If we don’t consider the American civil rights struggle of the mid-20th century over by now, then we will never consider it over.
It takes a special, perverse kind of pessimist to think that civil rights marchers in the early 1960s would cast a cynical eye on the progress that’s been made and respond, as the progressive site Beggars Can Be Choosers recently did, with an article titled “Why Today’s ‘Stealth’ Bigots Are Worse Than Old-School Racists,” or to compare the Trayvon Martin shooting to that of Emmett Till.
While civil rights protestors converge on the National Mall this week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, ask yourself which of the following activities a single African-American anywhere in this country has been prohibited from carrying out over the past 25 years: serving alongside whites in the military; attending public schools with non-black children; sitting in the white section on public transportation; attending state universities; demonstrating for civil rights; voting without a poll tax or a literacy test; or marrying interracially.
That’s right, none—though they are still occasionally chastised for rushing the stage and interrupting an award winner’s speech at the Video Music Awards. Progress is slow where it comes.
If the civil rights movement is a struggle with anything resembling a final resolution, we have to be able to pick a point at which we say, “OK, we’ve achieved the movement’s main goals—let’s move on to something else.”
If we’re not willing to anticipate an actual, concrete end—if we insist that the struggle go on forever—then we’re not really interested in a solution.
We’ve long since reached the point where not only has every legal prohibition against African-Americans been removed from the law, we regularly pass laws that give material advantages to African-Americans at the expense of other groups. How can anyone seriously claim that civil rights protections are not being respected, when most are demonstrably being enforced in a way that’s overly favorable to African-Americans?
Perhaps we should view racial progress not in terms of liberties but rather accomplishments that reflect more enlightened attitudes. How have African-Americans fared on, say, attaining positions of power?
In the past century, blacks have served as governors of New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Louisiana. Blacks have been elected mayor of many large cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver, and St. Louis. We’ve had blacks heading cities and towns large, medium, and small, in every region, in every type of community, in cities with every manner of racial makeup.
How about positions at the highest levels of government? Under just the past three Presidents, we’ve had African-Americans appointed to be Attorney General; Secretary of State; National Security Adviser; Ambassador to the United Nations; U.S. Trade Representative; Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Affairs, Labor, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Drug Czar; and Head of the Environmental Protection Agency. What’s left—President of the United States?
Oh, right.
If African-Americans have been granted all the above rights and filled all the above positions and still don’t have equality under the law, then equality under the law no longer has any meaning.
