Photography by Daniela Stallinger
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Change of Heart
By Adam Goodheart, May & June 2004
A landmark survey reveals that most Americans are open to sharing their life, work, and even love with people of a different color. So why do tensions remain?
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The rural Maryland county where I live, barely an hour from the Washington,
D.C., Beltway, is a place whose soul is not just divided but fractured. There
are still small towns here that feel like the Old South, where whites talk
about "colored people" and blacks in their late 40s remember such
things as farming with mules and horses and attending segregated schools. But
there are newer communities, too: sprawling tracts of identical suburban houses
whose middle-class residents—black as well as white—think little
about the past and care even less. In their midst, a small but growing Hispanic
population has started to thrive, drawn by the economic opportunities that
change has brought.
Many parts of our country today look something like this. When President
Lyndon Johnson's Kerner Commission famously prophesied in 1968 a future of
"two societies, one black, one white," it was wrong. What we have now
is a multiplicity of Americas, often sharing the same neighborhood, but rarely
the same mindset.
The good news is that in the 50 years since the Supreme Court ruled in favor
of school desegregation in the case of Brown v. Board of Education,
there have been some dramatic changes in Americans' attitudes toward race
and equality. Today, most Americans—55 percent—think that the state
of race relations is either very or somewhat good, according to a landmark
telephone survey of 2,002 people conducted last November and December by the
Gallup Organization for AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
(LCCR). Yet disheartening divisions between the races persist. Such is the
complicated picture painted by "Civil Rights and Race Relations," the
largest and most comprehensive race-relations survey of blacks, Hispanics, and
whites that Gallup has ever undertaken.
The most astonishing progress has been made in two areas that hit closest to
home for most Americans: interracial relationships and the neighborhoods we
live in. Consider that 70 percent of whites now say they approve of marriage
between whites and blacks, up from just 4 percent in a 1958 Gallup poll. Such
open-mindedness extends across racial lines: 80 percent of blacks and 77
percent of Hispanics also said they generally approve of interracial marriage.
Perhaps even more remarkable, a large majority of white respondents—66
percent—say they would not object if their own child or grandchild chose
a black spouse. Blacks (86 percent) and Hispanics (79 percent) were equally
accepting about a child or grandchild's marrying someone of another race.
When it comes to choosing neighbors, an inclusive spirit again prevails:
majorities of blacks, whites, and Hispanics all say they would rather live in
racially mixed neighborhoods than surround themselves with only members of
their own group. "It's hard now to imagine the level of
fear and anxiety that Americans felt about these issues just a few decades
ago," says Taylor Branch, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his history
of the Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,
1954-1963. "The idea [among whites] that you might have a black
colleague or customer or neighbor has now become relatively commonplace except
in a few scattered pockets." Similarly, slight majorities of whites and
Hispanics and a little less than half of blacks think that minorities should
try to blend in with the rest of American culture rather than maintain their
own separate identities.
The data did show a significant generation gap: young Americans (ages 18-29)
of all races were more likely than older respondents (65-plus) to favor the
retention of distinctive cultures. But this is not necessarily a step backward.
"Younger people are more likely to have been exposed in school to the idea
that multiculturalism is a positive thing, that it's not necessarily bad
when certain groups desire to be among their own kind," suggests the
eminent Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson. "This is a phenomenon
of just the last couple of decades."
When it comes to future expectations, however, in certain respects the
picture is as bleak as ever. Sixty-three percent of Americans think that race
relations will always be a problem for our country—a view that varies
little whether the respondents are white, black, or Hispanic. That's up sharply from the 42 percent who felt similarly in a study done in
1963, when most Americans were seeing television images of African Americans
withstanding police dogs and fire hoses but believed the Civil Rights Movement
would eventually prevail. (Indeed, respondents over 65, who remember the 1960s
well, were the ones most likely to remain optimistic, while those under
30—of all races—were the least hopeful.)
"There was a sense then that eventually truth and justice would win
out," recalls Julian Bond, who as a founder of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led some of the earliest sit-ins and is now
chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). "Maybe people are looking back and realizing we haven't come
as far as we'd hoped."
Share Your Civil Rights Story
Read personal stories of the struggle for civil rights or share your own at
the Voices of Civil Rights
website.
A large majority of Americans of all ages and races does agree that the
20th-century crusade for civil rights was a watershed in our nation's
history. In addition, most people of all backgrounds also believe that the
movement has benefited not just blacks and other minorities but all Americans.
This is a remarkable degree of unanimity for an issue that violently divided so
many families and communities just a generation or two ago.
