Martin Luther King, Jr. & The Manifest Danger of “Identity Politics”

January 22, 2019

As I am writing this, two seemingly unrelated things are happening.  First, America is observing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  At the same time, the truth is coming out about a confrontation between the Covington Catholic high school students and the Native American on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  These two events, in fact, areconceptually related and deeply instructive.

Covington Teens Incident

Last Saturday, a video went viral across social media depicting a white teenage boy, wearing a MAGA hat, smiling as he faced an older man, reported as a Native American and Vietnam war veteran, beating a tom-tom very close to his face. The boy was one of a group of students from a Catholic high school in Covington, Kentucky who had attended the annual March for Life in Washington the day before.  The mainstream media leaped on this supposed “story” (though it had largely ignored the March for Life and its estimated 300,000 peaceful, and mostly Christian, participants).

The pieces in Google’s news feed articles universally accused the boys of making racist taunts, mocking, obstructing and “getting in the face” of the Native American and his small group who were reportedly in Washington protesting during “Indigenous People’s Day.”   The left-wing accusations of racist, white privilege abuse filled Facebook, Twitter and other news feed Saturday and most of Sunday.

The teens were condemned by their own school and received a barrage of hateful, obscene messages and even death threats. One former CNN commentator, Raza Aslan, tweeted that the main teenager depicted in the video had the most “punchable face” he had ever seen. Many posts also bashed the kids’ Christianity.

It’s Not What It Seems

Sunday afternoon, however, a very different version of these events began to emerge.[i]   As a much longer video came to light, and the students started to set forth the actual facts to news outlets that would listen, it became apparent that the boys did nothing wrong.  There were two small groups on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the Covington high school students that day.  One was apparently there to voice concerns about Native Americans and the other was a group from the Black Hebrew Israelites sect.

The Black Hebrew Israelites can be heard and seen in the fuller video accusing President Trump and Rudy Guliani of being homosexuals, calling the mostly-white high school students “crackers”, yelling that the white students were going to harvest the organs of one of their black fellow students who were present, and making many clearly racist remarks.

Also, the video clearly shows that the Native American man who was beating the drum actually lead his group directly into the middle of the high school students, holding up and beating his drum while chanting/singing what sounds like a Native song of some kind.  He put his drum a few inches from the face of the white teenager who the press accused of racism.

The boy, to his credit, did not respond with any force or anger whatsoever.  He kept his peace and smiled.  Next to him and the drum-beater, another man apparently part of the Native American demonstrators, began to verbally berate one of the other white students with a profanity-laced tirade about how “Europeans” needed to leave because “we” (presumably, people of Native American ancestry) were here first.

The crowd of teenage students can be heard laughing as the spectacle unfolded.   Some in the group erupted in a high-school spirit chant of some kind. What one does not see are any of the racist statements, threats, mocking, bullying or intimidation they were falsely accused of. When their busses arrived, they hustled out of the scene, only to be followed by taunts and jeers from at least one of the Black Hebrew Israelites.

The Consequences Of Fake News

The defamation en masse of these school kids by the mainstream media resulted first from its abandonment of the chief value of journalistic objectivity.   Here we see yet another stunning and deeply harmful case of “fake news.”  This time, however, it was not a President or politician who was smeared, but innocent children and the Christian faith.

But, more fundamentally, the collective verbal reverse-lynching of these innocent teens by the left-wing news media is the offspring of the wicked regime of progressive thought-control called “identity politics.”  That regime dictates that people are defined by the color of their skin, their ethnic ancestry, their gender and by any deviant sexual desires they may have.   Membership in a group of this kind mandates what the member believes, what is “fair” for that person, what his moral character must be and how others are obliged to treat him.

In this case, the “protesters” were ethnically African American and Native American.  The other groups were mostly ethnic whites, Christian, pro-life Trump supporters.  Those outward appearances were enough evidence for the media to acquit the first group and convict the second, no questions asked. Forget about any possibility of innocence here. The students are members of the disapproved groups; therefore, they must be racist bullies.  The protesters were members of racial minorities; therefore, they must have been doing something virtuous.

The Irony

It is extremely ironic that this took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Lincoln led the nation in the bloodiest war in our history to FREE a race of people enslaved under a regime built on racial classification. King led a great movement to bring that freedom into maturity.   After another great march in Washington in 1963, King declared on those very steps, his dream for a day when children in America would be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Now, socialist progressives have fully turned King’s dream on its head.  Instead of fighting for a color-blind society as he envisioned, they have enslaved this country to a whole new system of racial classification.  Instead of the chains of steel, their new race-based slavery uses chains of the mind.   People, to this lying philosophy, are a product of outward appearance, not character.  This lie masquerades under the “civil rights” banner of Dr. King but could not be more incompatible with his real message.

Fighting For The Truth

Racism and slavery are evil and deadly, regardless of whether they be physical or mental.  The deception that is inherent in progressive identity politics is no less racist, and no less harmful, than the more obvious form of material, economic racism of the bygone era.  It must be fought with the same diligence and persistence that Lincoln and King demonstrated, no matter its form, no matter it’s party and no matter the cost.

[i] Multiple articles are available documenting these facts and events: