This dynamic is particularly noticeable and relevant when major news items are breaking, so it should come as little surprise that it reared its ugly head in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's death. In short, a line that wasn't spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr. became attributed to the civil rights hero, and all hell broke loose in trying to determine what had happened.
Megan McArdle of The Atlantic has the full details, and she should know them--she was intimately involved in the initial chaos.
Yesterday, I saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fly across my twitter feed: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Martin Luther King, Jr". I was about to retweet it, but I hesitated. It didn't sound right. After some googling, I determined that it was probably fake, which I blogged about last night...
It turns out I was far too uncharitable in my search for a motive behind the fake quote. I assumed that someone had made it up on purpose. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Had I seen the quote on Facebook, rather than Twitter, I might have guessed at the truth. On the other hand, had I seen it on Facebook, I might not have realized it was fake, because it was appended to a long string of genuine speech from MLK Jr. Here's the quote as most people on Facebook saw it:
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
Everything except the first sentence is found in King's book, Strength to Love, and seems to have been said originally in a 1957 sermon he gave on loving your enemies. Unlike the first quotation, it does sound like King, and it was easy to assume that the whole thing came from him.
So how did they get mixed together?
Thanks to Jessica Dovey, a Facebook user, that's how. And contrary to my initial assumption, it wasn't malicious. Ms. Dovey, a 24-year old Penn State graduate who now teaches English to middle schoolers in Kobe, Japan, posted a very timely and moving thought on her Facebook status, and then followed it up with the Martin Luther King Jr. quote.
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." MLK Jr.
At some point, someone cut and pasted the quote, and--for reasons that I, appropriately chastened, will not speculate on--stripped out the quotation marks. The rest was internet history. 24 hours later, the quote brought back over 9,000 hits on Google.
Eventually, it made its way onto Twitter, and since the 140-character limit precluded quoting the whole thing, people stripped it down to the most timely and appropriate part: the fake quote. That's where I saw it.
The speed of dissemination is breathtaking: mangled to meme in less than two days. Also remarkable is how defensive people got about the quote. The thread for my post now has over 600 comments, and by my rough estimate, at least a third of them are people posting that I need to print a retraction, because of the non-fake part of the quotation. But I didn't quote that part; I was only interested in the too-timely bit I'd seen twittered.
Crazy. McArdle goes on to discuss just how heated the "yes, he said it", "no, he didn't" rhetoric got, with some people even going so far as to explain (obviously, incorrectly) exactly what he was speaking about and why.
It's strange (though increasingly common) to see a misunderstanding like this develop a life of its own via Facebook, Twitter, and various internet message boards. But I think there's interesting stuff here beyond just the usual "isn't the internet crazy?" musings.
Namely, why should the speaker of a phrase matter so much in our response to that phrase? Shouldn't the sentiment and meaning of words be the same, regardless of who in fact spoke them? Should we disregard statements or feelings regarding non-violence just because they weren't uttered by King or Gandhi? Would they be any less meaningful had they been written by an anonymous blogger, or more ironically, a vicious dictator?
The answer, of course, depends on who you ask. We all have a certain number of pre-determined biases with which we approach situations like these--just as we Americans are bound to respond differently to the Osama news than Pakistanis or Saudis, so too are different Americans from varying backgrounds likely to have different responses.
The power of a quotation like this, reputedly from Dr. King, is that it begs us all to drop our "us vs. them" biases and to begin thinking about things in more universal terms. The emotions of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden are very fresh in all of our minds, and that fact has a tendency to skew the way we think about things, and how we interpret outcomes. The civil rights movement, on the other hand, is more distant and historical. Enough time has passed that we can think about things with clear minds, and consider both sides of the situation more capably than if we were still in the midst of it.
Who spoke a phrase, then, is less important in terms of the meaning of the words, and more important in terms of how we frame them. When we see "MLK" attached to a quotation, we read it much differently--much more divorced from our inherent biases--than if we saw "Barack Obama" or "Sarah Palin" or even "Matt Damon" in MLK's place.
It's difficult for us to read any words, or hear any statements, without first passing them through a filter of our experiences--in fact, it's basic human nature to do exactly that. By attaching a different name onto the end then, all we are doing is placing a different lens or a different filter on the camera.
Words should carry the same meaning regardless of who spoke them, but our experiences and biases won't allow it to be so. That's what allows a controversy like this to take root in the first place. It may be difficult if not impossible for us to hear the bin Laden news without remembering the emotions of 9/11, but I think it's important for all of us to try.
[The Atlantic]
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