I n perhaps the most famous passage of his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in August 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. offered a vision of a color-blind society: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not by judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A beautiful dream and one that is as far from realization today as it was in 1963 killed not by Southern rednecks but by progressive identity politics.
Dr. King painted a vision of a color-blind society based upon the quant idea that all people share a fundamental human identity and cannot and should not be defined by the color of their skin or their gender. In other words all lives matter. Identity politics and its faithful handmaiden political correctness assume the opposite — i.e. race and gender define the essence of a person.
The fundamental premise of political correctness is that there is only one permissible manner to think about any particular issue each according to his race or gender or another defining trait. When various heterodox Jewish temples indulged in mourning rituals after Donald Trump’s surprise victory the message was that there is only one correct way for Jews to vote.
American blacks are repeatedly bombarded with the message that they must either think one way or they are traitors to their race. Thus Benjamin Barber an academic and former adviser to President Clinton commented before the election that blacks who considered voting for Trump were like the Jewish kapos in the concentration camps and must be sick in the head. And just last week Marc Lamont Hill a black CNN commentator slurred those blacks who met with Donald Trump as “mediocre Negroes.”
