How do we honor the heritage of a segment of our culture without turning it into a weapon of polarization

It's MLK Day, and there's no shortage of reflections on how Dr. King's vision stacks up against where 2018 post-America is as a nation. I don't know that that's the right way to go about thinking about him 50 years after his passing.
King was, as we all are, a fallible human being, but he was also exceptional, as most of us aren't. The emphasis is rightly on the virtue of his vision. He was the kind of great orator whose greatness had to come from something more fundamental than just his speaking chops. He was on fire at a podium because he was driven by a clear understanding of the right and the wrong present in his experience of American life. He probably would not have been remembered for a thunderous deliverance if his subject matter had not so completely consumed him. His sincerity couldn't be doubted.
But it bears pointing out at the outset of any reflection on his legacy that he was writing at a time of real, pervasive, institutional bigotry and racism. The set of societal conditions he addressed no longer characterize life in this country.
Sorry if that outrages anyone, but the burden to process reality is on you.
We know that's so because when it is pointed out to today's race-hustlers that nowhere in America does one find separate drinking fountains, denial of service in dining and lodging facilities, or systemic white-on-black police brutality, they have to retreat to claims of ill-defined "subtle forms." Ta-Nehisi Coates has to resort to claims that opposition to Obama's climate and health-care policies had a strong racial element, and reserves the right to assert as much with no substantiation.
An interesting cultural question, it seems to me, is the degree to which there's a black American culture within the broader general American culture. It's obviously real to some extent. There are black churches in which the music and preaching style are distinct and recognizable. There is, of course, still a form of popular music we call R&B which, as grotesquely morphed as it is, is traceable back to the jump blues and doo-wop of the middle of the twentieth century, and big-band, stride-piano, Delta blues and ragtime antecedents from decades earlier. At ethnic-food festivals, there is often an African-American booth, serving barbecued ribs, sweet potato pie and stewed greens. There's a vibe within the sports world that is identifiably black, as we know from the ugly and ridiculous form it took in the take-a-knee phenomenon that caused NFL ticket sales to decline by a third this season.
The question that follows from that one is indeed pressing: How to acknowledge and properly honor that cultural distinctiveness without attaching a victim mentality to it? Obviously, when families that are entirely black, as is still generally the case, even as interracial marriage has proliferated, and enjoyed widespread acceptance, get together for pitch-ins, you're going to see the kinds of food mentioned above. These are the recipes handed down from grandmothers and their grandmothers, confirming a heritage that bonds generations, a healthy bulwark against the dysfunction that statistics about black family formation so grimly remind us.
Speaking of which, consider that Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family, and the 25 percent-out-of-wedlock birth at the time of his writing, came out in 1965, so that we can see that other currents were impacting black life in America along with the bigotry and racism that Dr. King was struggling so mightily against at the time.
Or consider the February 1963 publication date of Norman Podhoretz's discomforting Commentary essay, "My Negro Problem - And Ours." 1963, the year that would see the "I Have a Dream" speech delivered to hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, as well as the Birmingham church bombing. Podhoretz was writing about his own childhood, in the 1930s, in a section of Brooklyn mainly populated by Jews of Eastern European descent, Italians, and blacks, and how racial intimidation was mainly directed at the Jews by the blacks.
Also consider that by 1963, Berry Gordy Jr.'s Motown empire was well into its ascendancy, Miles Davis was playing Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, Bill Cosby's first comedy album for Warner Brothers was selling like hotcakes, and Sidney Poitier was within a year of getting an Oscar.
So America was learning how to celebrate the black component to its overall culture.
The world we inhabit over a half-century later is one characterized by a sad irony. There is a thriving black middle class, in which one finds stable families and achievement in all the same fields any other Americans are contributing to. And then there is the chaos of high murder rates, fatherless children, drugs, and materialism one finds in cities in palpable decline - as well as a grievance industry that has convinced those trapped in it that their problems are not of their making. Furthermore, blacks striving to join the stable middle class, who use proper diction in their speech, who excel at science courses, who are maneuvering the minefield of horrible schools and gang intimidation are mocked for somehow not being "true to their race."
This is the question we face on yet another MLK Day: how to honor the rich heritage of the black component of our culture without bringing along a notion of victimhood that does not reflect what is possible for any American who happens to be black and wants to mainly live and be regarded as such.
Can we give up the identity politics and retain the identity?