Dr. King and the Furlough - Attacks on the Dream

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day (abbreviated MLK Day). Its also day 30 of the latest government “shutdown.” Contemplating each day requires contemplating both.  And sadly, this year we seem to be even farther from Dr. King’s vision and call to a higher place.

The furlough is impacting communities nationwide and has spread its pernicious damage well beyond the 450,000 or so federal civil servants who have now worked a month without pay.  Hundreds of thousands of federal contractors – who work beside us daily to deliver federal services to our fellow citizens – remain furloughed as well, and they will not be back paid for time lost. Their economic straits will get worse more quickly and honestly I don’t expect to see many of their faces when we do return to work.  Many small businesses are also suffering – dry cleaners, restaurants, office suppliers, and a thousand thousand others who rely on federal spending to make their money are now either shuttered or running on a shoestring.  They too will not be compensated.

Lost in those grim statistics is the number of immigrants and people of color whose lives are upended by this. People of color make up 36.7% of the federal workforce, and many of them are employed by the agencies currently shuttered.  Contractors too are significant employers of people of color, most notably in the building maintenance, food service, custodial, and childcare facility contracts.  Roughly 25% of the workforce of the Department of Homeland Security are minorities, which means people of color working to secure our border are seeing their livelihoods impacted in the President’s fight over the wall.

Elsewhere communities of color are being impacted by the closure of HUD; by the decrease in food safety inspections, and by the inability of the IRS (so far) to issue tax refunds.  Thus this shut down isn’t just about shafting fed to try and force Democrats to do something most American don’t want; nor is it winning support for Republicans (only 29% of respondents in the survey linked to the Examiner article say Democrats are to blame).  Rather, this latest political intrusion into good government is also impacting communities of color in growing and pernicious ways.

So what would King say in response?

There are few direct quotes in his many speeches and writings about government directly, except that he notes on many occasions that local governments seek to preserve a racist status quo in the US. He frequently takes whites to task for their assertions of moderation and ill timing of the Civil Rights movement, and this leads me to wonder if he would rebuke those who call for civil servants to just back up and bear it all.  Mostly though, I believe he would be on the forefront of those who remind us this shut down is not about border security, but another battle in the long war to bring true justice to those people of color who labor to make their nation a better place by working in the government system, even as that government continues to be used against them.