The World House

One matter that would have been worth pursuing is how King, shortly before his own assassination, was echoing Malcolm in his speeches and writing, linking racism to economic subordination and calling for a Poor People’s Campaign and a guaranteed income, with the goal of initiating a “radical restructuring of American society.” King also linked black freedom at home to the end of Western hegemony abroad by opposing cold war interventions in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere in the third world…. By the end of their lives, neither King nor Malcolm was a conventional reformer; rather, each had come to view race in the United States through both class structure and the global legacies of empire. [King declares in the chapter “The World House,” in Where Do We Go from Here? (1968), that] “Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.”

Aziz Rana

Axé.


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