Martin Luther King Jr. has a legacy in America. A sneaker shows we’ve lost the plot.

What did you learn about in school?

A child: Martin Luther King Jr.

What did he do?

He died for our sins.

Lord knows what year the clip of that little white girl describing her day in the classroom went viral. But never in my life have I felt more like we’re all living in a simulation as I did that day.

It was reminder of a glorious coming together of the American education system, the ever-growing societal creep of religion into a world in which the separation of church and state are allegedly still a thing constitutionally. The video is so efficiently on point and well-timed that one might think it was made with AI.

Following the release of LeBron James’ “Honor The King” sneakers — a shoe whose main feature is a colorway designed to mimic the teal pillars and doorways of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee — Nike might want to blame this wildly overcooked-and-on-the-nose idea on a machine that uses an algorithm for a brain.

We have collectively lost the plot when it comes to remembering what the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. are in the United States of America. Period, full stop. For those of you who need the bite-size “explain it to me like I’m 5” analysis: Commemorating the life of a person by making an artistic display that harkens back to the place they were killed is not appropriate. In fact, it’s gross.

More specifically, it cuts at the wound that no matter how much healing we try to do collectively as a people, someone will reopen in the name of capitalism. A feeling best expressed in the legendary Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Are Watching God, “if you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

If you need me to draw this line for you directly, hold my hand. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on a balcony at the Lorraine Hotel in 1968. The person who murdered him, James Earl Ray, a segregationist, was an escaped convict. The Lorraine Motel was not just some random place. Prior to its canonization into American history, it was the go-to spot for Black professionals in segregated Memphis. It’s now a heritage site where people get to learn about this. The reverend was there to protest the mistreatment of sanitation workers.

In today’s America, people are being kidnapped from job sites and thrown into concentration camps left and right. King would have actively been supporting those frontlines to prevent that from happening, too, presumably. Not telling people how to protest, something we frequently hear these days when condescending morons say outlandish stuff like “MLK wouldn’t have done it this way.”

This sneaker, which Nike says in part celebrates the night James scored 51 points against the Memphis Grizzlies (whoopty doo), is a slap in the face from a commercial and foundational standpoint to the obvious causes of MLK. I refuse to believe that African Americans in any level of executive decision-making looked at this and said, “It’s a go.”

Even if LeBron James had enough power to stop this, which it’s easy to assume and I don’t know that he could have, you’d like to think that it wouldn’t even need to go that high up the flagpole for someone to say, “Stop. This is absurd.” For a guy who seems to read Page 1 of every book when he’s photographed, one would think he might be more educated on the matter.

Point is: Not much has changed, so perhaps celebrating the place where King was murdered in cold blood is out of pocket.

We hold concerts, parades, and pretty much every marketing team in the country finds a way to roll out their obligatory King tributes. This came to a zenith in the 2000s/2010s, when club culture was still a thing, and you’d get photoshopped images of King in a durag or whatever, to celebrate the three-day weekend. Those were funny, as they were obviously poking fun at the fact that, you know, maybe these parties wouldn’t exist without the man. And, were he still here, hell, he might in the club, too.

Of course, nothing will top Florida State University going full “we have no idea what we’re doing.” But again, that call didn’t feel like it was coming from inside the house, just people doing too much to be performative allies.

The holiday weekend wouldn’t exist without various people trying to make his birthday a national day. James Brown and Al Sharpton famously lobbied Richard Nixon to make it so. Ronald Reagan, the sitting president when the bill came up, didn’t want to do it but finally did in 1983. Hell, Arizona — the state outside of the confederacy with the most confederate statues — lost the opportunity to host a Super Bowl because it refused to recognize the holiday.

It’s one thing to whitewash history and act like Martin Luther King was some kumbaya type of character in his day that everyone celebrated. The man was looked at and considered a radical. We live in a world where the very government agency that King accused of trying to get him to kill himself has the gall to celebrate his birthday publicly. What’s next, ICE agents gunning people down in Minneapolis while rocking the “Honor The King” 23’s? Or, maybe Lincoln should come out with a new X-100 convertible in the JFK ’63 colorway.

To be clear, there are plenty ways to do this without stepping in it. The WNBA’s Atlanta Dream are named after the legendary speech King gave in the District of Columbia on Aug. 28, 1963. The NBA’s Hawks have worn their MLK jerseys with a far more appropriate colorway of black and gold to represent his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha.

Meaning, it’s not necessarily just the capitalistic element of this equation that’s most concerning regarding LeBron’s shoes. With the extreme rise in anti-intellectualism in this country, people simply don’t care or want to know why small things like this are connected to how easily our people can be erased from the map. Folks don’t even feel bad because the propagandic powers of society will, again, make it seem like our lives are just set up to end so other people can enjoy them. There’s a reason why in the hip-hop world there’s a belief that dead rappers make more money.

Fred Hampton, a man who was killed at the age of 21 as one of the leaders of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1969, once said: “If you don’t fight, then you don’t deserve to win. If you don’t move on these fascists, then you’re crazy. We say it’s no longer a question of violence or non-violence. We say it’s a question of resistance to fascism or non-existence within fascism.”

This is your reminder that the Black Panther Party is now active in Minneapolis for the purposes of community protection. Once again, not much has changed. And yes, Hampton was assassinated by the FBI. This has all happened in the lifetimes of many people who definitely still walk the earth among us. Some of them are major decision-makers in life. If Hampton and King were still alive, who knows what this country looks like.

As for Nike, there is a connection to King that makes this particularly heartbreaking. George Raveling is in both the Naismith and college basketball halls of fame. A longtime head coach of USC basketball (three-time PAC-12 Coach of the Year, where he was also the first brotha to head coach in the conference), he was also an assistant in the Olympics. Also, as global sports marketing director of Nike, his connections with the company dated back to well before that when he was a part of the team that made Air Jordan a brand name in America.

Why does that matter? Because when Raveling, a D.C. native, was in college at Villanova — when he found himself on summer detail doing security for Dr. King at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — he had the gumption to do something many wouldn’t. He asked Dr. King for the copy of the speech he used that day, and the reverend gave it to him. Raveling kept it and donated it to his alma mater, which now has it on long-term lease at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

I refuse to believe that Raveling, a man who protected and knew Dr. King, would have been cool with the Air Assassination 23’s on an NBA court. We lost George in September at age 88. He was a kind man who you’d see around Los Angeles quite a bit in his later years. Thankfully, he got to live a full life.

So, when you hear people crassly referring to how they “honor” a man who was a revolutionary with bulls— messages of kindness and civil disobedience just so people can selfishly attach themselves to the legacy of Dr. King? The messages to be more like Martin ring hollow in every Black person with a heart and soul. Why? Because they killed him, too.

That’s a shameful thing to celebrate.

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