Last week, I was honored to be the keynote speaker at this year's Martin Luther King Jr., Birthday Celebration, hosted by Bemidji State University. The event was covered by the local PBS news station (covered by reporter Justin Othoudt), as well as the Bemidji Pioneer newspaper who wrote the following article (written by Daltyn Lofstrom) featured below.
Quotes from the Bemidji Pioneer news article:
"Part of addressing this mission involved bringing in keynote speaker Dante King, who led the attendees through discussion and activities relating to several aspects of anti-Blackness, white supremacy and racism.
One particular theme of King’s speech was educational systems and versions of history that are taught in schools today.
“We have a school system that’s based upon the psychology of white children and people. If we’re trying to educate our children in that system, they are bound to fail,” King said during his speech. “The very structure of the educational system itself is based upon a white model and therefore has a built-in failure mechanism for us one way or the other.
“We learn what is practical and beneficial for white people who control our historical orientations and everything that we register as knowledge, as academia, as intelligence.”