Martin Luther King Day: How far is America along road to the 'dream'?

Those views hint at a stubborn perception gap, in which a majority of blacks cite discrimination as a roadblock to success in the US while whites, by an equally large margin, believe that blacks seldom, if at all, experience bias.

But in a common perception that links to King’s insistence that blacks bear responsibility for their situation, a majority of both races say African-Americans who don’t get ahead have primarily themselves, not discrimination, to blame, according to the Pew Research Center. 

Moreover, some Americans perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Obama emphasizes King's calls for "societal responsibility" in redressing racial discrimination over King's point that individuals bear personal responsibility for ameliorating such bias, as a function of God-given "natural law." They worry that such an emphasis leads to an overreliance on government to fix everyone's problems – and consequently, an oversized government. Indeed, the debate over striking the right balance between societal and individual responsibility is playing out today in issues ranging from gay marriage to tax policy concerning whether to raise taxes on the rich or cut spending on programs for the poor. 

“Natural law, at least the version to which King refers, is that law which encounters the glory of divine creation in nature,” writes Stanford University lecturer Ruth Starkman on the Huffington Post. “It is old, troublesome, and informs the ideals of America. … Irrevocably volatile, natural law may equally encompass King’s appeal to God-given rights and natural born equality as well as various scriptural illiberalisms, including the notion that marriage is ‘naturally’ about one man and one woman.”

More troubling, perhaps, on the day of Obama’s inauguration is that a majority of black Americans remain skeptical about whether King’s dream can actually be realized in the US. After Obama's first election in 2008, there was a spike in the share of blacks who said that equality had already been achieved. But that perception has faded in the dark economic days that have followed. Today, more than half of all US blacks again don’t believe that racial equality has, or will be, achieved.

“The combination of blocked roads to social mobility, continuing economic crisis, the near unanimous belief among blacks that racism remains a major problem in the United States, and the consequent widespread and growing despair about the prospects for racial equality provide the grounds, if not the inevitability, for an ever more volatile and conflicted racial landscape,” Michael Dawson, director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture in Chicago, wrote in The New York Times last year.

Yet other experts suggest that younger generations are wearing down those lingering malignancies. Social historians point to younger Americans, especially those under 40, as pivotal to the nation’s social justice reforms around race and other hot-button issues, including gay marriage and drug criminalization. That would include the generation that came of age in integrated public schools, a dream that King saw realized before his death.

"This generation that is rising is the most diverse we have ever had in this country," NAACP President Ben Jealous told ABC News this week. "It's also the most inherently inclusive and the most embracing of racial and gender equality. … It's in their DNA." 

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