Taking King's message forward

On this holiday created to honor slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., most of us would report a positive view of race relations.

We would correctly point to tremendous advancement in the nearly five decades since King and his followers braved water cannons, snarling dogs and rocks to change an entrenched system of racial inequality. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was America's act of contrition, outlawing racial discrimination in public places, requiring employers to provide equal employment opportunities and yanking federal funds from projects that allowed discrimination. Today, we can say we've come a long way. We should add that we can and ought to go a lot further.

Efforts to improve how we co-exist in America's melting pot must be redoubled. Pressing for diversity and inclusion may appear counterintuitive in 2007, when people of color appear in the upper echelons of business and politics.

But racial discrimination remains a stumbling block, preventing many from fully realizing King's dreams of opportunity and equal rights. These are not the biases of old. Laws protect against those. Instead, the new challenge is to guard against racial biases so subtle and unobvious as to not lend themselves to immediate and identifiable solutions, such as a new law or social program.

Public education offers a prime example. Schools in Seattle with the most resources and experienced teachers can be found in the largely white and affluent sections of the city. Schools in the South End where most of Seattle's minority residents live, are presumed — sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly — to be of lesser quality.

The reality of education funding plays a role, but the uneven quality in the city schools is also a reflection of our values. Our values should not fall along racial lines, but in the matter of public schools, they unfortunately do.

Attacking the subtleties of racial bias is less dangerous than the challenges faced in King's day, but no less important. Journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," illuminates how subtleties such as our unconscious attitudes about race tie into opportunities for education, employment and other basics.

In a section called "Think about Dr. King," the author relies on well-known sociological studies to make the case that how we consciously feel about race, the ideals that we say we prize, can be diametrically opposite our inner feelings. And it is those inner feelings that we rely on to think in the blink of an eye.

No surprise there. We all have public and private faces. Our chief role as a society was to change overt horrors, such as forbidding blacks to drink from the same water fountains as whites. Now we should have a vested interest in changing how we perceive others.

It is about going beyond a simple commitment to equality.

In "Blink," Gladwell makes many interesting social observations but he throws out a challenge that bears repeating: It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture; so that when you want to meet, hire, date or talk with a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.

This goes multiple ways. Who couldn't stand to step out of their comfort zone and view others as full human beings?

Some might accuse this page of preaching to the choir. This is the 21st year King's birthday has been observed as a federal holiday. The myriad celebrations reflect the huge importance we attach to this day. But King's words would be our answer. Sitting cold and weary in jail, King penned the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" as a prescient urge to push forward on matters of race. Just when we think there is nothing left to accomplish or that now is not the time to do it, King reminds us that good intentions take us only so far, action must follow.

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

We all can use a nudge forward. King's holiday performs that task.