Once at BYUI in the mid-2000s, at the start of yet another freezing Winter trimester, I checked the calendar at my on-campus job to see when the next 3-day weekend would be, so that I could get out of dodge for a couple days. I furrowed my brow as I scanned through January: “Where is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day?” I finally asked, “And what the heck is ‘Human Rights Day?'”

As I swiftly learned from my native Idahoan classmates, the Idaho state legislature only opted to finally, belatedly adopt MLK Day^[1]which had been made a Federal holiday clear back in 1983 by Ronald Reagan, mind you by renaming it “Martin Luther King, Jr. – Human Rights Day” as a compromise–and which got promptly shortened to simply “Human Rights Day” on all official state calendars.^[2]And you Utahans, don’t you dare get all high and mighty with Idaho here: the Beehive state didn’t adopt MLK Day till 2000, either. And before you Arizonans get all high and mighty as … Continue reading The stated rationale, they explained to me, was that there were way more people than just Martin Luther King, Jr. who were involved in the Civil Rights struggle, all of whom deserved to be honored as well–which, in a vacuum, is a salient point, but Idaho is not a vacuum.

Idaho, remember, is home to the headquarters of the Aryan Nations; the birthplace of Ezra Taft Benson, who wrote an entire book in 1968^[3]An Enemy Hath Done This that claimed the entire Civil Rights movement was a communist plot to overthrow America; and is rabidly anti-Affirmative Action despite being 91% white (it’s the sort of state where people sport the “Equal Rights Does Not Mean Special Rights” bumper sticker—the standard dog-whistle of people who don’t want to grant equal rights, either). As I protested to my Idaho acquaintances, the phrase “Human Rights Day” does nothing to recall the long, wretched history of racial oppression in this country–slavery, segregation, lynchings, police brutality, criminal injustice, and other sins–quite like the name of “Martin Luther King, Jr.” does.

Using generic language to white-wash an atrocious history is of course a standard move in political speak. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language:”

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

The same principles apply here: the name “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day” invokes very specific imagery–of police beatings, fire-hoses, whites-only signs, backs-of-buses, white-supremacist violence, and a murderous gunshot in Memphis, Tennessee–that the antiseptic “Human Rights Day” assuredly does not. Hence why I was immediately suspicious of the term.

I had an ever-so-slight change of heart, however, when I started teaching MLK’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in 2010 at SLCC and LDSBC, and decided it would be useful to demonstrate for my students how to adapt a message for a different audience. So, in the interests of balance, I added Malcolm X’s 1964 address “The Ballot or the Bullet” to the readings-list.

It’s a deeply influential speech; it is in fact ground zero for where the term “African-American” at last displaces “Negro” within American vernacular. But Malcolm X didn’t just invent the phrase for branding purposes; he coins the term to do two things: 1) Establish that black people are Africans, that is, a people with a rich and diverse continental history, culture, personhood, and most importantly, humanity; and 2) establish that black people are also Americans, already possessed of certain inalienable rights that are theirs to claim, to insist upon, and not meekly beg for. As Malcolm himself had earlier explained in the speech:

“Well, I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn’t need any legislation; you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don’t have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.”

When one considers that the Polish were probably the one white ethnic group that was treated more abominably than any other upon first white group upon first arrival to America^[4]Read, for example, Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” from A Good Man Is Hard To Find–worse than the Italians, worse than the Germans, even worse than the Irish^[5]Who were called “white negroes” when they first arrived, a slur that is racist on at least two levels.–and consider that Congress still never had to pass laws to guarantee any of them voting rights, well, Malcolm X becomes pretty hard to argue with.

His diatribe, however, was not merely an impassioned cri de coeur, but prelude to his proposal to adopt the term “African-American” instead, explaining:

“Right now, in this country, if you and I, 22 million African-Americans—that’s what we are—Africans who are in America. You’re nothing but Africans. Nothing but Africans. In fact, you’d get farther calling yourself African instead of Negro. Africans don’t catch hell. You’re the only one catching hell. They don’t have to pass civil-rights bills for Africans. An African can go anywhere he wants right now. All you’ve got to do is tie your head up. That’s right, go anywhere you want. Just stop being a Negro. Change your name to Hoogagagooba. That’ll show you how silly the white man is. You’re dealing with a silly man. A friend of mine who’s very dark put a turban on his head and went into a restaurant in Atlanta before they called themselves desegregated. He went into a white restaurant, he sat down, they served him, and he said, ‘What would happen if a Negro came in here?’ And there he’s sitting, black as night, but because he had his head wrapped up the waitress looked back at him and says, ‘Why, there wouldn’t no n*gger dare come in here.'”

If you ever listen to the speech (the whole thing’s available on YouTube), you’ll note he’s telling this story for laughs as much as anything, and the crowd responds uproariously. That’s not to say he wasn’t serious; jokes are often the most serious statements we make. And Malcolm X was dead serious when he argued that, by adopting the term “African-American,” black people in America could finally force their oppressors to treat them like human beings–largely because they would begin to treat themselves like human beings.

As noted earlier, “The Ballot or the Bullet” initiates the sea-change in U.S. vernacular wherein we shift from “Negro” to “African-American” as the socially acceptable term for black people. One wonders what other cultural shifts he could’ve accomplished if he hadn’t been assassinated a year later; because in that same speech, he also argues that we should stop calling it the Civil Rights movement, and instead re-label it the Human Rights movement:

“When we begin to get in this area, we need new friends, we need new allies. We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level — to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. And as long as it’s civil rights, this comes under the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.

“But the United Nations has what’s known as the charter of human rights; it has a committee that deals in human rights. You may wonder why all of the atrocities that have been committed in Africa and in Hungary and in Asia, and in Latin America are brought before the UN, and the Negro problem is never brought before the UN. This is part of the conspiracy. This old, tricky blue eyed liberal who is supposed to be your and my friend, supposed to be in our corner, supposed to be subsidizing our struggle, and supposed to be acting in the capacity of an adviser, never tells you anything about human rights. They keep you wrapped up in civil rights. And you spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor.

“When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights. Civil rights keeps you under his restrictions, under his jurisdiction. Civil rights keeps you in his pocket. Civil rights means you’re asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time any one violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court.”

For Malcolm X, rebranding the movement as “The Human Rights struggle” expands it beyond the borders of the United States (where black people are hopelessly outnumbered) in order to bring in allies from all across the world–Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc.–to exert pressure on the United States to finally pass social justice legislation.

And this is all individually hilarious to me, because if there’s one thing Idahoans overall despise even more than affirmative action, it’s any sort of globalism or internationalism. These are the same voters and politicians, after all, who have for decades called for defunding the U.N., who advocate for cutting off all foreign aide, who were entirely sincere in insisting that the civil rights movement was a communist plot. But in renaming “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day” as “Human Rights Day,” they have unwittingly endorsed it as “Malcolm X Day” in its stead.

So now, every time the third Monday of January rolls around, I smile and imagine that in Idaho, “Human Rights Day” is observed by throwing a Molotov cocktail at a line of cops, prosecuting the US before the UN, and fighting “by any means necessary” to overthrow the white power structure! This is surely not what the Idaho state legislature had in mind! Doesn’t matter; they should’ve read their Malcolm X before making ignorant fools of themselves.