On MLK Yesterday

Tim Wise, at Univ of Michigan:

The Baldwin quote (Jet Magazine, 1965):

People who imagine that history flatters them - as it does indeed, since they wrote it - are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin, and they become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is where it appears to me most white Americans find themselves - impaled. They are dimly, or perhaps vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie. But they do not know how to be released from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.

If we want the world to be a better place, the first thing we have to do is to stop insisting that it can't be.