THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have an unpleasant confession to make. I am a Southerner. Born in the south of southern parents, with Confederate veterans and slaveowners on both sides of the family tree. For all I know, there may even be a few Klansman hanging in the lower branches as well -- by their necks, I hope.

I'm also, in some deep subterranean sense, a racist -- for one cannot grow up in the world of my childhood and not be marked by its imprint. Believe me, I know: I've spent my entire life trying to get away from it.

Intellectually, I believe in racial justice as feverently as I believe in anything. I would rather have my tongue cut out than utter a racist thought, much less a slur or insult. I support just about every item on the traditional civil rights agenda -- affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, you name it -- even though I'm not entirely comfortable with race-based solutions. As a privileged white American, I don't think I have the right to tell black Americans the playing field is level enough, especially when I know that it isn't.

I'm even open to conservative solutions, such as tuition vouchers, that are popular with black parents -- though I disagree with them philosophically. Again, I don't think I have the right to tell someone who lives in the ghetto what's right for their children.

But that's just politics. On a personal level, I know there is still a deep divide between me and anyone who happens to have a dark skin.

Of course, when you think of it that way, you realize just how insane it is -- that a tiny piece of code in a billion-molecule strand of DNA could make such an enormous difference in how we think and feel about our fellow human beings. Which is why racist societies (like the one I grew up in) make such a point of indoctrinating their children. They have to be carefully taught, as the old Rodgers and Hammerstein song put it.

And so we were -- by experience, if nothing else. It seems bizarre, here in the 21st century, to recall a time when people with different skins were required to drink from different water fountains, but one of my most powerful childhood memories is of my mother jerking me away from a fountain in mid-drink, because I'd happened to pick the wrong one in a department store.

I was too young to read the "Colored" sign, you see.

And Mom was the liberal in the family. She was the one who cringed every time Dad started flinging the "n" word around. But even she couldn't handle her 4-year old son putting his lilly white lips next to a spout where black lips had recently been. Not in public. Not with other white lips around to spread the story.

We heard the "n" word a lot in that summer of 1963. Dad and Granddad would sit with their bourbon and branch water -- in the downstairs rec room, by the fireplace with the crossed sabers and the Confederate flag hanging above it, and curse the civil right "agitators" who were invading Washington. And I would listen, through one ear, as I watched Bonanza or The Wonderful World of Disney. I didn't understand much of what they were saying, but I caught enough of it to realize that something scary was happening, something involving the "n"s, who were also scary. And in a vague, kids' kind of way, I was scared, too.

Lots of things happened after that; the riots and the war and the assassinations. The '60s blew up my family just as thoroughly as it blew up segregation. My parents divorced; I moved away from the South -- first to California, then back East, then to Washington State. And I ended up a very different person than the one my Dixie Daddy had hoped to raise.

But maybe not that different, after all. True, I've lived in racially diverse neighborhoods most of my adult life. I've had black neighbors, black co-workers, black nurses -- even, for a time, a black doctor. But I can't honestly say I've ever had any black friends. And I can't honestly say I've ever really tried. At some basic psychological level, black people are still the Other for me, and probably always will be.

There is, however, one thing I've always sworn to myself: The world of my childhood dies with me. My children are going to grow up free -- or as free as I can possibly make them -- of the taint of racism. That's going to be my own personal victory over the bastards who gave America slavery and segregation, including the ones in my own family.

And last night, I got a glimpse of that victory.

I took my 8-year-old daughter to my son's new middle school for Orientation Night, and after the obligatory pep talk and teacher introductions we all went downstairs to the cafeteria for sandwiches and cookies. Standing in line, my daughter ran into a friend from her school, who was there with her older brother.

Naturally, they began to chat, and giggle and make funny faces -- the usual little girl stuff. Pretty soon, they were doing the bump. Then the handslapping game. Like I've seen my daughter do with a dozen other little girls a thousand times before. But this particular friend was particularly cute, particularly sweet -- and particularly black.

After we got our sandwiches, I sat down at one of the rickety cafeteria tables with my son, and my daughter went and sat down next to her friend. And we all started eating. And that's when it hit me. I was literally watching a dream come true:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood ....

OK, so it was the surburbs of Pennsylvania instead of red hills of Georgia. And the great-great-great-granddaughters of former slaves and former slave owners instead of their sons. But Martin Luther King's dream was big enough to include them all. And last night, I got to see my own little piece of it come true.

It's not much, I know; not when this country remains so distant from the rest of MLK's dream. But it was at least a reminder that the civil rights movement was an enormous triumph for American progressives, and for me personally. And not all of the fruits of that victory have been stolen by the tides of reaction since then.

Is there enough of Dr. King's dream left in this corrupted, polluted and reactionary America of ours to make it worth fighting for? I don't know. But about the dream itself I have no doubts. It will always be worth fighting for -- for my children's sake, and for my own.