![]() ![]() Little understood and rarely acknowledged, these are the conditions that spawned Black Lives Matter and account for its having thrust itself, or been thrust, into the role of the vanguard of the multicultural left. Many of these same elites eventually embraced what has come to be taken as inevitable - America's emergence as "a majority-minority society." Lost in such rhetoric have been the continuing, even exacerbated challenges facing not only black Americans but also many white Americans. Somehow this conceit is supposed to not only justify prevailing levels of immigration but also suggest specifically that the interests of Hispanic and Asian immigrants are not at odds with those of African Americans. To square this circle, elites have embraced, or at least gone along with, the notion that the interests and moral claims of "racial minorities" - or alternatively, "people of color" - are all equivalent, if not indistinguishable. But they have also negatively affected our less affluent citizens, white as well as black. To be sure, these have benefitted many Americans, especially the well-off. Foremost among these have been the consequences of free trade and historically high levels of immigration, policies endorsed by elites across the political spectrum. And in recent decades they have been exacerbated by the economic, social, and cultural strains resulting from post-Cold War globalization. Such sentiments have waxed and waned among substantial segments of American society since the 1960s. Others feel that, after decades of controversial or downright objectionable policies ranging from compensatory programs to affirmative-action quotas, whatever debts were owed have long since been retired. Many believe that the nation's obligations to African Americans were never their responsibility in the first place. Yet millions of other Americans have had enough of such talk. Today, Americans are talking about black Americans a lot. This is precisely the void that BLM would soon fill. There was scant media attention to the problem of concentrated urban poverty (neighborhoods in which a high percentage of the residents fall beneath the federally designated poverty line), little or no discussion of inner-city challenges by mainstream political leaders, and even an apparent quiescence on the part of ghetto residents themselves. Through the second half of the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century, public attention to the plight of poor black Americans seemed to wane. In 1998, a third of a century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was adopted, Nathan Glazer argued that "this country has a special obligation to blacks that has not been fully discharged." Twelve years later, in 2010, he restated the problem more forcefully: "Perhaps the strangest thing about black America today is how little we talk about it." At that point, Glazer was echoing the observation of his esteemed Harvard colleague, sociologist William Julius Wilson: Yet in important respects, over this period America has evaded and even ignored the distinct concerns of its black citizens. Whatever their considerable political or intellectual shortcomings, the BLM movement, as well as efforts such as the New York Times's 1619 Project, have plainly tapped into the deeply felt belief of many Americans, white and black, that the legacy of this nation's history of slavery and Jim Crow remains to be reckoned with.Īfter three decades of identity politics, multiculturalism, and diversity talk, the notion that this problem has been neglected may strike many as preposterous. Yet the signs also reflect genuine outrage at repeated deadly encounters between black Americans and law enforcement. Such displays have much to do with the ease of, and increased demand for, virtue signaling in the age of social media. ![]() Before the winter snows arrived, we were struck by the number of Black Lives Matter (BLM) signs we encountered - in something like an inverse ratio to the number of black Americans who actually live here, or could afford to live here, or would even want to live here. For some months now, my wife and I have been taking long, pandemic-induced walks around the affluent suburb where we live just outside of Boston.
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