This Twitter thread that starts with a Tweet from Ben Shapiro really exemplifies the ignorance about King that is so common and the much more sophisticated truth.

In a different tweet, Shapiro tries to say that MLK Jr “the symbol” and “the man” should be separated. By symbol, Shapiro means simplistic racial equity with no acknowledgement for systemic racism. A pleasantly diluted message that is comfortable to conservatives. By the man, he means the holistic approach Dr. King actually took towards racial injustice. This is nothing more than another white person attempting to appropriate the blandest version of a civil rights hero so they don’t have to examine the faults of US society and the role that white people continue to play in its shortcomings.

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

• Lenin