by NICKY REID
Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream, and it sounded pretty fucking sweet on the radio. Even a bitter post-everything anarchist like me gets a little choked up listening to the good doctor’s Sermon on the Mount at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Martin had a dream about America living up to its word and redeeming itself after centuries of barbarism by opening its doors and letting everybody in. A dream in which his own children wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and all Americans would work together, play together, struggle together, go to jail together. A dream about inclusion that invited everyone to take part in the American Dream.
You could actually argue that America has kind of achieved this goal at least on the surface. In fact, America seems to have made Martin Luther King a major part of their whole sales pitch and the entire month of February is pretty much devoted to making this argument in the form of Black History Month. For 28 days a year, we are all reminded by a host of corporate sponsors that after just three civil rights acts and a few dead heroes America has become a place with Black celebrities, Black billionaires, Black CEOs, senators, generals and Supreme Court judges. We’ve even had a Black president. In what other indispensable empire could such things be possible?
If this all sounds a little too good to be true, then join the club and get ready to sit through a very short month of appalled guilt trips delivered by straight white dudes in dashikis. To be perfectly clear, I myself am what you might call a honky. In fact, I’m what many would likely refer to as a redneck. But I’m also a neurodivergent transwoman in the thick of Trump Country and I know when I’m being sold a bill of goods. The harsh reality that only a handful of politically incorrect people of color seem to even be willing to touch is that Martin’s dream, at least the version sold at Walmart for 9.95, is tragically skin deep and quite nightmarish just beneath the surface.
In 1968, LBJ ordered a study to be done on racial disparity in America after Dr. King’s assassination nearly triggered a nationwide revolution across the country’s ghettos. The result was the Kerner Commission and what this commission found was a nation wracked by generations of institutional apartheid and a Black community in particular struggling to survive under third world conditions in the wealthiest nation on earth. The most tragic fact made clear by the Kerner Commission however didn’t actually surface until half a century after it was published.
In 2025, some 57 years after LBJ passed this nation’s last civil rights act while the ghettoes were still burning, study after study shows that racial inequality in this country is virtually unchanged from the one in the yellowed pages of the Kerner Commission and in some places, it has actually gotten worse. The earnings gap remains the same, the wealth gap remains the same, the disparity between Black and white homeownership remains the same, and four generations after desegregation, America’s cities are more segregated than ever before.
“But how could this be…?” a frantic white woman cries out in the distance, “We killed Jim Crow!” Perhaps, but the War on Drugs brought him back by turning America’s prison system into the most effective tool for white supremacy that the world has ever seen. In 1968, the American prison population was 188,000. Today, it stands at just over two million with another three million people living under some form of judicial supervision which renders convicted felons bereft of nearly every right guaranteed them by the civil rights acts of the 1960s, including the right to vote.
This population is made up overwhelmingly of people of color convicted of non-violent drug offenses and this isn’t just some cruel coincidence. It was a deliberate conspiracy conjured up by failed segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond who used the manufactured panic over America’s poverty driven drug habits to turn the federal government they once opposed in the name of state’s rights into the kind of white power behemoth that would make the Klan downright irrelevant.
But it wasn’t cross-burning goons in white hoods who drove the final nail in this coffin, it was LBJ’s Democrats. Men like former President Joe Biden, who Thurmond carefully groomed to take his place as hangman of the Senate Judiciary Committe, and former President Bill Clinton who together passed the largest crime bill in American history in 1994. A legal monstrosity that more than doubled the prison population within a decade with 60 new death penalties, 90 enhanced penalties, 100,000 new cops, and 125,000 new state prison cells. As late as 2007, then Senator Joe Biden described this bill as his proudest achievement. A year later he would serve as Vice President to America’s first Black Commander in Chief.
Yes, a handful of the Black bourgeoisie like President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris have reached the pinnacle of American power, but they have only done so by taking part in the violence as token members of a police state still defined by white supremacy.
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