Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Civil Rights in the North

Posted on by Iansã

…[W]hites in the postwar era did lose much of their animosity toward blacks–in a 2007 survey, 87 percent of whites claimed to have black friends–but that transformation of the white psyche has paid many fewer dividends than expected. It may have helped to elect a mixed-race African-American to the presidency, but black babies still die more than twice as often as white babies, black men still live six years less on average than white men, black Americans are still almost six times as likely to be incarcerated as white Americans and black communities are still ravaged by levels of violence unfamiliar to white America: in a recent study, 70 percent of blacks reported that they knew someone who had been shot within the past five years. We seem, that is, to have arrived at a near-reversal of the state of affairs that Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal diagnosed in 1944: “The social paradox in the North is exactly this, that almost everybody is against discrimination in general but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs.” The paradox nowadays is that fewer whites practice discrimination in their personal affairs, but at the same time, a powerful majority countenances discrimination in general.

Sugrue’s brief against the “prejudice” school of social psychology is convincing and should be required reading for all those pundits who enthused that Barack Obama’s victory meant that the civil rights movement could hang up a “mission accomplished” sign. (For those unrepentant holdouts, here’s another sobering statistic: among whites nationwide, John McCain beat Obama by a twelve-point margin.)
…
…[The] larger challenge [the book faces [is] how to animate those damning statistics, and the lives of those who have struggled against them, so that they have the strength to take on the morality-play version of civil rights history, shift our cultural memory and galvanize a new debate about racial inequality. Against the traditional, and quite Christian, tale of sin, suffering, death and redemption, Sugrue offers a numbers-driven story of perseverance without relief–the myth of Sisyphus rather than A Pilgrim’s Progress. How to produce a PBS miniseries based on that?

Axé.

2 thoughts on “Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Civil Rights in the North”

  1. “How to produce a PBS miniseries on that?” Or worse, a History Channel documentary. Or worst, teach the story to children who MUST have that happy ending that divorces the past from the ongoing present.

    Reply

Leave a comment