Since that great and idealistic time, America has been a riot of greed and of individualism. The old, obvious barriers of racial segregation have been replaced by newer, more sophisticated political and economic discrimination. The old oppression is still present, but harder to name and confront. Dr. King would rejoice that the hard and fast racial barriers in America have been broken. Things are possible in our time which could hardly be imagined 40 years ago.
Persons of color are present in nearly every formerly all-white enclave in America.
At the same time, the disregard and continued disadvantaging of a significant proportion of the non-white population of America, together with a smaller proportion of the white population, continues. Marketing strategies, urban sprawl, political boundaries, regressive taxation, and economic policies designed to benefit the top strata of the population have created a culture where a great mass are simply left out of the American Dream. Politicians of both parties declare this failure to be success. They pledge to continue and increase the same economically divisive policies, while larger and larger groups of people are completely omitted from the equation. One quarter of the world's prison population is now in America.