We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are always the good guys, everywhere-in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too.
When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America had always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintain them and profit by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true.
Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk