Verified by 
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. (August 28, 1963)
Today - January 18, 2010 - those of us in United States and elsewhere celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. In my own small way, I would like to celebrate by offering some comments on one of the best-known lines from his "I Have a Dream Speech."
Yes, we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Work by positive psychologists over the past decade sheds some light on how we might judge the content of character. Here is what we have learned.
First, good character is plural, a family of morally-valued traits like bravery, kindness, teamwork, modesty, and mercy. To judge someone's character, good or bad, we should judge the entirety of the person. This is not to say we give a pass to anyone who has a few strengths of character but lots of deficiencies and flaws. It is simply to say that character is complex and deserves to be approached as such.
Indeed, different character strengths are cut from various cloths. A strength like kindness can be displayed on an ongoing basis, in small and large ways, each and every day. "A random act of kindness" done once or twice in a lifetime does not add up to kindness as a strength of character.
But a strength like bravery seems different. How many lives can a Soldier give for his or her country? Only one, and the Soldier was of course brave. On how many buses did Rosa Parks remain seated? Only one, and she was of course brave. How many times do any of us need to risk our own safety and comfort to do the right thing - blow a whistle, call the police to report a crime, or stand up for an underdog? Only once, and we are of course brave.
Second, the components of good character exist in degrees - they are not either-or features of anyone. We can speak of extreme cases, paragons - e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. epitomized leadership - but all of us should and indeed aspire to increase our strengths of character.
Third, character strengths - at least as we have measured them - often show remarkably similar profiles across different groups of people. The same sorts of strengths are typically high - those that connect people to one another - and other sorts of strengths are also typically low - those that entail temperance and self-control. We have shown this similarity across different nations of the world, across red states and blue states, as well as across ethnic groups in the United States. Perhaps Dr. King's dream would be realized if we choose to look at actual people and not the demographic groups in which we so conveniently and carelessly place them.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children ... will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
References
Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2006). Methodological issues in positive psychology and the assessment of character strengths. In A. D. Ong & M. van Dulmen (Eds.), Handbook of methods in positive psychology (pp. 292-305). New York: Oxford University Press.
Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Character strengths in fifty-four nations and the fifty US states. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1, 118-129.
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press/Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
