Ep. 740 - Why I found MLK Day to be a bit frustrating this year
The Breakdown with Shaun King
The North Star
4.8 • 12.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2023
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Don't get me wrong - I am nothing but glad to see Dr. King honored at this time every year, but part of me has grown to think that we are no longer actually honoring Dr. King, but this nation is, instead, creating a bland, toothless, colorless caricature of the man and forcing it on all of us.
Dr. King was a revolutionary. The man had more courage in his pinky toe than most of us have in our entire body. He spoke truth to power. And this nation hated him for it.
I saw a few things yesterday that made me sad and certainly a bit frustrated.
Let me unpack and explain it all.
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Love and appreciate you all.
Shaun
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Happy Tuesday, everybody. Glad to be back after the extended MLK day weekend. |
| 0:06.8 | There are a few things if you don't mind. We did a special MLK day episode yesterday, |
| 0:13.3 | but there are just a few things I want to reflect on today that make me kind of sad about MLK day and how |
| 0:22.5 | Dr. King has acknowledged and honored and what it really means for America. I, the episode won't be |
| 0:33.0 | a downer. I know I did just say we're going to talk about a few things that make me sad about the |
| 0:38.1 | King holiday, but I just have some reflections and just want to see if they resonate with you in |
| 0:46.2 | any way. Let's talk about it, let's unpack and explain it. It's the day after King day, |
| 0:52.0 | and I'm having some fresh thoughts that I want to share with you. This is Sean King, and you're |
| 0:56.7 | listening to the breakdown. I am a huge, huge, huge fan of Dr. King, and I have been certainly for |
| 1:23.4 | my entire adult life, but even into my teenage years, I've always just been an enormous fan |
| 1:32.4 | of Dr. King of his intelligence. He was also an intellectual who earned a PhD and we're talking |
| 1:39.2 | about somebody that graduated undergrad all the way back in 1948 and went straight into grad |
| 1:46.0 | school. Of course, being a student and a student leader at Morehouse, Dr. King was just, he was larger |
| 1:55.4 | than a life at Morehouse, and I wrote an article. I was a student writer as well for the school |
| 2:01.6 | newspaper called the Maroon Tiger. I was the senior columnist all the way back then |
| 2:09.3 | for the school newspaper. I was a student government president even before that, and I wrote an |
| 2:15.6 | article about how there was something on our campus that concerned me. There is a wonderful |
| 2:26.1 | statue and monument to Dr. King, kind of right in the heart of our campus in front of the |
| 2:30.9 | admissions building, and the statue of Dr. King there just towers over the campus. The statue |
| 2:39.2 | itself is on a platform that I think is like 10 feet tall, and then the statue itself might be |
| 2:44.7 | 10 or 15 feet tall. I've never got up there and stood next to it. It's almost impossible to get |
| 2:51.6 | up there. But Dr. King looked like a giant on our campus, and I wrote an article, I mean, gosh, |
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