"Martin Luther King Jr. had an unfavorable rating of 63 percent before his assassination."

This was not racial backlash, this was everyone had not yet decided to put his pro-communist activism down the memory. This was during a time when the non-KKK party had just nominated for president in the two prior elections, the two strongest-credentialed anti-communists on the national scene, and would go on to do so in the next two as well. The man was in the town where he got shot because there was a garbage strike and he was coming in on behalf of the garbagemen. In the immortal words of the greatest president since the Civil War, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, at any time." King did not have to live with the consequences, he did not have to pay the taxes to meet their demands, nor live in a city with sanitation problems, nor witness the effect on the poor neighborhoods when labor costs and overtime rates curtailed service there.

Stealing the credit from the people who did the actual work of the Civil Rights movement is the only way to explain why his approval rating was as high as it was. Up until that gunshot that was the best thing that ever happened to his surviving family, no one would have believed he'd have a national holiday less than 20 years later.

Oh, and regarding diversity, in my experience and that of every child-oriented television program for years, you overcome racial barriers by finding things in common, rather than addressing differences. Because white people have differences, too. So do straight people. So do men. Especially ones who were born men and stayed that way. So do people collectively labeled Christians by people who rarely if ever set foot in a church for their own spiritual inclinations. We members of those groups don't have the advantage of a monolithic unity of opinion and taste and preferences like folx of color and women and LGBTQWERTYs and foreigners and heathens apparently do. It kind of puts an undue burden on the members of marginalized and minority groups to try and sort out which group of privileged types they are dealing with at any given moment. According to the big guy at my first Harlem Globetrotters game, white people all look alike to them, too.

Honestly, the best way to get along with someone who is very different is to find something you both hate. Look at the John Birch Society. You hardly ever hear about feuds or infighting or factions in them, and they are all sorts of religions, like Mormons, Catholics, Evangelicals, Baptists, Jews, etc, and almost all of them take it seriously. The only time I voluntarily listened to a black minister lead a prayer was at a JBS function (black priests giving sermons is a whole other thing - they're ok). On the other hand, my parish is a different story. I can recall at least three major divisions in my lifetime, at least two of which saw the departure of a non-insignificant portion of the congregation and once half the parish school, and I'm not even sure that's all, because I was a kid for some of it, and never got the full lowdown. And that's among people who all believe the same things, and are super-committed to our particular form of exercising those beliefs. The difference between the two groups is that the JBS, for all their efforts to maintain a positive face on their message, is ultimately about hating something - communism and government. And non-America parts of the world that don't have the decency to remember they are not America, and butt out. Meanwhile, Catholicism, for all the efforts of the Church to point out all the bad shit in the world, and to remind us of the bad stuff we do, so we can fix it, is basically about love. People who REALLY believe in the importance of love and not just reading about it, end up fighting over it, while people who don't have much in common except hating the government get along fine (also, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to kill a general who was a JBS member right before he succeeded in taking out the First Catholic President - hate is a better survival mechanism, QED).

Also, the only racial disagreement I can ever remember having with a black coworker was on interracial marriage. I didn't care about it, and he was most emphatically against it. We ended the brief discussion amicably by my asserting my preference for white women and him expressing his happiness to hear that he would not have take action if he caught me with a black woman. We couldn't agree about Richard Loving, but we could agree on "Cannoli should date white girls." Also, for the record, his wife is white. My coworkers are not exactly paragons of intellectual rigor or even consistency. Anyway the point to this anecdote that might seem, in a certain light, to contradict my previous point, is that I'm pretty sure the Diversity Inc folx would not be really thrilled about the resolution of our argument.

People can figure out ways to get along without institutional help, and there is no indoctrination that can overcome the centrifugal forces of human nature.