Race in America

Americans with short time horizons often think that racism in the U.S. is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, media incitements to the contrary, racism, at least white racism, is probably at historically low levels right now.

It's so difficult to find examples of white racism that race hustlers have tried to persuade us that the difficulty in finding it is proof of how insidious it is.

Here are some facts from an essay by Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch:

Last September, American support for interracial marriage hit an all-time high. Ninety-four percent of Americans approve not merely of interracial marriage, but specifically of marriages between white people and black people. I’m not sure it’s necessary for my purposes, but I’m happy to concede that the “real” number might be a bit lower.

Polling on such questions is always open to “social desirability bias”—people say what they think they’re supposed to say. But even if there’s some of that at work—and there probably is—that too is a good thing.

In 1958, when Gallup first asked the question, only 4 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage. I’m sure some of those people were lying, too. In other words, what is considered socially acceptable to say—even to a stranger on a phone—has moved massively against racism.

As I’ve written many times, this is hardly the only data point about how America has become less racist since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

For starters, we had a two-term black president and currently have a black vice president. In 1965, there were no black senators or governors and only five black members of the House of Representatives. In 2021, there were 57 black members of the House of Representatives, a statistically proportionate number to the black population (13 percent).

State legislatures are somewhat below that benchmark—about 9 percent in 2015—but even so, there are hundreds of them, most notably in the Old South. Georgia has 66, Mississippi 51, South Carolina 44, North Carolina 37, Alabama 31, etc.

“In 1942,” Marian Tupy, who runs the invaluable HumanProgress.org, wrote a few years ago, “some 68 percent of white Americans surveyed thought that blacks and whites should go to separate schools.

By 1995, only 4 percent held that view. In 1958, 45 percent of white Americans would ‘maybe’ or ‘definitely’ move if a black family moved in next door. By 1997, that fell to 2 percent.”

In surveys asking whether you would be opposed to a neighbor of a different race moving next door, America doesn’t come out as the least racist country in the world, but we do far better than many countries. We beat Germany and France (3.7 percent), Spain (12), Italy (11.7), Mexico (11.4), Russia (14.7), China (18), Turkey (41.21!), and even Finland (6.8).

My only point is that America has made monumental and, to a significant degree, historically unprecedented racial progress.

It's one of the tragic flaws of human nature that we seek to divide ourselves along differences, but race is only one of those differences. We segregate ourselves along religious, gender, political, socioeconomic, geographical, ethnic, and linguistic lines.

Blacks do it, whites do it, pretty much everyone does it, but for some reason we think it's especially problematic when the divides fall along racial lines and when whites are the perpetrators.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to live if you're black and it's not hard to see why. There's more opportunity here for blacks than there is in any other country in the world, even predominately black countries, especially predominately black countries.

This is why millions of non-whites are seeking to emigrate to the United States. It's certainly not because they think that the U.S. is a racist hell-hole. It's because they know that they have more opportunity to succeed here than anywhere else in the world.

In summary, there are two things I wish to stress about race in America: There's far less racism in this country in 2024 than we're led to believe, and blacks are just as guilty of what racism there is today as is any other race.

When our media and race-hustlers seek to ladle on the racial guilt by recounting stories, many from over fifty years ago, about racial injustices, simply ask yourself, or them, why, if the contemporary U.S. is so awful, so many non-white people are trying so desperately to get in.