Billionaire Bill Ackman used Martin Luther King Jr. Day to claim that the legendary civil rights leader would have been against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in schools and businesses.
Ackman made the comments during a conversation on X (formerly Twitter) along with Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips and X owner Elon Musk on Monday.
Ackman said that King’s famed “I Have a Dream” speech is “precisely about a world where people will be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. And when I came to learn about the DEI movement, which is an ideological movement, it’s really the reverse of that.”
“I think Dr. King would be very opposed to this sort of ideology, even though, you know, diversity is a good thing, even though, of course, a culture where everyone feels comfortable and included is critically important,” he continued.
Ackman has been in the headlines a lot lately. The hedge fund manager was at the forefront of efforts to oust Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard University. Gay was the first Black person to serve as president of the school. He has also claimed that DEI initiatives are “racist” and that he’s worried about “reverse racism.
Ackman’s comments are part of a broader narrative by wealthy conservatives who evoke MLK’s words and twist them in their own interests.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican businessman who dropped out of the presidential race on Monday, said last week, “I think it desecrates the legacy of our civil rights movement, desecrated the legacy of Martin Luther King, that right when we get closest to having racial equality … to then obsess over systemic racism. To then obsess over white guilt and otherwise.”
When promoting Florida’s Stop Woke Act in 2021, which prohibits schools and businesses from discussing race and racism in a way white people don’t like, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boldly suggested MLK Jr. would approve. “You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. You listen to some of these people nowadays; they don’t talk about that,” he said.
The same year, then GOP lawmaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted, in all seriousness, “Critical Race Theory goes against everything Martin Luther King Jr. taught us.”
Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign told Axios that King “said to us that we must address fully systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, and militarism. It’s dishonoring of the memory of King not to raise that full critique, no matter how unnerving, unsettling, or uncomfortable it is.”
MLK’s daughter Bernice King has criticized the use of the legendary speech by some to project their own ideas and beliefs, highlighting his desire that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Last August, she wrote on X, “My father’s dream and work included eradicating racism, not ignoring it.”
