Some younger folks aren’t aware that Stevie Wonder’s 1980 hit “Happy Birthday” isn’t just the version that your aunties sings with gospel precision clapping when the cake is cut. It’s really a protest song of sorts, written by Wonder to support the establishment of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday.

It’s been 45 years since Wonder performed that song on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in front of about 100,000 people, including my late father, my twin sister and I, all of our many voices raised to the heavens and the lawmakers across town, hoping they were listening.

Two years later, the official holiday was signed into law. But decades after the ink has dried, and many of us take the day off work and school, I’d be lying if it wasn’t bittersweet.

Because I don’t think we’ve learned a damn thing.

Some of you honestly don’t deserve a holiday when you pervert the very philosophies that Dr. King literally died for. There are federal agents attacking and killing people in major U.S. cities, with threats to send in the full military. The government is systematically ripping apart the Civil Rights Act, which the current president recently called unfair to white people. The history of Black people, our hardships and our contributions, are being erased because it makes some feel bad.

I am not going to try to imagine what Dr. King would think or feel, because his family has made it clear that he was a real person and not some sort of mascot for your feelings, agenda or B.S. He wasn’t some fictional genie with a soft message of unity that blunts righteous anger and pain. We must not whittle his revolutionary ideas of equality and social and economic power for his people down to some kumbaya soundbite that scolds anyone who wants real action.

I do look at the lyrics for Wonder’s song, released just 12 years after King’s assassination, and want to remind you how fresh it was then. There were people gathered on that mall, like my father, who had been there for the March on Washington, demanding to be heard and seen. There is a reason that so many of the photos of that day, and of the Civil Rights Movement in general, are produced in black and white — there are people who want you to believe this was ancient history, a thing long settled, as they play in our faces and try to snatch those rights back.

What a nasty little trick.

There is such hope in Wonder’s lyrics, such peace and urgency residing in the chords and sentiment of the same song. The gospel clap set the beat of a groundswell, ringing out in three-part harmony. He sang, “Because it should never be / Just because some cannot see / The dream as clear as he / That they should make it become an illusion.”

He was talking about the haters, the ones who’d hoped perhaps that the pain of a people would disappear with the signing of the Civil Rights Act, or that it would all blow over and we’d learn to stay in our place.

Nah.

Wonder was clear — our history was not an illusion. Our dreams were not light fantasy work. We were not going anywhere. I’m just sad for people who think that an official holiday solved everything, because our current presidential administration has demonized the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion — THE VERY THINGS DR. KING WANTED — as some dirty cheating trick rather than trying to level, somewhat, a playing field that will never be steady.

I used to go out of my way to spend the King holiday doing community service. But lately I’ve opted to watch civil rights movies — I think we might watch Chadwick Boseman’s “Marshall” this year — at home with my son. He is now 12 and sadly has to understand the terrible things his ancestors went through and how some want us right back there. These conversations are not comfortable, but it is not a breezy-cookout-in-the-backyard kind of observation.

It’s about the sacrifices so many people, across racial, class and religious lines, made to ensure that we were never going back. We are not going back.

Happy birthday to ya, Dr. King. We’re trying to be worthy of you.