Rania Masri, NCEJN Co-Director, gave this speech on Monday, January 19, 2026 at the annual MLK March & Rally at the Thomas Foreman Park in Greenville, organized by Coalition Against Racism (CAR).
MLK Day. What does that mean when the State – in this case the Federal Government, since 1986 – grants a holiday (not on his birthday, mind you) for us to ‘honor his life and legacy’?
What legacy does the State want us to honor?
MLK day is also the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer and improve their communities.
So to honor Dr. King, we are told to volunteer.
This framing implies that the pain our communities are experiencing is the result of our own individual failure to build community — rather than the result of deliberate federal and state policies.
Are we to believe that the Founding Fathers knew best?
That the economic and political system this country is built upon is fundamentally sound?
That any harm produced by policy is merely a mistake, not a feature?
That poverty is an individual choice — a failure to “pull oneself up by the bootstraps”?
And that we influence power by voting every two to four years between the red team and the blue team, both funded by the same corporate lobbyists?
The harms we endure are not accidental.
They are not anomalies.
They are the direct consequence of the system itself.
Dr King understood this. By 1967, he felt morally charged to expand his political critique beyond domestic civil rights to address the structural violence of U.S. imperialism.
In his April 4, 1967, address at Riverside Church, King argued that the Vietnam War was not an anomaly, but a symptom of a broader system rooted in militarism, racism, and economic exploitation — what he called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism”.
He highlighted the theoretical and practical interconnection of these elements.
He located U.S. power within a global racial-capitalist order.
Dr King condemned U.S. imperialism while arguing that it would bring imperial blowback: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home” he said.
The violence we are enduring today is neither an anomaly nor separate from US empire itself.
The murder of Renee Good on January 7th was not an anomaly.
It is to be expected from ICE thugs who are kidnapping up to 1,000 people a day!
And the fact that we learned of the killing of a white mother before we learned of the killing of a Black father — Keith Porter Jr., killed days earlier on New Year’s Eve by ICE — is also not an anomaly.
At least 32 people have died in ICE custody.
At least six people have been killed by ICE.
There have been at least 22 known instances where ICE agents have shot at individuals.
This violence is expected.
ICE agents – dressed in military gear and behaving with no regard to state or federal law, or the US constitution – are all too reminiscent of the US police force, which itself can be traced back to the Slave Patrol created in the early 1700s in the Carolinas.
Last year in the United States, one person was killed by police every 7.5 hours.
These connections are not coincidental.
They are systemic.
And they are tied directly to U.S. foreign policy.
We also see ‘the bombs exploding at home’ in the language used in the language to justify this violence. “We use this language of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and freedom and democracy at the barrel of a gun,” wrote journalist and US military veteran Laura Jedeed who tested ICE recruitment. “We did this overseas, and it’s come home in every conceivable way.”
We see those ‘bombs exploding at home’ in the budget itself. – what is prioritized and what is considered disposable.
The US military budget is now one trillion dollars, with bi-partisan support. Trump wants to increase it to $1.5 trillion. Just ten days of the annual defense spending would cover the $30 billion of expired Obamacare subsidies.
Meanwhile, the US War machine is quite literally destroying the planet – And destroying the land, air, and water here in the US. The Department of War acknowledges that it dumps 28 million pounds of toxic waste into the environment annually, at sites all around the US! This, in a country in which pollution is the #1 cause of death.
And still, the bombs continue to explode abroad.
This year, the US invaded a sovereign country, kidnapped its elected President, and paraded him and his wife in the farce of the US courts – after imposing deadly unilateral sanctions on the people of Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Trump, the CIA and the Israeli Mossad openly speak about how they are orchestrating and arming protests in Iran to overthrow the government, to install a Zionist puppet, to dismantle the Palestinian resistance, to destroy and dismember Iran so it poses no resistance to Western Zionist barbarism.
Sanctions imposed by the US – against Venezuela and Iran – are Illegal under international law. They are designed to strangle local economies, create mass misery, and destroy people’s lives – to advance US regime-change objectives.
The Lancet reported last year that economic sanctions imposed by the US or the EU have caused 564,258 deaths from 1971 to 2021 – five times the annual number of battle-related deaths.
Economic sanctions kill more than 11,000 people every year — quietly, bureaucratically, and by design.
And meanwhile, in Congress, another $3.3 billion in taxpayer funds was allocated to fund weapons to Israel.
All while the genocide continues.
Yes, the killing of Palestinians continues.
At least 680,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. And they continue to die every day. Through direct Israeli bombs and killing. Through denial of food. Through hypothermia.
The so-called ceasefire has brought only one thing: the return of the Israeli Prisoners of War. Nothing else has changed for Palestinians in Gaza. Since this so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed more than 460 Palestinians and injured more than 1,200.
Israel continues to restrict food, medical aid, and shelter materials from entering Gaza, where 2.2 million people face acute humanitarian crisis in freezing conditions — barely shielded by flimsy tents. Israel continues to effectively occupy the entire territory.
With the bipartisan blessing from the US.
With the financial support of the US – more than $21 billion spent on the genocide by the US since October 2023!
The genocide in Palestine, the invasion and regime change in Venezuela, the killings by ICE, and the pollution — are all interconnected by the same pathology for violence, by the same training forces, by the same tax dollars, and by the same philosophy of disposability and racism.
If the politicians can get away with genocide, then genocide will become the model of all their actions.
No anomalies here.
Nothing accidental either.
All systemic.
And our response must be systemic as well.
And it cannot arise from the Blue or Red Teams.
It cannot arise from isolationist issue-oriented resistance on our part.
Our resistance must be systemic, must be intersectional, and it must center our collective liberation, centering Palestine.
Rejecting imperialism.
Rejecting capitalism.
Rejecting militarism.
And rejecting defeatism.
Building a new world.
That is how we honor MLK.
