A critic of the US Empire.
And a victim of it, because he believed we as a species could to better.
Knowledge and consciousness are terrains of struggle. To depoliticize empire is to normalize it. Dr. King concluded his Vietnam speech by identifying with the victims of empire: “I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam… the barefoot peasants of our world” (King, 1967). This identification was not symbolic but political. It grounded King’s ethics in solidarity with the colonized, the exploited, and the excluded.
Contemporary radicals face a similar task. People(s)-Centered Human Rights offers a framework that reclaims human rights from state-centric, liberal, and imperial interpretations and recenters them on collective dignity, sovereignty, material survival, and self-determination. It allows movements to defend life without legitimizing empire, to oppose repression without endorsing intervention, and to build unity across the Global South and within oppressed communities in the North.
Such a framework restores the connection King insisted upon between morality and power, and between justice and structure. In a world where empire increasingly disguises itself as humanitarianism and war as protection, People(s)-Centered Human Rights provides a language for resistance that is ethical, political, and internationalist.
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