We all know the great principle that was the foundation of Martin Luther King's work in the civil rights movement — namely, that he wanted a world where his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  King delivered his "I have a dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, with a quarter of a million people in attendance.  Five years later, King was dead, assassinated on April 4, 1968, but his dream lived on and changed the world.  King was instrumental in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed.  King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, deservedly, for his work in civil rights.  The man is a national treasure and his words guided America's civil rights for decades.

King's dream is no longer honored.  The lip service paid to his soaring vision of judging who someone is by his character and not by what he looks like has been discarded in the 21st century.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has emerged as the yardstick by which society is to be judged.  Not individuals.  Society.  White people are no longer individuals, but a society inherently evil because of their skin color, suffering from white fragility and white privilege.

Whites must be subjected to seminars that teach them about systemic racism by whites.  These trainings are not designed to change whites, who are presumed to be irredeemably evil, but rather to humiliate them.

Blacks are not individuals, either.  Blacks are a society assumed to be superior solely by virtue of their skin color, although the soft bigotry of low expectations keeps affirmative action alive and well.  There is a cognitive dissonance in proclaiming blacks superior while insisting they cannot succeed without generous subsidies and government programs to get them through college and into jobs, but I digress.

Parents who believe in Martin Luther King's dream are fighting back against CRT invading classrooms.  They don't want their children divided into "oppressors" and "oppressed" based on their skin color.  They don't want their children to be taught that math is racist and that blacks are not capable of learning math.  It's true that everyone can't be a math superstar like Katherine Johnson, the black woman who calculated flight trajectories for Project Mercury, but there's no reason blacks can't learn basic math as well as whites.  To teach children otherwise cripples their minds, and concerned parents of every color are fighting back.

Martin Luther King envisioned a time when something like CRT could not exist because it is incompatible with basic human decency and fundamental civil rights to use race to classify people into groups.  To embrace CRT is to reject King's dream.  I have a dream, too, that more and more hands of all colors will join across America to take back King's legacy and push CRT into the shadows where it belongs.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a black teenager from the 21st century who is sent back in time to become a slave in the old South.

Image: Martin Luther King giving his "I have a dream" speech.  Public domain.

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