Like many consequential leaders, Martin Luther King was complex. He was a man of enormous courage, almost preternatural vision and marvelous eloquence, but also vulnerable to some of the same failings that have beset many of the great men in our culture.
On the day we celebrate his birthday, however, we'd do well to focus on his virtues. King was a man resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America.
His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.
It's a great sadness that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his hope for racial harmony has not, or rather not completely.
One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that today the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to progressive identity politics.
For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.
Unfortunately, it may not be a stretch to say that people seem to be judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character as much today as at any time in our national history.
Nor do I think King would've been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it somehow stood apart from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of the American story. The civil rights movement was, after all, not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded.
It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God who created us all in His image.
Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.
It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.
On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good, indeed, to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.
Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and our minds, and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.
There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.