Color blind or just blind?

Conservatives in state legislatures across the country have taken phony piety to new depths. It is ironic that people who oppose civil rights legislation, as their political fathers once also did, now use Martin Luther King to justify their pious, but phony, embrace of his vision. They quote from his March on Washington speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

With a straight face, a crooked spine, and a forked tongue, conservatives use it to oppose affirmative action programs and those that clearly help the disadvantaged. Voter suppression, the political hobby today of conservative legislatures, is not based on character flaws or virtue, but skin color. Their daily political actions are not a King dream, but a nightmare for those still judged by their skin. You can pretend that prejudice is gone, but it isn’t. Character as a measure, not color, is a goal not yet achieved.

Conservatives apparently don’t believe that. One, George Leef, has written, “Considering race as a factor in affirmative action keeps the wounds of slavery and Jim Crow sore and festering. It encourages beneficiaries to rely on ethnicity rather than self-improvement to get ahead.”

The Weekly Standard, the premier intellectual magazine of the right, titled a book review "The Price Was High: Affirmative Action and the Betrayal of a Colorblind Society.” The self-styled RightWingNews.com blog has said, "The idea that everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin" was among what "25 People, Places and Things Liberals Love to Hate." They should tell the family of George Floyd that we have reached a color-blind society.

The right’s catalog of liberal secular sins includes making Hispanic-owned businesses get a share of government contracts, encouraging more non-white corporate executives, or finding a way to get black students to college. Simply, conservatives in legislatures, in blogs and publications, in political campaigns embrace a world that does not exist. They distort Martin Luther King’s words. They are self-righteous and wrong. Their only virtue is consistency.

I heard King’s words when they were spoken, but that should not be a prerequisite for truth, understanding, and empathy. I was at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington in 1963. My day began early. That morning, I helped serve breakfast to a bi-racial delegation from Minnesota. They were all of good character. Most were Black. The pancakes were flipped from stove to plate in a church basement about a mile from the Lincoln Memorial. The cooks were the senators from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey. It was not character that brought us there. Nor would it be today. Our country is not yet colorblind, despite gains since then.

Martin Luther King III believes that one day we will be able to live every word of his father's dream. "I think my father's vision was that we should at some point have a colorblind society…. He always was challenging us to be the best nation we could be.”

Conservative legislatures don’t have the character to get us there. They are simply blind.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”