in full at AOL News, under a different title.

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Perhaps it's no great surprise that Glenn Beck would distort Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message, as he did when he held a rally for mostly white reactionaries on the 47th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech in August, all the while suggesting that the group was "reclaiming the civil rights movement." After all, what do you expect from Beck?

But Michelle Obama really should know better.

And since she most certainly does, her message, which I only today received as part of a mass e-mail honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Day, strikes me as particularly disturbing. Even more, it seems indicative of a tendency, many years in the making, for even relatively liberal folks to sanitize the King legacy to a point where it is unrecognizable as the radical gift it truly was.

Read the rest of this op-ed on AOL News.

(And thanks to Gina Misiroglu of Red Room for putting me in touch with the folks at AOL, which is one of the ways she's bringing traffic to Red Room and getting attention for Red Room's authors).