Progress is an essential tenet of America’s civic religion. As someone born and raised in England, where “not bad” is a compliment and “could be worse” is positively upbeat, this strikes me as an endearing national characteristic. But as with any religion, when faith is pitted against experience, faith generally wins. And at that point, optimism begins to look suspiciously like delusion.
Since 1977, when Gallup started asking people if they thought they’d be better off the following year, a huge majority have said yes. A 2005 poll revealed that even though only 2 percent of Americans describe themselves as rich, 31 percent thought it very likely or somewhat likely that they would “ever be rich.” And as in most religions, those who have the least are the most devout. Despite entrenched and growing inequality, the poorer people are, the more optimistic they are likely to be about their future financial health.
The sixtieth anniversary of
, the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation, offers yet another chance to gauge the progress toward racial equality in America. During this bumper period of civil rights commemorations—the current decade presents a litany of markers, from the uprisings in Birmingham to Martin Luther King’s assassination—the official mantra rarely changes: we have come a long way, but we have further to go. “To dismiss the magnitude of this progress…dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years,” said Barack Obama, celebrating the March on Washington last year at the Lincoln Memorial. “But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete.”
Who could argue with that? Half a century ago, America was officially an apartheid state, with black people denied the basic rights of citizenship in large swaths of the country. Then the signs came down; the laws were overturned; the doors to the polling stations were prized open. The notion that the work is proceeding perpetuates the myth: America has no reverse gear—we just keep going forward.
But the awkward truth is that when it comes to the goals laid down by the civil rights movement in general and
in particular, America is actually going backward. Schools are resegregating, legislation is being gutted, it’s getting harder to vote, large numbers are being deprived of their basic rights through incarceration, and the economic disparities between black and white are growing. In many areas, America is becoming more separate and less equal.
According to research recently conducted by ProPublica, “black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades.” A recent
article illustrated how this trend is largely by design. In suburbs across the region, wealthier whites have been seceding from their inner- city school districts and setting up academic laagers of their own. The result is a concentration of race and class disadvantage in a system with far fewer resources. In a 2012 report, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project noted: “Nationwide, the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates (64%) are low-income.”
