【Lesson 1 Good News about Racial Progress
The remaining divisions in American society should
not blind us to a half-century of dramatic change
By Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom
In the Perrywood community of Upper Marlboro, Md.1, near Washington, D.C., homes cost between $160,000 and $400,000. The lawns are green and the amenities appealing—including a basketball court.
Low-income teen-agers from Washington started coming there. The teens were black, and they were not welcomed. The homeowners association hired off-duty police as security, and they would ask the ballplayers whether they “belonged” in the area. The association s newsletter noted the “eyesore” at the basketball court.
But the story has a surprising twist: many of the homeowners were black too. “We started having problems with the young men, and unfortunately they are our people,” one resident told a reporter from the Washington Post. “But what can you do?”
The homeowners didn t care about the race of the basketball players. They were outsiders—intruders. As another resident remarked, “People who don t live here might not care about things the way we do. Seeing all the new houses going up, someone might be tempted.”
It s a telling story. Lots of Americans think that almost all blacks live in inner cities. Not true. Today many blacks own homes in suburban neighborhoods—not just around Washington, but outside Atlanta, Denver and other cities as well.
That s not the only common misconception Americans have about race. For some of the misinformation, the media are to blame. A reporter in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, writes that the economic gap between whites and blacks has widened. He offers no evidence. The picture drawn of racial relations is even bleaker. In one poll, for instance, 85 percent of blacks, but only 34 percent of whites, agreed with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. That racially divided response made headline news. Blacks and whites, media accounts would have us believe, are still separate and hostile. Division is a constant theme, racism another.
To be sure, racism has not disappeared, and race relations could — and probably will — improve. But the serious inequality that remains is less a function of racism than of the racial gap in levels of educational attainment, single parenthood and crime. The bad news has been exaggerated, and the good news neglected. Consider these three trends:
A black middle class has arrived. Andrew Young recalls the day he was mistaken for a valet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. It was an infuriating case of mistaken identity for a man who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
But it wasn t so long ago that most blacks were servants—or their equivalent. On the eve of
