It’s Thanksgiving week in a country whose warring political tribes are not much inclined to give thanks. But any American with a reasonable historical perspective can easily find reasons to do so.
For one thing, it’s clear that we are a much fairer nation than we were in the past. Women, blacks, immigrants, and minorities of every perceptible kind are treated more fairly and in a more friendly manner than was the case within the memory of many of us now living.
Evidence of this comes from the strained attempts of those critics of the country who desperately insist that things are just as bad as they ever were. The New York Times’s 1619 Project, for example, insists that anti-black racism is the central theme of American history. The author Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to argue that American racism is as strong as ever today — and always will be.
A more sensible estimation, paradoxically, can be found on World Socialist Web Site, in an interview that Tom Mackaman conducted with Princeton historian James McPherson, the nation’s premier Civil War historian. The Times, surprisingly, did not interview McPherson for its articles, which he called “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.”
Slavery and racism were part of the American story, he argued, but so are the anti-slavery and civil rights movements. And “the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well that’s just not true.” You don’t have to match McPherson’s mastery of the subject (and few can) to know that he speaks the truth.
Black Americans — the group with the most firsthand exposure to examples of anti-black racism — agree with him. The available polling shows that the belief in racism as an impenetrable barrier to black Americans is not growing among blacks, but it is growing among liberal white college graduates.
On his New York Times blog, Thomas Edsall cites research showing that many black voters have shifted from blaming racial discrimination for blacks’ statistical disadvantages to blaming individual-based behavior.
Since President Trump’s election, affluent white college graduates have increasingly blamed racism. As evidence, they often cite 1930s New Deal housing programs “redlining” and the 1955 murder of Emmet Till. This hunt for unfairness in the distant past smacks of desperation, and the insistence that nothing has changed in the last 90 years is pure virtue signaling, untethered to observations of contemporary American life.
Actual contemporary evidence indicates that blacks are doing better in a fairer society. Crime rates, incarceration rates, and teen pregnancy rates are way down from even the 1990s, as Columbia undergraduate Coleman Hughes recently noted in the Washington Examiner. The rate of college graduation is way up, as are black life expectancy. And we must not neglect the perhaps politically awkward fact that lower-income and minority Americans have been experiencing record-low unemployment and higher-than-average percentage wage gains during the last three years.
Complaints come in that social mobility is decreasing, and that various elite educational and economic categories do not contain the same percentages of blacks and some other minorities as the larger society. But it is an illusion of social engineers that a free society can be arranged with identical percentages of every identifiable group in every identifiable category.
And it is also a fact — a melancholy fact, perhaps, but a fact — that an increasingly fair society will have a decreasing degree of social mobility. That’s because, in a fair society, people will tend to end up in places where they started off. With more and more people marrying those with similar interests and abilities, both hereditary traits and child-rearing practices will tend to produce a generation less inclined than ever before to climb up or fall down the socioeconomic ladder.
The good news is that our advanced and increasingly fair society has many such ladders and many fewer barriers. And as a recent academic study published by the National Academy of Sciences finds, “Americans overestimate the inter-generational persistence in income ranks. They overestimate economic prospects for children from rich families and underestimate economic prospects for those from poor families.”
Many academics and journalists seem fixated on income inequality and the gap between billionaires and others. But most ordinary Americans seem more concerned about fairness. They embrace equal treatment and reject racial quotas and preferences. Their chief concern is about showing equal respect to fellow citizens, regardless of race, income, or wealth.
This is all reason for thanks, in my view, in an increasingly fair nation — and one that can get fairer still if social engineers stay out of the way.
