Each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we revert to Dr. King’s concept of the “beloved community”—a society not only free from injustice but also replete with dignity, shared responsibility, and authentic belonging. Too frequently, though, we view that vision as moral rhetoric rather than a concrete imperative, something to admire rather than to build.
For much of the last century, racial justice in America has been predominantly perceived as a defensive undertaking. We identify discrimination, label a transgression, and often seek a remedy in court. This effort has been indispensable. It upended Jim Crow, opened schools and workplaces, and affirmed the fundamental principle that discrimination has no place in a democracy.
But today, that framework alone is no longer adequate. Not because discrimination has vanished—it hasn’t—but because racial inequality increasingly manifests through systems that scarcely proclaim themselves as discriminatory. Inequality is engendered by that curtail affordable housing, by that segregate neighborhoods, by that persistently bypass certain communities, and by that displace long-established residents. These systems are commonly characterized as neutral, efficient, or inevitable. Yet their consequences are deeply racialized.
The outcome is a disconcerting paradox. We reside in a nation with courts and laws formally committed to equality. But in practice, we too often tolerate patterns of racial inequality that are enduring, predictable, and profound. This gap exposes a more profound issue, not merely with civil rights enforcement but with how we conceive of justice itself.
Justice is not solely the absence of discrimination. It is the existence of conditions enabling people and communities to live with dignity, stability, and opportunity. And those conditions do not emerge naturally. They are deliberately shaped by law, policy, and public investment.
Take displacement as an example. Across the country, Black communities are being ousted from neighborhoods they have called home for generations. This is seldom framed as a civil rights issue. Instead, it is explained as the result of market forces or urban “revitalization.” But displacement is not an accident. It is the foreseeable outcome of decisions regarding housing policy, land use, transit, and development—decisions that determine whose presence is safeguarded and whose is treated as dispensable.
Or consider infrastructure. Highways that cut through Black neighborhoods, transit systems that connect wealthier areas while bypassing others, environmental hazards concentrated where political power is weakest. These are not remnants of the distant past. They are ongoing instances of how physical systems distribute advantage and vulnerability. Infrastructure shapes who can reach work, access healthcare, survive climate disasters, and participate in civic life. When infrastructure fails communities, it fails democracy.
Traditional civil rights tools struggle to address these harms not because they are misguided but because they were designed for a different problem. Much of our legal framework is geared toward identifying intentional discrimination by a specific actor. But today’s inequality is often structural, cumulative, and diffuse. It has no single culprit. It unfolds over time. And it is embedded in systems that appear race-neutral on the surface.
This does not mean we should abandon civil rights law. Robust enforcement remains essential. But enforcement alone cannot fulfill the full scope of what justice demands. What we need is a complementary approach that treats racial justice not only as something we defend against violation but as something we must actively construct.
Dr. King grasped this distinction well. To him, the beloved community was never merely about curbing harm or condemning injustice after the fact. It was about constructing the social, economic, and political conditions that make equality enduring—conditions enabling people not just to coexist but to live together with mutual care and shared destiny. The work of justice, as King envisioned it, was fundamentally constructive.
Building justice entails asking different questions. Not just: Was there discrimination? But: What systems are generating these outcomes? Who benefits from their design? Who bears the costs? And what would be required to redesign them so that communities can thrive rather than fragment?
It also necessitates expanding our understanding of harm. Inequality is often experienced collectively. When a neighborhood loses affordable housing, a community loses stability. When public investment bypasses certain areas, residents lose access to opportunity. When displacement erodes social networks, people lose the support systems that make daily life feasible. These are community-level injuries, and they demand community-centered solutions.
This approach is not a departure from our history. It is a continuation of it. In each of the nation’s great moments of progress, justice advanced not merely from restraint but from design—slavery’s end paired with schools; voting protections paired with federal enforcement. The New Deal combined regulation with social insurance and public investment. The civil rights movement demanded not only the end of segregation but access to jobs, housing, and political power. In each case, equality became more enduring because it was integrated into the structures of daily life.
Today, as courts narrow the meaning of equality and policymakers retreat from race-conscious remedies, we face a choice. In recent rulings, the Supreme Court has restricted race-conscious admissions in the name of formal neutrality, made it harder to prove racially discriminatory gerrymandering, and limited voters’ ability to challenge practices that deny meaningful ballot access. Collectively, these rulings reflect a constricted vision of rights—one that treats inequality as legally irrelevant so long as it is produced by ostensibly neutral rules. We can continue to rely solely on tools designed to halt yesterday’s harms. Or we can pair those tools with a more ambitious undertaking: embedding justice into the systems that shape where people live, how communities function, and who gets to belong.
Justice is not only a shield we raise when harm occurs. It is a blueprint for the beloved community we aim to create. On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the question is not whether we honor Dr. King’s words. It is whether we are prepared to build the beloved community he envisioned—one where dignity, belonging, and opportunity are not aspirational ideals but lived realities.