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Character. I’ve been thinking about this word a lot lately, especially since Monday was the day we observed Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. It was also the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Hardly a day goes by without someone quoting to me perhaps King’s most famous words that you judge a man not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. However, do we really practice seeing characters these days?
I say practical because it is a skill. It takes no skill to claim an identity with immutable characteristics. Just enter into the politics of that particular identity and speak according to its pre-approved clichés. Nor does it take skill to make snap judgments based on a person’s immutable characteristics. This requires nothing less than ignoring the individuality of the person in front of you and sticking all the stereotypes associated with that particular identity onto them.
We see this kind of behavior too often in the cesspool of social networks and our so-called thought leaders who sit behind podcast microphones, stirring up outrage to line their pockets with clickbait money. The irony is that many of them tell us to see character and yet they practice the opposite.
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Seeing his character doesn’t make money.
Even I, others have asked me to see color first. While I was on the roof raising money for my community center, we heard about how a white neighborhood on the north side of Chicago had to hire security guards after the murder. George Floyd protests because there was violence.
As we prepared to record this story for Fox, several people came up to me and pointed out that we should talk about how white people would finally get a taste of the violence that was plaguing our neighborhood. I totally resisted. It wasn’t racial to me. It was about the downward spiral in which our city’s values were sinking. I left race aside and produced what I thought was a much better and insightful story.
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It takes discipline to resist the temptation of identity politics and delve deeper into the character of the person or even the character of society at any given moment. When we do this, we often arrive at a deeper and closer meaning to the truth. This should not be surprising because, after all, character is human truth.
We live in the United States of America and that should mean something. If there is anything I have learned from King and his long struggle for civil rights, it is the lesson of striving to be a man, an individual. His infantrymen often carried signs proclaiming: “I am a man.” This was the very essence of our struggle and what was denied to us over centuries of brutal oppression.
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So why should I betray King for the instant and modest gratification of playing identity politics? I have disciplined myself to follow the path of character and this choice has brought me much fruit.
Today, I am building a $45 million community center where our focus and the foundation of everything we do will be character. My neighborhood may be predominantly black but we raise men and women of character and I hope they become so successful that their names will mean something to you one day.