A dream deferred: Martin Luther King's legacy betrayed.

Every January we go through a ritual commemoration of the life and career of Martin Luther King, Jr., but we rarely listen to what he had to say. We almost never hear his religious message, and we seldom ponder his vision of a society in which people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

We are now in the third great period in the American history of white-black relations. The first was the age of slavery, which lasted from the seventeenth century to the 1860s. Next came the era of racial segregation, which lasted from just after the Civil War until the 1960s. Since the late '60s we have been living in an era which, as yet, has no definitive name.

When it first began, we thought this third age would be called "the age of integration." But we now see, after thrity years of bitter and disappointing experience, that it can hardly be called that. True enough, some blacks have been integrated into the American mainstream: they went to college, got good jobs, have healthy incomes. But at the subcollege-educated level, blacks are not doing so well; and the further we go beneath that level, the worse their situation becomes relative to the rest of the population.

By the time we reach the black "underclass" we are in a world that is actually worse off in many ways--in terms of crime, violence, substance abuse, broken families, out-of-wedlock briths--than poor blacks were in the pre-1965 era. Back then we thought poor blacks were at the rock bottom of American society; their situation, we believed, was as bad as the situation of any American could possibly get. We were mistaken. Today's underclass has fallen through the floor that we used to think was rock bottom, and we have no reason to believe that it has hit true bottom yet. It seems to be falling in slow motion down a bottomless pit. Impossible though it would have been to believe back in the days of the civil rights movement, lower-class blacks in the "age of integration" are probably less integrated into American society than were their forebears of fifty years ago.

The inclusion of blacks in American society, then, has been partly a success, partly a failure. Which is to say, it has been a failure; for this is the kind of thing where nothing less than full success can count as real success.

Even well-educated, well-paid blacks who have "made it" have the feeling that they have not really made it. And they are correct to have this feeling. For racial identity is still a salient status in America. If you are black, your personal achievement remains subordinate to your membership in a racial category. Thus as long as blacks as a group have not won full membership in the American community, it will be impossible for even the most successful African-American individual to feel that he or she has won full membership.

This is America's third failure at finding a satisfactory basis for black-white relations. Slavery wouldn't do. Segregation wouldn't do. And this--whatever we finally decide to call it--won't do either.

There are many causes for this latest failure, but one of the most important has been the assumption that there can be such a thing as a benign race consciousness. For 350 years prior to the 1960s, race consciousness--that is to say, white consciousness of another person's African ancestry--had been powerful in America, almost always producing bad consequences. The sensible strategy would have been to erode race consciousness, to persuade white Americans that race did not really count. This was the strategy Martin Luther King, Jr., had in mind when he made his "content of their character" remark.

And the strategy worked. During the first half of the 1960s the nation went through a collective examination of conscience on the question of race and, in principle at least, came to the conclusion hoped for, namely, that race is a minor and relatively unimportant category. Victory had not been won, but it was at hand.

But then defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. In the late '60s and early '70s, a combination of white liberals and black leaders (King now being dead) decided it was possible to have a benign race consciousness. As in the past, a person's African ancestry was to be regarded as his or her principal defining characteristic; but now, instead of considering this a negative trait, white Americans would be expected to consider it a positive trait. The United States would continue to be divided on racial lines, but this division would no longer be a division into black and white castes, separate and unequal. Instead, we would be divided into black and white clans, clearly distinct from one another but equal and cooperative, both clans being peer members of the great American tribe. To promote this equality and cooperation, it would, of course, be necessary to introduce racial quotas into schools, jobs, legislative redistricting, etc.

Given the long racist history of British America and the United States, the notion of a benign race consciousness should have been seen as a kind of contradiction in terms, nearly as preposterous as the notion of a benign anti-Semitism. But black leaders imagined it was possible to combine the incompatible ideals of integration and black nationalism, a synthesis of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael. White liberals (with the exception of some Jews for whom anything smelling of quotas was suspect) suspended their critical faculties out of a desire to remain in harmony with blacks. And almost everyone else shut up for fear of being called racists were they to turn critics.

Two decades later the color line is still present in American society. To this day an African-American's blackness remains his or her most salient trait in the eyes of most white Americans, as it does in the eyes of many black Americans.

White racial bigotry, which once seemed to be well on its way to becoming an extinct species, is growing in strength. So is black racial bigotry. Worse than white bigotry, however, is white indifference: by and large, white Americans have lost interest in the troubles of their black fellow citizens. They have stopped listening, and they have largely stopped caring in any but a ritual manner.

In the last thirty years, American life has been very disappointing in many ways, but no disappointment is more heartbreaking than the failure of racial integration. For in this case we had victory in the palm of our hands, victory over the most abiding social evil in American history--and we threw it away.