When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in 1963 during his March on Washington, he famously said in his “I Have a Dream Speech” that he dreamed that his “four children [would] one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Earlier that same year, and in a radically different context, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” spoke searingly about the collateral damage of racial prejudice done to black Americans and white Americans and done to “those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” No other public figure in modern times has expressed sentiments so resonant with the
color-blind tradition in the Western intellectual tradition. Given King’s moral and practical advocacy, he seems to have understood that he was a mere vessel of many strands of ethical thought that privilege individual character (êthos), and its concomitant choices and actions, over conventional and arbitrary markers of distinction such as a person’s sex or race. Many of those strands of ethical thought inform Archie’s approach to relations between all Americans, especially the relations between America’s two oldest groups, the white and black communities. Archie’s approach to race relations, the color-blind approach, is grounded on the moral belief that the mere possession of hereditary qualities, like race, should not confer moral merit by their possession or nonpossession.