“Really?” I swear to God, she leans in and bats her eyes at me. I totally thought that was some made-up thing from fiction. But it’s super hot.

“Yeah. He has this quote about the relationship between justice and peace, that you can’t have one without the other. It’s—” I pause. “Well, you know?” I don’t want to be the guy who always explains things. I know I get overly detailed about stuff like this. Other people get bored with it.

“I don’t know that quote,” she says. “I guess Dr. King said a lot of important things, huh?”

I smile. “The thing is, they do go hand in hand. Justice and peace. In reality, if we don’t have justice, we already don’t have peace.”

Kimberly frowns, mulling over it. “How so?”

“Well, think about what the justice system is supposed to do. It’s supposed to uphold the moral ideals of our society, right?”

“Thou shalt not kill, and such.”

“Right, so when you break the social code, there are consequences.”

She nods. “I mean, I get that. We send people to jail for murder.”

“So, to look deeper, what happens when the system is built to uphold a moral code that is skewed from actual fairness? Or, when people have different ideas about what is fair?”

“Isn’t that why we have courts in the first place, to keep everyone honest?”

“Sure, but it requires integrity of the system.” I tap my fingers against my lips. Is this making sense to her? Does she think I’m a giant nerd?

“And the system is broken.”

“But also, in a sense, if there is no justice for us, what is our obligation to create peace?” I’m super excited now. No one ever wants to get this far into this. I love her.

Um.

Swallow that thought.

Try again. “What I mean is, black people basically live outside the law already, because the law doesn’t serve us fairly.”

“And so…?” She’s clicking through the pieces of the puzzle in her mind. I can tell.

“So, it’s possible that the only way to achieve actual justice, the only way to change the system that is acting against us, is to act outside the law.”

“But that would be illegal.” She blushes. “I know that sounds super obvious. I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard stuff. Think back to the 1960s. Organizers used civil disobedience to great effect.”

“All the sit-ins and marches.”

“Yeah, technically they were breaking the law. Black people would go sit in at Whites-Only lunch counters, knowing that they’d be arrested.”

“And the laws eventually changed.”

I nod. “In part because black people proved to lawmakers that the laws were unjust.”

Kimberly shakes her head. “Well, but more so because we disrupted the economic structures of those businesses. They couldn’t sell lunches to white people while black people—who they refused to serve—were occupying the counters. They couldn’t make money.”

I’m totally impressed. Hardly anybody knows that. Is it weird that it makes me want to jump her bones? Yup, totally weird. I’m hopeless.