Our Racial Crisis Has Not Been "Solved"

Working toward racial justice is crucial to our democracy

In this week’s podcast episode, Dr. Kaye Whitehead said that race has been diluted in the discussion around the upcoming election because people have come to believe that we have “solved” the racial crisis. 

Obviously that’s not true - so, let’s talk about that. 

When this country finally abolished slavery in the 1860s, we had to figure out how to create a society where race no longer determined status. Lawmakers started to pass race-conscious laws with the intent of helping those who had been enslaved become full citizens, but the opposition was too strong and Reconstruction came to an abrupt end twelve short years later. 

Next up was the nearly 100-year period known as Jim Crow. During this period people of color were violently subjected to racist laws, segregation, and a vigilante system of white supremacy that attempted to keep them as second class citizens. With racism built into our laws and society, America was prevented from becoming a true democracy.

During the civil rights era, a series of laws to dismantle systemic racism were passed. Today this is often celebrated as the period when the nation finally triumphed over its original sin of slavery, but that notion ignores the ongoing racism and inequality that exists in America. Right-wing politicians love to quote Martin Luther King Jr., in their attempts to act like racism is a thing of the past. 

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”, is one of their favorites. 

But, we never hear them speak of the Letter from Birmingham Jail where King addresses eight white fellow clergymen. They had criticized his protest campaign in a joint statement published in the Birmingham News. He responds to that statement in his letter and defends nonviolent protest, pushes the issue of civil rights, and puts out a rallying cry for fence-sitters to join the fight, even if it meant that they, too, might end up in jail.

Then, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court began to waver on programs aimed at repairing the harms of racial segregation, and this idea of colorblindness was used as a rationale that dismisses both the history of racial disadvantage and its continuing disparities.

Conservative groups still lead these efforts today, like last year when the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in university admissions in the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.

Edward Blum is the man behind this case and in August of 2023 his nonprofit, American Alliance for Equal Rights, filed a lawsuit against the firm, Fearless Fund, claiming that their grant program, Strivers Grant Contest, that focuses on women of color, is “unfair.” 

Earlier this month, an appeals court ruled that the grant program for Black women business owners is discriminatory, serving up another victory for groups like Blum’s that are waging legal battles against corporate diversity programs.

In Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap - How a civil rights ideal got hijacked, she says that these groups have “co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.”

She also quotes Justice Thurgood Marshall from a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

Jones stressed in her essay that working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it is also crucial to our democracy, and that if we are to preserve our multiracial democracy, we must find a way to address our original sin.

We have to understand that race is an issue in the upcoming election because like Dr. Kaye Whitehead said in this week’s episode, “It’s still an issue in everything we deal with in this country.”

(Photo credit: Shuran Huang for The New York Times)