I Have a Dream vs. I Have a Drone: Dr. King v. Barack Obama

Margaret Kimberley, senior editor and commentator with BlackAgendaReport.com, joined us this week to honor Dr. King and discuss the many attempts to construct a fraudulent lineage between King, the movement to which he belonged and Barack Obama.*  As Obama and his handlers attempt yet again to pose the president as an heir to King’s legacy many of the important differences between the two continue to be submerged beneath that powerfully false construct.  Kimberley helped greatly in making clear those differences as she described the the suppressed realities of both men and the politics they represent.

The full DJ Sese The L’s Coming mixtape we aired:

*My comments read during the show regarding the inauguration and Obama’s use of King’s and Lincoln’s bibles that were sent out as part of a press release for the Institute for Public Accuracy can be found HERE and are also re-printed below:

Associate professor of journalism and mass communication at Morgan State University and author of I MiX What I Like: A MiXtape Manifesto, Ball said today: “Not even the Hollywood distortions of Lincoln and Django out-perform the political myths being planned for this week’s inauguration. One hundred and fifty years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years after the March on Washington, Barack Obama will use both the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of a ceremony that is as much about obscuring or preventing progressive change as were the real politics of Lincoln and those falsely ascribed to King. It is as doubtful that Lincoln meant by colonization [of blacks back to Africa] the eventual return of Africans to sit in this country’s highest offices as it is that King meant to fight for an equality that would allow black people the same right to perform drone strikes. Lincoln and King represent important dialectical, hostile and very unequal political opposites. Obama’s symbolic merging of the two in fact works to impose a false unity to what each represented and disrespectfully aligns King with a political tradition he was killed trying to eradicate.”