Earlier today, as the 50th anniversary March on Washington got underway, writer David Sirota tweeted the following:
This is a premise that Sirota has indulged frequently in recent months — that his own criticism of Obama’s foreign policy is in the tradition of Martin Luther King, and that Obama’s defenders are the modern-day equivalent of those who attacked King for speaking out against the War in Vietnam.
Many have objected to this tweet, and to those that followed. Goldie Taylor of MSNBC suggested that Sirota was applying a flawed “cultural lens” to the analogy, while Imani Gandy of RH Reality Check and This Week In Blackness suggested that describing King’s criticism as simply “slamming LBJ” misrepresented the nature of King’s critique.
Taylor and Gandy are right. While King was fiercely critical of US government
