Opinion | Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America? - The New York Times - 0 views
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n the popular narrative of American history, Black Americans made essentially no measurable progress toward equality with white Americans until the lightning-bolt changes of the civil rights revolution. If that narrative were charted along the course of the 20th century, it would be a flat line for decades, followed by a sharp, dramatic upturn toward equality beginning in the 1960s: the shape of a hockey stick.
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In many ways, this hockey stick image of racial inequality is accurate. Until the banning of de jure segregation and discrimination, very little progress was made in many domains: representation in politics and mainstream media, job quality and job security, access to professional schools and careers or toward residential integration.
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In terms of material well-being, Black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era
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The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest
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Understanding how and why not only reveals why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward, toward a more perfect union.
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In measure after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after
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The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.
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The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed
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Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed
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It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.
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However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968
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What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.
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Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation
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nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.
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These data reveal a too-slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most of the century that begins to flatline around 1970 — a picture quite unlike the hockey stick of historical shorthand.
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It was Black Americans’ undaunted faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. Collectively, these migrants and their children and grandchildren steadily narrowed the Black-white gap over those years.
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But if Black Americans’ advance toward parity with whites in many dimensions had been underway for decades before the Civil Rights revolution, why then, when the dam of legal exclusion finally broke, didn’t those trends accelerate toward full equality?
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Why was the last third of the 20th century characterized by a marked deceleration of progress, and in some cases even a reversal?
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Substantial progress toward white support for Black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century
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when push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to those principles. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68 percent of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement. In fact, many felt that the Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.
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Lyndon B. Johnson’s rejection, in 1968, of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations of sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested that his fine-tuned political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes in the year since he — more than any previous president — had led the project of racial redress
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as the century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, America experienced a remarkable moment of inflection that set the nation on an entirely new trajectory. A diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism.
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Some six decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age
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These interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have come to call the “I-we-I” curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century
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The moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely coincides with the moment America’s “we” decades gave way to the era of “I.”
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A central feature of America’s “I” decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.
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Contemporary identity politics characterizes an era that could well be described as a “War of the ‘We’s’.” This is a reality that predated the election of Donald Trump, though his presidency threw it into sharp relief.
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It is difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment or the broader shift from “we” to “I.”
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the fact that landmark civil rights legislation passed at the very peak of the I-we-I curve suggests that an expanding sense of “we” was a prerequisite for the dismantling of the color line. Without what the historian Bruce Schulman calls the “expansive, universalist vision” that America had been building toward in the preceding decades, it is hard to imagine that such watershed change — so long and so violently resisted — would have been possible.
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By the late 1960s, though the work of widening was not nearly complete, America had come closer to an inclusive “we” than ever before. But just as that inclusion began to bear tangible fruit for Black Americans, much of that fruit began to die on the vine.
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The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception
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we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.