Book Analysis: Must We Care About Racial Injustice

Tramel Raggs Must We Care About Racial Injustice?
‘I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”…[but] when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing bitterness toward white people…when you are forever fighting a degrading sense of “nobodiness”; then you

Dr. King believes that decent human beings should stand up for injustices they see affecting others as they would their own, and argued that segregation was and is an unjust philosophy because it is undemocratic, degrades the human spirit, and is immoral through the eyes of God. Dr. King challenges all Americans to become emotionally involved in the fight for racial equality.
In John Draeger’s “Must We Care About Racial Injustice?”, he discusses the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s arrest in Birmingham in a series of civil disobedient campaigns around the city such as sit-ins and marches. The analysis also recaps Martin Luther King’s a “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which Dr. King responds to the notion that his leadership and movement were ill-timed and disruptive. In the second page of Draeger’s analysis, he argues that the white clergy to whom Dr. Martin Luther King addresses in his letter should show empathy and concern about the racial injustice of the United States in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the white clergy that served as the audience to Dr. King’s article were emotionally indifferent to the suffering of Black Americans due to racial segregation. Draeger believes that the clergy should have forged an emotional connection

She argues that moral reasoning requires moral judgment from a moral standpoint. He uses an additional supporting example to his argument, quoting Stephen Darwell who argues the possibility of both intellectual and emotional ways appreciating the values of others. “Our capacity for sympathy, both with others and with ourselves, underwrites our conviction that the flourishing of any creature with whom we are capable of sympathy has a value and importance that gives any of us an objective reason to promote it…” (Darwell, 162)
Overall, I do believe in the main points of John Draeger’s argument not only from a convincing and supported view, but from a personal standpoint as a Christian and African American individual that is well aware of the racial history of the United States. I believe in Draeger’s stance in that the benefits of caring for my fellow man and showing empathy for those who endure hardship raise my moral aptitude. In Christianity, it is embedded within my faith to see the problems of mankind as my own problem, regardless of whether or not I suffer from