Why the Left is pessimistic about racial equality in America
Hudson Crozier
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When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, it would have been hard for its supporters to imagine that roughly half the country would consider it a mediocre victory decades later. But that appears to be the case.
Pew Research Center asked people how much progress the nation has made in the last 60 years regarding racial equality. Fifty-two percent of people think America made “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of progress, while only 38% of Democrats agree. Forty-three percent of Democrats see “some progress,” and almost 1 in 5 see “not much” or “no progress at all.”
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Shockingly, it’s possible that this level of optimism is unusually high for Democrats. In 2021, Pew Research found that just 29% of them believe America has made “a lot” of progress toward racial equality in the past 50 years. At any rate, a strong and misguided pessimism is persistent among most liberals.
A large reason is that the Left believes racism remains strong on a “systemic” level. To continue believing America is so horrible for minorities, this idea is necessary to compensate for the fact that America is obviously far less racist on a social level today.
Until civil rights legislation came along, it was legal for private companies and governments at every level to openly discriminate against nonwhite people. The country took tremendous steps to ensure equal opportunity and colorblind standards. When it came to voting rights, job applications, and criminal justice, the theory was that our systems would not penalize skin color.
That goal was never good enough for the Left. The philosophy that has dominated for so long says that people do not have equal rights until they experience equal outcomes. It goes like this: even if laws and policies are colorblind on paper, they must be racist if more nonwhites are punished under them. And even if it’s illegal to deny jobs or housing based on race, the system must be racist if some demographics don’t end up with them as often.
One cannot prove racist intent from statistical disparities. Underlying this assumption is simply factual laziness, and underlying that is a desire to stay pessimistic. It is also impossible to eliminate disparities because there will always be a million factors other than racism causing them to occur. After decades of discriminating in favor of minorities in areas such as education, they still persist strongly.
This thinking creates a vicious cycle so that America will always seem like a white supremacist country. And our institutions have promoted it for so long that many people are numb to the undeniable progress that has been made. Now, the end of Jim Crow segregation and rampant lynchings are seen as a small matter.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.