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This Blog resumes my focus on Ian Haney Lopez’s book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.

Rather than highlighting some of his major points, however, I want to discuss why it is essential for our nation to confront the “dog whistle” racism for which he makes such a definitive case. (Please read the book if you have any doubt about its reality.)

Actually Martin Luther King explains why in a sermon in his book, Strength To Love.

“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason 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. This is the way God’s universe is made.”

These words speak of an invincible connectedness every human being shares with another. Like it or not, our lives are bound together so that what happens to you eventually impacts my life and vice versa.

That sounds like something a preacher would say, but which is disconnected to real life, much like “loving your enemies” is. In other words, it sounds fine, but is too unrealistic to be taken seriously.

But is it? Maybe it is more real than we might think.

Consider the absolutely devastating impact racism has had on the world and on our nation.

The world still lives in the shadow of the Holocaust. Our nation still lives in the shadow of slavery and segregation, and the inhumane way we destroyed native American culture and way of life. Nor can we ever outlive the legacy of the absolutely insane Civil War that tore our nation apart.

None of us is responsible for what happened in the past, but none of us can escape it either.

Why? Because brother against brother, sister against sister, family against family, neighbor against neighbor, tears at the fabric of the human soul.

That is why Martin Luther King understood as few others did at the time that the fight for civil rights in our country was in truth a battle for the very soul of America, and all of us as a people.

Racism – and all other “isms” – is always such a battle because that is how the universe has been made.

It really is true whether we want it to be or not that “we are one in the spirit.”

Indeed, those words go to the very core of what it means to be human, and are why “dog whistle politics” is something all of us should be keen to spot and none of us should ever ignore.