We cannot afford to regard as normal the presence of injustice, inhumanity, and violence, including their verbal and cyber manifestations.
Interpretation
We must not accept or normalize injustice and violence in any form.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and challenging injustice, inhumanity, and violence in all its forms, including verbal and online. It calls for a collective responsibility to foster a society where these negative elements are not treated as a normal part of life, but rather as issues that need to be actively addressed and eliminated.
In practice
In a speech addressing civil rights issues.
I didn't have a father to deal with about boyfriends. I didn't have a father to show me how a man and woman relate in a family setting. Therefore, I have given over my life to mentoring young people. I'm adamant about young people who have been denied a father/daughter relationship.
Seek out your brothers and sisters of other cultures and join together in building alliances to put an end to all forms of racial discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice. There are people of good will of all races, religions, and nations who will join you in common quest for the betterment of society.
My mother was the strong wife, partner, and co-worker Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to be an effective leader, and he said so on many occasions.
One person cannot be blamed for years of problems as it relates to race in America. This is something that has been with us since the founding of this nation. I mean, we were founded with slaves.
If each of us works toward making a sincere effort when we wake up each morning with a renewed commitment and dedication to embracing nonviolence as a lifestyle, this world will become a better place, bringing us ever closer to the Beloved Community of which my father so often spoke.
Love is not a weak, spineless emotion; it is a powerful moral force on the side of justice.
I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.
Nobody wants a judge to be subject to the political whim of the moment.
The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.
In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.
Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?
Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.
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