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I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963

There has been a lot of debate about this passage from the speech, delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that is now widely known as "I Have A Dream," from, after singer Mahalia Jackson exhorted Reverend King, "Tell them about the dream, Martin."

I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal."

The rest, as they often say, is history.

The idea that we in the United States judge people, or at least we should judge people, "by the content of their character," has become something of a "self-evident truth" itself over the intervening fifty-plus years. And so it's hard to find anyone who would openly admit to contravening it, despite the never-ending accusations that people often do.

And in this, I'm not sure that either side is wrong. In my own experience I have yet to meet someone who openly judges people based on the color of their skin. Seeing the color of a person's skin and the content of their character as being related, on the hand, is a different matter.

And people don't take these shortcuts out of malice, but because, evaluating the character of every person someone has to make decisions about likely requires more time than they have. So treating skin color and character as dependent variables is an adaptive, if inaccurate, mechanism. Given that we live in a world of scarce resources, the fact that treating people who are different from the self as lacking in character means justifying retaining more resources for the self is a convenient fringe benefit.