Yeah, this is a huge (purposeful) revision of the history of change and progress. Disruption is an integral part of advocating for change, sometimes violent sometimes not. If you can be ignored, you will be.
But when the dust settles, the people in power say "we're really doing this because of all of the kind, non-disruptive people. In fact, this would have happened faster without all of those pesky disruptive protests." And the news and the history books and the biopics all start to reflect that narrative until people have forgotten the relationship between disruption and change.
It's genius, really. They had a perfect narrative of MLK and the "peaceful protest wing" being the good guys and Malcom X and his "radical violent Black supremacy wing" as the bad guys. Very easy for kids to understand, and now the kids who learned those lessons are adults who think you get what you want from our owners by asking nicely. Any protest that isn't a completely useless clever sign-making competition on a sidewalk is illegitimate and the grown-up liberals have to distance themselves from it.
I seriously think the strategy of posthumously de-fanging MLK and separating him from the broader Black Liberation movement has almost single-handedly allowed the rise of fascism and the erosion of labor and civil rights and living standards. Not to mention the fact that they killed all of the leaders of the various movements, so they're not exactly around to give us their thoughts today.
The irony is that, by the abrupt end of their lives, X, who had returned from Mecca, was leaning more toward who King Jr. was at the beginning of his activism, very inspired by Gandhi. In contrast, King Jr., fed up with being stalled, started to think more like X when the latter began his liberation work.
Even the statement DISRUPT has been co-opted by capitalists as a synonym for innovation or pioneering. To remove the vocabulary association from non-violent acts of liberation.
For example, economic boycotts like the Black community at large is doing against Target are pure disruption for Target's policy choices.
That last part is interesting, I hadnt considered that before but youre totally right. Disruption in the 2020s usually means labor law violations being committed by "start-ups" or other tech companies
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz Jul 28 '26
Yeah, this is a huge (purposeful) revision of the history of change and progress. Disruption is an integral part of advocating for change, sometimes violent sometimes not. If you can be ignored, you will be.
But when the dust settles, the people in power say "we're really doing this because of all of the kind, non-disruptive people. In fact, this would have happened faster without all of those pesky disruptive protests." And the news and the history books and the biopics all start to reflect that narrative until people have forgotten the relationship between disruption and change.