My conservative colleagues groan at the term "racial economic justice," but the fact remains that the playing field still isn’t level, despite significant progress made in the 32 years since Dr. King’s assassination. Differences in incomes, home ownership rates, and unemployment can partly be explained by nonracial factors, but at the end of the day race still matters. When the overall unemployment rate is barely 4 percent and the African American unemployment rate is 8 percent, there's a racial difference that needs to be explained. When African American household incomes remain at lower than 60 percent of white incomes, there's still work to do. Indeed, though many talk of racial bias as a thing of the past, when new economy companies like Microsoft are being sued for racial discrimination, it is clear that racial economic justice still needs to be a goal.

Unfortunately, the economic expansion of past years has left many people with the sense that little is wrong on the racial front. To be sure, this impression is shattered when African Americans are denied voting rights, as they were in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. But most whites and many African Americans bask in the progress that has been made and think there isn't much left to do.

Dr. King would disagree. In his speech, "Where Do We Go from Here," he talked about our nation’s economic structure. "There are 40 million poor people here," he said in 1968. "And one day we must ask the question, why are there 40 million poor people in America. We’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole of our society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice that produces discouraged beggars needs restructuring. You see, my friends, when you begin to deal with this, you begin to ask the question, who owns the oil? Who owns the iron ore? Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?"

There was a time when people openly asked questions about our nation’s economic structure. Now we simply accept the fact that one in eight Americans, and one in four African Americans lives in poverty. Though the income distribution ought to be a matter of concerns, we ignore the fact that the rich have gotten much richer in the past decade, that African Americans, are 12 percent of the population, but only hold 1.7 percent of the nation’s wealth. Questions about economic structure are not popular, which is why California Governor Gray Davis seems determined to develop a negotiated solution to energy deregulation in California instead of simply admitting that deregulation has failed, and it has hit the poor harder than anyone else.

All the poor aren’t African American, and all black folks aren’t poor. That ought to be a mantra when we look at poverty policy. So many Americans are accustomed to seeing have-nots with a face of color that we forget that the majority of the poor are white. And we forget that economic success is a fragile thing, that some who were last year’s dot com millionaires are now struggling to make ends meet. We need to repair our fraying social safety net, but there seems little sentiment to do that. Instead, we keep hearing about private charity and faith-based programs, neither of which take a single step toward economic restructuring.

While closing the racial economic gap out to be an imperative, visible African American economic success convinces some folks that the playing field is level and anyone can get rich in America. The success of BET’s Bob Johnson, Harpo Productions Oprah Winfrey, and a legion of multimillionaire sports gladiators notwithstanding, should not be Exhibit A in any effort to eliminate affirmative action or continue to be race-sensitive. Some will say that Dr. Martin Luther King said that people should be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin. But he said much more than that. Those who want the flavor of Dr. King’s latest thinking, the thinking that caused him to lead a strike of Memphis garbage workers, ought to read "Where Do WE Go From Here," not "I Have a Dream."