As I've mentioned already, today is Martin Luther King’s birthday (though we formally observe MLK Day a few days hence) and shortly, the nation will inaugurate Barack Obama as its first African-American President. We have come a long way from the day when the founding fathers, apparently without pausing to look around them, declared “…that all men are created equal.” It set a fine and worthy ideal, even if it wasn't real at the time. Lately the election of Obama as our next President has been heralded by some as the demise of racism. I wish that were true; realistically, I know it’s not.
We’ve crossed other finish lines before that turned out to be only mile-markers. The Civil War, the subsequent Amendments – perhaps at the time these events occurred, people might have supposed discrimination had been banished. No such luck.
In more modern times, Truman’s 1948 Executive Order for integration of the military is one I remember well. I grew up as an “Army brat” mostly in that desegregated military, but in North Carolina in the early 1950s, it was easy to see the differences blacks experienced between life on the base and life in the still-segregated community off base. Twenty years later, during my own army service, the reality was that units were integrated, but personal relations between blacks and whites were in an uneasy state of truce, a truce that was broken occasionally by racially-sparked disorders in public areas on bases.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, a triumph of Lyndon Johnson’s political art, was a major advance too. Yet one of my most vivid memories of racism comes from that same year. I was studying at a university in a Midwestern state with no history of official racism, yet at a football game that fall, white fans near me in the stadium were chanting “turn the nigger loose!” (i.e., ‘put the team’s best ground gainer in the game’), even though there were black students only a couple of rows away. There are lots more examples, including all the voters who unabashedly voiced racial slurs directly to TV cameras in 2008, and there is much evidence that anti-Latino racism is on the rise, but the gist is clear: Work remains to be done.
Still, there’s reason to be optimistic. Most of the earlier milestones along this path were court decisions, or laws passed – in other words, top-down stuff. The election of Barack Obama, though, comes from the bottom up. It shows that for the first time, grassroots attitudes may be changing. And that’s the real news of the election, so far as race is concerned.
(Please read on for a thought about a related development on the Voting Rights Act)
Just a couple of days ago, the Supreme Court announced it would hear Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Mukasey, a dull-sounding case which challenges aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , specifically the requirement that many states and counties in the South still must get federal government approval for any change in their election procedures. The original law was intended to quash some states’ special requirements that typically made it more difficult for African-Americans to vote. Now, some suggest that continuing these restrictions is anachronistic and unnecessary.
Have things changed enough to abandon watchfulness? I’d say not. Or at least, not in all cases. Some jurisdictions (including several in rapidly urbanizing northern Virginia, where I currently reside) have sought and received exemption; it’s very possible that others might also justifiably be exempted. But I have no doubt there are jurisdictions where a continued tight federal rein is critical. It will be interesting to see how the Court deals with this one.
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