King's genius here lies in proposing something far more demanding than mere tolerance—he's asking us to reorganize how we see people altogether, to strip away the surface and attend to something invisible. The phrase "content of character" isn't sentimental; it's a direct challenge to those who believed certain groups were inherently inferior, because character is something earned, tested, and revealed over time, not fixed at birth. When you sit across from someone in a job interview or a classroom and catch yourself making assumptions based on appearance, you're wrestling with exactly this tension—the constant work of choosing to see the person rather than the category.