What does it say about the state of racial relations in America when protests breakout over a white police officer’s shooting of a black youth in self-defense? Antonio Martin, an 18-year-old black man with a long rap sheet that included assaults and armed robbery, was shot to death in Berkeley, Missouri Tuesday night when he pointed a gun at a police officer. Immediately afterward, protests began in this St. Louis suburb, escalating to the point that Interstate 175 was shutdown by protesters for about 45 minutes on Wednesday evening.

I guess the only way for these protests to have been avoided was for the white police officer to permit the black youth to shoot him to death. Of course, in view of America’s belief in institutional racism, this still would not have exonerated the dead white police officer of his supposed inborn racism or have generated any accusation of racism against his black killer. After all, we all know, thanks to today’s political correctness, that racism, though universal among whites, is nonexistent in the black race.

I’m constantly amazed these days by the sheer idiocy of the American people. It forces me to admit that Adolph Hitler was right when he said, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Take the lie of institutional racism for an example. The belief that racism is innate in the white race is actually the classic definition of prejudice, which is nothing more than a preconceived idea about an individual based on their particular race. In other words, if I am white, I must be a racist, because all whites are racists. Now, today’s African Americans can believe this without ever being accused of prejudice, while at the same time, no white American can ever escape the accusation of prejudice, regardless of how unprejudiced they may be.

If a white police officer arrest a black criminal, uses force if the black criminal resists arrest, or shoots the black criminal in self-defense, the incident is immediately chalked up by many in the African American community as another example of white racism. It has nothing to do with the criminality of the criminal, but everything to do with police brutality against blacks. How do you explain this trumping of truth, facts, evidence and justice with race by so many in the black community? Is it not because so many African Americans have made their color their god? They literally bow before a black idol. To them their race is the only thing that matters. It trumps everything else, even to the point that nothing else should be considered besides the color of their skin.

The noble dream of the late Dr. Martin Luther King was that his children would “one day live in a nation where they [would] not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Unfortunately, Dr. King’s dream has not been realized. Instead, what we have in today’s America is a nightmare, in which everyone is judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. What I find most ironic is that it is today’s African American community that is most insistent upon everyone being judged by their color rather than their character, and that most modern-day Americans actually believe that the way to fulfill Dr. King’s dream is by all of us continuing to sleepwalk through this racial nightmare. Is it too late for America to wake up?