Hello everyone! I hope the holidays treated you well and that you are on track with your New Year's Resolutions!
Today is Martin Luther King Day, and I have released the latest episode of JZ and the Amazing Technicolor Podcast a day early in honor of him. You can find it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and in the next couple of days it will be available on Google Podcasts. There has started to be a delay when uploading to that platform I hope to get resolved by the next episode. It is also available on the official podcast host page, right here.
Anyway...
Martin Luther King is a legend in the United States, whether you are black or white. His message and leadership style are enough to inspire anyone. As a white American, I was raised learning about him in a sort of context of how he helped "them" find more equality, but rarely was there a sense in which what he said was directed at me. At least apart from the random out-of-context quote here and there about how we needed to help King fulfill his dream by being colorblind.
As I got older, though, and as I spent more time around people who were not white like me, I came to see that there is a lot of what he said that wasn't directed at the Black community at all. A lot that he said was meant for me, as a white man. One of those statements, and it is the one that I use today as the starting point for the podcast, is this one, from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech,
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
Truth always has the final word. Truth always wins, and it always wins without firing a single shot. Truth just is. As a white man, this means acknowledging that I likely have ancestors who were on the wrong side of the slavery and Civil Rights debate. It means acknowledging where I might have been influenced by a biased perspective on King and the Black community as a whole. I can't change what I may have been raised here, but I can change how I respond to and interact with the truth of how POC are treated in the United States, even to this day.
Give today's episode a listen, and I will see you guys next week.
https://redcircle.com/shows/61272438-4d3a-4d05-99ba-03a6992e90d4