If you have any social media presence, you were likely inundated this past weekend with inspirational quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. Or, as one shrewd observer put it, it was a “big day for MLK quotes with weird ellipses in the middle.” It’s a perfect send-up of how the American right has co-opted King as a prophet for its vision of a “color-blind society”—a conservative foil to the modern Black Lives Matter movement. In this retelling, King stood for non-violence as a means of reconciliation, a way of inducing change without making white Americans too uncomfortable. By this same logic, King’s dream that his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is somehow a rebuke of modern efforts to teach children about the darker moments of this country’s history, moments that continue to cast a long shadow today. Teaching about structural racism, in this warped reading of King, is actually a desecration of his legacy.