Nowhere near the mountaintop

Nearly 54 years after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., the United States is a far more racially just nation than it was in the throes of the civil rights movement. Not only have many forms of legal discrimination been barred, but Black Americans have made substantial gains in education, in climbing out of poverty and into the middle class and in many other respects. The arc of the moral universe is indeed bending, nevermind the pessimists who insist that racism has always suffocated and continues to suffocate a supposedly irredeemable white supremacist experiment.

Yet on King’s birthday, chronic optimists who deny the existence of corrosive racism — overt and subtle and, yes, systemic — are also due a corrective.

This is a country in which a massive Black-white wealth gap, which doesn’t close when factoring in educational attainment or any other factor, persists. In which, though racial bias in housing is illegal, real-estate agents far too often steer Black families to live among one another and to stay away from predominantly white neighborhoods. In which voting rights are being compromised, and aggressive gerrymandering is diluting Black votes.

In which public schools that mostly serve Black youngsters, often de facto segregated from those serving whites, frequently fail to equip their students with the knowledge and skills needed to excel. In which racial prejudice in hiring, though against the law, continues to skew hiring in many sectors. In which Black and white Americans often have starkly different access to high-quality health care.

And it is a country in which the criminal justice system continues to suffer from far too many skincolor-based disparities.

We must continue struggling together to find and eradicate the many obstacles to true fairness. Some are large, some small, some nearly invisible. All must be demolished.