CNN gets the distinction this year of being the newsroom that ran what is likely the nastiest op-ed written in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.
The thrust of CNN contributor Peniel Joseph’s op-ed, “What MLK might say to Donald Trump,” is this: Everything that the Civil Rights movement achieved is in danger of being undone by President-elect Trump.
Proof?
Trump has criticized Civil Rights hero and Georgia congressman John Lewis. Also, Trump regularly cites Chicago’s infamous violence, which is apparently a very racist thing to do.
Lewis calls the president-elect illegitimate and refuses to attend the inauguration. Trump has fired back at the congressman by accusing Lewis of overseeing a poorly run and corrupt district.
For Joseph, Trump’s criticism equals a “racially charged smearing.”
The president-elect’s “assaults” on Lewis, Joseph explained, could potentially diminish “our nation’s moral stature on race matters at the precise moment we need it most.”
Assaults? Trump’s criticisms of Lewis are non-sequiturs, and have nothing to do with the discussion about whether congressmen should attend the inauguration, but “assaults” seems like a silly dive into hyperbole.
There’s more.
Joseph continued, writing, “That [Trump] engaged in this latest Twitter war a few days before the King holiday is no accident.”
What is he suggesting? That the Trump/Lewis feud is part of a larger, kinda-sorta’ racist plot by Trump to dishonor Dr. King?
“Throughout perhaps the most racially divisive presidential election campaign in history Trump used terms like ‘Chicago’ to signal his open disdain for black America. His comments on ‘inner cities’ revealed a man stuck in a time warp, a place where African Americans all reside in seething urban ghettoes whose potential for violence threatens to wreak havoc on law-abiding white citizens,” the columnist added.
Oh?
After also accusing Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., of posing a serious threat to the gains made by the Civil Rights movement, the CNN column concludes on these final notes:
“2017 promises to offer a racial landscape at the federal level that echoes aspects of King’s era more than our recent past, where President Obama’s rise gave way to grand expectations that the nation had finally turned the corner on race,” Jospeh wrote.
He added that, “every president since [Kennedy], despite disagreements over how best to achieve racial equality,” has accepted the idea of a larger and more inclusive democracy as an article of faith — “until now.”
“The power of King’s message in these times is reminding the world that justice is what love looks like in public, even when new leaders emerge willfully bent on forgetting,” it ends.
Oh boy.
