Image by Joshua J. Cotten.

Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream, and it sounded pretty fucking sweet on the radio. Even a bitter post-everything anarchist like me gets a little choked up listening to the good doctor’s Sermon on the Mount at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Martin had a dream about America living up to its word and redeeming itself after centuries of barbarism by opening its doors and letting everybody in. A dream in which his own children wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and all Americans would work together, play together, struggle together, go to jail together. A dream about inclusion that invited everyone to take part in the American Dream.

You could actually argue that America has kind of achieved this goal at least on the surface. In fact, America seems to have made Martin Luther King a major part of their whole sales pitch and the entire month of February is pretty much devoted to making this argument in the form of Black History Month. For 28 days a year, we are all reminded by a host of corporate sponsors that after just three civil rights acts and a few dead heroes America has become a place with Black celebrities, Black billionaires, Black CEOs, senators, generals and Supreme Court judges. We’ve even had a Black president. In what other indispensable empire could such things be possible?

If this all sounds a little too good to be true, then join the club and get ready to sit through a very short month of appalled guilt trips delivered by straight white dudes in dashikis. To be perfectly clear, I myself am what you might call a honky. In fact, I’m what many would likely refer to as a redneck. But I’m also a neurodivergent transwoman in the thick of Trump Country and I know when I’m being sold a bill of goods. The harsh reality that only a handful of politically incorrect people of color seem to even be willing to touch is that Martin’s dream, at least the version sold at Walmart for 9.95, is tragically skin deep and quite nightmarish just beneath the surface.

In 1968, LBJ ordered a study to be done on racial disparity in America after Dr. King’s assassination nearly triggered a nationwide revolution across the country’s ghettos. The result was the Kerner Commission and what this commission found was a nation wracked by generations of institutional apartheid and a Black community in particular struggling to survive under third world conditions in the wealthiest nation on earth. The most tragic fact made clear by the Kerner Commission however didn’t actually surface until half a century after it was published.

In 2025, some 57 years after LBJ passed this nation’s last civil rights act while the ghettoes were still burning, study after study shows that racial inequality in this country is........

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