Change of Heart: Positive Feelings about Interracial Relationships!
Great article in publication of American Association for Retired People:
By Adam Goodheart, May & June 2004 /AARP Magazine...
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?
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.
By Adam Goodheart, May & June 2004 /AARP Magazine...
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?
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.
