what will become of Dr. Kings dream?
It is ironic that some of the modern apostles of apathy now misappropriate Dr. King’s own words to support their assertion that the struggle for justice in which he led us is nearly over — that the time has come for our policies to be, in their phrase, “color-blind.” So let’s start at the beginning: what is racism? Is it merely a mistake in reasoning, an erroneous conclusion based on faulty logic which, once corrected, can be banished from human society? Or is it something much deeper and more powerful, more threatening and more persistent? Dr. King taught us that as human beings, we are vulnerable to the sin of racism. As a young man, he studied the teachings of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who had written that it is foolish to regard racism, in his words, “as a mere vestige of barbarism when it is in fact a perpetual source of conflict in human life.” Niebuhr criticized those who “wrongly drew the conclusion…that racial prejudice is a form of ignorance which could be progressi
