WORDS FOR THE WEEK: 1/20/2025
Honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The following is an except from the book entitled, America Will Be!, Conversations on Hope, Freedom, and Democracy, by Rev. Dr. Vincent Harding and Dr. Daisaku Ikeda.
In this section, they are discussing Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s perspective on the impact of white supremacy on all Americans.
Harding: “King maintained the belief that the idea and practice of white supremacy was harmful to black people, as well as everyone else – including white people, especially white children. Therefore, King thought that we must devote ourselves to loving white people and to working to create a more ‘perfect union,’ and that this required overcoming white supremacy.
Partly through the efforts of white allies doing anti-racism work in the white community, we are now discovering how the teaching of white supremacy gives white people a completely false sense of reality and damages them deeply, beginning in childhood.
King was always expanding and moving forward with his work, not just for the sake of black people, but to heal society. What would a healed America be like?…
Of course, laws are important, but building a healed society involves much more than enacting a law.”
Ikeda: “The root of the English word heal originally included the meanings ‘totality’ and ‘ completeness,’ and the word health has the same root. In this sense, a healed society would be a society that has discovered its sense of wholeness and has achieved equality for every person. This would be a society in which the social system and its laws serve the people. It would be a society in which people respect one another and live with dignity and equality. They would share a deep trust in one another, come to one another’s aid, and grow and learn from one another…”