Many young black comics can’t see or understand the value of the work Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did. It’s so far removed from their lives. Lives that are not only filled with the distractions of how many twitter followers they have, but they have to spend so much time thinking up unfunny jokes about how “black people do this and white people do that”. When they make jokes about King or about how they would have “handled” Jim Crow, it’s obvious they have no idea what they are talking about, but that’s not the most offensive part.
The most offensive part is the lack of context. The idea that a young black person can get on stage and pontificate the most intimate and uncensored thoughts about race, sex, and politics in their heads would have been a difficult concept for African Americans 60 years ago. That they do it in front of an integrated mixed-sex audience, would have been an impossible concept to understand. To say that the civil rights movement was and is irrelevant today because you “do not see the value of it” means only one thing: It means that you are blind.
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