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Character. I’ve been thinking about that word a lot lately, especially since Monday was the day we observed it Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday It was also the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t quote to me King’s perhaps most famous words, about not judging a man by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. But do we really practice seeing character these days?
I say practice because it is a skill. It takes no skill to claim an identity with immutable characteristics. All you have to do is step into the politics of that particular identity and speak in the pre-approved clichés. It also takes no skill to make snap judgments based on someone’s unchanging characteristics. This requires nothing less than ignoring the individuality of the person in front of you and holding them to whatever stereotype comes with that particular identity.
Too often we see this kind of behavior in the cesspool of social media and from our so-called thought leaders who sit behind podcast microphones and stoke outrage to line their pockets with clickbait money. The irony is that many of them tell us to see character, yet practice the opposite.
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Seeing your character doesn’t make you money.
Even I have been asked by others to see color first and foremost. While I was on the roof raising money for my community center, we heard about how a white neighborhood in North Chicago had to hire security guards after the disaster. George Floyd protests because there was violence going on.
As we prepared to shoot that story for Fox, several people came up to me and emphasized that we needed to make sure white people finally got a taste of the violence that was plaguing our neighborhood. I resisted outright. This wasn’t racist to me. This was about the downward spiral into which our city’s values fell. I left the race out and produced what I thought was a much better and more insightful story.
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It takes discipline to resist the temptation of identity politics and dig deeper into the character of the person or even the character of society at a given time. When you do that, you often arrive at a deeper and deeper meaning that is closer to the truth. This should come as no surprise, because character is, after all, human truth.
We live in the United States of America and that should mean something. If I learned anything from King and his long struggle for civil rights, it was the lesson of striving to be a man, an individual. Those foot soldiers of his often carried signs that read, “I am a man.” That was the essence of our struggle and what we were denied under centuries of brutal oppression.
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So why would I betray King for the instant gratification of the low class by playing identity politics? I have disciplined myself to walk the path of character and that 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 mostly black but we are raising men and women of character and I hope they will become so successful that one day their names will mean something to you.
