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Good Morning Today in the United States it is Martin Luther King Day. The public holiday is one of two lasting memorials to his work, the second of which is the Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, established two years after his death in 1968. I visited there on my first trip to the US as a student in 1995. It was an inspiration to find the tranquil courtyard, his tomb surrounded by a pool, and to sit on the flagstones to read his most famous speeches. It’s the cadences of these speeches that ring in my ears whenever I witness racism - whether it’s the abuse hurled at footballers on social media or casual opinions expressed on the bus or the hastily denied or withdrawn comments of public figures when they realise they’ve misjudged the public mood. As we were hearing earlier, the comments allegedly made about Meghan Markle by the former girlfriend of the current UKIP leader have led to her suspension from the party and prompted an unreserved apology. In claiming that the Royal Family would be ‘tainted’ by Harry marrying a person of mixed race these comments reveal the fear of difference that leads us to want to distance ourselves from the other, believing that our blood or our way of life can somehow be contaminated and that we can somehow stay pure. Like other people of mixed race Meghan Markle has had cause to think at length about what it means to feel ‘tainted’. Often finding that she was not ‘black enough for the blacks or white enough for the whites’ she describes her own journey into self-worth, finally finding the confidence to face the dreaded ethnicity forms with the courage to follow her father’s advice and draw her own box. Strikingly for Martin Luther King the tackling of prejudice of all kinds requires the marriage of opposites. Drawing on Jesus’ injunction that his followers be both as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, Dr King taught that anyone who wants to combat racism must be both tough minded – resisting lazy ways of categorizing human beings as less than one human race – and tender-hearted – able to put ourselves into the shoes of the other. King’s work was rooted in his deep belief in a divine loving presence that binds all life. For him there could be no ‘us and them’ that would excuse hate on either side but only a dogged determination to hold together the whole of humanity’s redemption as one single destiny. Today, 50 years on from his death, as I read our news and look across the pond, for me, King’s words and ideas still resonate: That we are mutually bound by one another; that ‘I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.’