"The Civil Rights Movement has had enormous collateral effects for
everyone from gays to members of religious minorities, and especially for
women," Branch says. "These effects have been felt in every
university, every corporation, and even, I'd venture to say, almost every
American household, down to the level of who does the dishes and changes the
diapers."
But when it comes to gauging the ultimate success or failure of the
struggle, members of different races diverge sharply. While 56 percent of
whites say they believe that "all or most" of the goals of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement have been achieved, only 21
percent of blacks agree with them. A similar margin divides
whites' and blacks' opinions on how much of a role the movement will
continue to have: 66 percent of blacks think it will be "extremely
important" to the United States in the future, compared with only 23
percent of whites. "Many whites have a misconception of the Civil Rights
Movement as something with a few limited goals that have already been
achieved," Branch suggests.
Similarly, the AARP-LCCR survey found vast gulfs between different
groups' perceptions of how minorities are treated today. Seventy-six
percent of white respondents think that blacks are treated "very
fairly" or "somewhat fairly," but only 38 percent of blacks
agree with them; nearly one-third, in fact, say that members of their race are
treated "very unfairly." (Hispanics fall in the middle: they are more
or less evenly divided about the treatment of their own group as well as that
of blacks.) And while 61 percent of whites believe that blacks have achieved
equality in the realm of job opportunities, just 12 percent of African
Americans concur.
How is it that we can all share the same land, the same history, and yet
reach such different conclusions? The disparities start to make sense when you
look at the most fundamental measure of each group's current happiness:
economic prosperity.
Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to say that their personal
finances are in "poor shape"; they are also more than twice as likely
to say they worry constantly about whether their family's income will be
enough to pay the bills. Hispanics appear to be feeling similar or even greater
degrees of financial stress. And indeed, their concerns are legitimate:
nationally, the median household income is $35,500 among blacks, $40,000 among
Hispanics, and $55,318 among whites, according to the most recent figures
available from the U.S. Census Bureau.
"The fact that
there is still an enormous wealth gap between blacks and whites is evidence of
the continuing legacy of segregation and even of slavery."
"Were we to have solved all the problems that we tried to take on,
there would be relative parity today," Bond says. "The fact that
there is still an enormous wealth gap between blacks and whites is evidence of
the continuing legacy of segregation and even of slavery."
What explains these persistent economic disparities? Continued prejudice,
plain and simple. Half a century after Brown, a minuscule 8 percent of
African Americans could claim that they had ever in their lives been denied
admittance to a school on account of race. Yet other forms of discrimination
persist. A third reported that they had been passed over for a job because they
are black, a third said they had been blocked from promotion, and a quarter
said they had been denied an opportunity to rent or buy housing. Only slightly
fewer Hispanics said they had experienced similar forms of prejudice.
Even more than such dramatic instances of racism, it is the less obvious,
day-to-day examples of prejudice that are a continuing, grinding burden on
minorities in America. Nearly half of all blacks reported having experienced at
least one form of discrimination in the last 30 days, in settings ranging from
stores (26 percent) to restaurants and theaters (18 percent) to public
transportation (10 percent). The figures for Hispanics were at nearly the same
level. Perhaps most troubling of all, a surprising 22 percent of blacks and 24
percent of Hispanics said they had, in the past month, been the victims of
prejudice in an interaction with the police.
For the record, a significant number of white Americans maintain that they,
too, are sometimes penalized on the basis of race: 21 percent report that they
have been the victims of reverse discrimination, especially in the workplace.
And many seem unaware or even dismissive of continuing prejudice against other
groups: nearly half insist that society treats them no better than blacks. But
the majority of whites—52 percent—say they support affirmative
action for blacks, as do 81 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics. So
while an uncomfortably large number of Americans remain in denial about
persistent discrimination against minorities, an even larger percentage, it
seems, want to do the right thing.
Like the American countryside, the AARP-LCCR survey results are a landscape
of layers: old outlooks and new perceptions, 20th-century memories and
21st-century expectations. One of the most unexpected results came when the
polltakers asked participants to consider the prediction that by 2050 the
majority of Americans will be nonwhite. Only about 13 percent of each group
said this would be a bad thing; most Americans said it simply won't
matter.
So, as their country changes, perhaps Americans—more than they are
often given credit for—are ready to change along with it. Indeed, the
revolution that Brown started will likely continue through the next 50 years
and beyond. "We did much," Bond says, "but there's much left
to do."
Adam Goodheart is a fellow of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the
American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
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