Looking Back at MLK Day 2015

As we near Martin Luther King Jr Day and the yearly symposium that the university plans in his honor, I believe it would be beneficial to look back at last year’s and at one particular event. I attended this event and it was perhaps one of the hardest things for me to sit through, and not in a good way. This event was Erik Wahl’s Embracing the Art of Change.

When I first read the seminar planned for the 2015 symposium, I was excited to possibly attend many of them. In particular, I was most interested in an event discussing queerness in our prison system and Erik Wahl’s event where I hoped they would be discussing the intersectionality of art and Black culture. While the prison system one appealed to me slightly more, I decided to attend the Erik Wahl event as a few friends were planning to go as well and I believed I should be spending MLK Day learning about race and racism, which I thought would be discussed more at this event.

The day started off great as I also attended the keynote presented by Marc Lamont Hill. This was an extremely powerful speech as he unashamedly discussed the hard topics that we should focus on during MLK Day and throughout our lives. I was lead to believe that the university’s annual MLK Day Symposium was an effective force of positive change and that the university was actively trying to educate it students on the intrinsic racial disparities in our society. My opinion changed after the Erik Wahl event.

Let me first start off by saying that I cannot put too much blame on Erik Wahl. Yes, he was very clumsy and ineffective in altering his standard motivational speech to try and include social justice, but we should place more blame on the event planners who believed (for some ungodly reason) that a white “grafitti artist” who spent most of his time working in corporate America was a good fit for the MLK Day Symposium. Perhaps it’s my fault for believing I would see something poignant and intelligent about the criminilization and debasement of Black art without looking into who the actual speaker was.

Now luckily this event was packaged with it’s own perfect metaphor to explain the inappropriateness of this event for this symposium. Throughout the event, Erik Wahl would take time out of his speech to paint his “graffiti”. The last one was the icing on the cake as he flashily painted Martin Luther King Jr. in white on a piece of black canvas. He literally whitewashed one of the most important social activists in American history in front of hundreds of people. Looking back on it, it’s pretty humorous.

But we should focus on the particulars as to why this event was such a dark cloud over MLK Day. First, let’s discuss how absolutely trite the motivational speech was. This was clearly one of Erik Wahl’s most popular speech and the one that he always has in his back pocket in case he needs to give one. This would be fine if it was original, but it wasn’t. Everything he said was just a rewording of phrases that I have heard from hundreds of other motivational speeches, only this time he peppered in a few social justice buzz words. It was one of those substandard “get out of the box, get creative” speeches that have been drilled into all of our heads by now.

In addition to this, the multiple paintings that he did, while fitting the theme of diversity, were unfortunately misutilized. I don’t remember specifics, but I remember he painted two famous athletes and finally MLK Jr. in white. While these could have been great points of access into discussions as to why these people are idolized and the barriers they had to break in order to become successful, he instead used them as talking points into how they affected his privileged childhood. He preferred to discuss why they were some of his heroes, but shied away from the racism they overcame in his shallow anecdotes.

All of these aspects came together to present me with a pandering, purposeless event that had me writhing in my seat from frustration. It was clear that Wahl didn’t feel comfortable actually discussing race and instead preferred to discuss his famous sports stars, his pretentious music, and his hollow philosophy. The part that continually plays in my head when I think about this event is the Q&A portion. A homeless woman came to mic and wished to talk about the affect of homelessness on the Black community. Instead of taking this opportunity to actually learn something, Wahl instead decided to climb off stage and hug the woman in a perfect display of this event’s pandering nature.

It’s clear that the Business & Finance Convocation simply used “graffiti” as a connection to Black culture, when all they really wanted was a another white guy to discuss business practices with. This could have a been a great event with an actual Black artists who could discuss the nuances and depth of Black art and Black culture, but instead we got Erik Wahl and his whitewashed Martin Luther King Jr.