Bangladesh, Jan. 22 -- To speak seriously of Martin Luther King Jr. today is already to enter into conflict with the form in which he is publicly remembered. King survives as a moral icon precisely because his thought has been stripped of its antagonism. He is invoked as a patron saint of patience and civility, a figure used to discipline protest and reconcile injustice with order. In this sanitized form, King functions as an ideological device: proof that freedom can be achieved without structural rupture, redistribution, or confrontation with power.

This King is a fabrication. The question, then, is not how King should be honored, but why his most radical commitments have become structurally unreadable within liberal memory.

The histo...