Think!

What is Dr. King’s legacy?

You can boil it down to one sentence: “Hey, my people are people, too.”

So simple, yet so hard to understand and do. Not just for blacks. If you look at so many movements, past, present and future, they, too, boil down to {fill in the blank} are people, too.

They’re all people. Not all sinners, not all saints. People can be good; people can be rotten. You can say that white and brown and yellow and black people, you can say that about men and women, you can say that about popes and atheists. Nobody has a monopoly on good and bad.

And that’s what the problem is. To judge people “by the content of their character” takes effort. It takes thought. Racism or chauvinism or whateverism is simple a refusal to think.

And so is the opposite.

The answer to “______ group is bad” is not “_______ group can’t be bad” nor “nothing and no one is bad.” That’s at least as bad; it’s the same refusal to think. The answer to bad judgment is good judgment, not no judgment.

That’s all Dr. King wanted, and that’s all we expect and deserve. To be judged for ourselves, nothing more, nothing less.

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