" ... white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race ... the ‘congenital deformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.”

HONORING MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY

“Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans…. What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the ‘congenital deformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.” 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? 1967; Reprinted, Boston: Beacon Press, 2010