“Business cash and lobbying in Washington honestly drowns out the voices of regular families on a dayto-day basis.” “This, I believe, is where the increasingly unexamined role of unconscious bias comes in to our public culture in ways that are eroding opportunity for all of us. Since Dr. King’s time, we have had a deep and growing anxiety in this country about who is American. It’s that anxiety that is allowing these more selfish values to take root—even among people who are suffering economically under the new economic rules.
“Harvard research on implicit bias helps explain how racial anxieties affect our brains. Our brain categorizes people by their physical characteristics—and it finds shortcuts to give attributes to those categories. Most of these shortcuts are happening subconsciously, without our conscious awareness.
“The problem is that our society has been so hierarchical along these lines—race, gender, age, sexuality—that the shortcuts we are constantly primed to make have unequal consequences.
“Prejudice and stereotyping [are] normal. That doesn’t make it acceptable, but it does make it understandable, and it certainly means we can’t keep pretending it’s not still with us.”
“Prejudice and stereotyping [are] normal. That doesn’t make it acceptable, but it does make it understandable and it certainly means we can’t keep pretending it’s not still with us. No other wealthy country tries to create a democracy from such diversity—to assert that we all are supposed to feel like a community. We must see that as part of our exceptionalism; acknowledge the challenges and take a bit of American pride in working at it every day. We must not wish it away under a myth that we can be colorblind.
“We are the children of Dr. King’s dream because we are the most diverse generation in American history. But fundamentally, we are the children of his dream because we are the generation that is left to fulfi ll that dream.
“Fortunately for the future, our generation, having grown up hearing that you’re on your own, has decided that in fact, no, we’re in this together. According to public polling, more than any other generation since the Depression-era generation, we believe in individuals sacrificing for the common good, not just seeking out private gain.
“That’s why I believe that it will be us, the children of the Dream, who finally achieve a sustainable, fair economy, where everyone, regardless of what zip code or school district they were born into, can meet their basic needs and have a shot at fulfilling their dreams.
“Although these questions are seldom at the forefront of your lives as Milton students, I don’t want you to forget that they are the great questions of our time. The relative privilege of all of us in this room, compared to the vast majority of Americans, is not a reason to avoid questions of economic inequality, not at all. Our relative privilege is an opportunity, for it gives us power. And what is power but the ability to make change?” Heather later published a version of her Milton speech in the Huffington Post: “Message to Millennials: We Are the Children of Dr. King’s Dream” and at http://www.demos.org.
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