Progress Against Racism

In these days is it easy to focus on the negative. Europe is close to financial ruin, the U.S. debt load threatens to take our nation down the same path, oil continues to pollute the Gulf, and the tyrannical regimes of North Korea and Iran continue to stir up trouble.

And yet we should not lose track of the good news. I expect this year will revolutionize publishing with the rapid rise of multiple ereaders and related technology. The rise of the Tea Party movement illustrates that Americans are rethinking fundamentals as I have never seen before.

Perhaps the greatest long-term success story of our nation is the fight against racism, among the great evils of collectivism. The U.S. Constitution permitted slavery in 1787. Less than a century later, with the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, slavery officially was abolished, largely fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence. A century later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite its problems and contradictions, achieved some major advances by equalizing voting laws and outlawing racial discrimination by the government. Less than half of a century later, U.S. voters elected a black president (and, leftist paranoia to the contrary, with extremely rare exception nobody chalks up his Carteresque bungling incompetence to the color of his skin).

In personal terms, my grandfather lived through segregation, and I saw that many of his generation had to make a conscientious effort to overcome racist attitudes. Among my parent's generation -- the '60s generation -- racism was nearly universally reviled. And yet I was struck by a paragraph from today's article by John Podesta and Robert Levy: "Nearly a century after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that 'marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man."' That 1967 case, Loving v. Virginia, ended bans on interracial marriage in the 16 states that still had such laws." Just a few years before I was born, states legally prohibited interracial marriage!

Of course President Obama may also be described as interracial. I was struck by this recent news account of interracial marriage:

Americans are more likely than ever before to marry outside their race or ethnicity.

Nearly 1 in 7 marriages in 2008 was interracial or interethnic, according to a report released by the Pew Research Center Friday. That’s more than double the intermarriage rate of the 1980s and six times the intermarriage rate of the 1960s.

Also, most Americans say they approve of interracial marriage, with more than 6 in 10 saying they're OK if a family member marries outside his or her group. Thirty-five percent say they already have a family member who is married to someone of a different race or ethnicity.

It is a sign of great progress that, in roughly the span of my lifetime, our nation has gone from overturning laws against interracial marriage to mostly openly accepting it.

Obviously some people continue to hold racial prejudices, and some politicians relish racial strife and economic inequality as a pretext for more political controls, despite the fact that previous political controls largely caused today's problems. Racism remains a live cultural issue. Yet, most of the time, most people don't even think about race.

We needn't make light of today's problems, including residual problems of racism, to recognize how far we've come in fulfilling the promise: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Notably, the progress against racism has come, not from the "progressive" infatuation with group rights and collectivistic politics, but from the individualist regard for the rights, liberties, and character of each person.