Civil Rights Are Yesterday

It’s Time For a New Approach To Social Justice

When I was a child growing up in the 1970s, I learned to revere Martin Luther King Jr. and the power of civil rights. Many of us felt that a society that respected the civil rights of all Americans would inevitably become more just and equal. Racial divisions, irrational prejudice, and social injustice would quickly yield to the blind justice of the law.

It didn’t work out that way. Not only did civil rights laws prove unable to redress many racial inequalities, the laws often got twisted in ways that King …