As Racism Recedes, More Blacks Shift to Political Center
"What more do you people want?" strikes most black Americans as a naive question.
After all, the abuse of racial profiling remains one of the nation's most serious problems (although some profiling will remain necessary in troubled communities to protect their own residents from harm). Racial discrepancies, subtle but decisive, persist in areas such as bank lending and healthcare. Black men are tragically overrepresented in the prison population.
Yet these remnants of pre-Civil Rights Act America hardly constitute the "reign of white supremacy" that some blacks still decry. The United States now has a lower percentage of black families living below the poverty line than at any time in the nation's history, and the figure is falling with every census count.
It is difficult to see "apartheid" in a country in which the secretary of State, the national security advisor, the CEOs of Time Warner, American Express and Merrill Lynch, the presidents of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the American Bar Assn. and even the last James Bond and Austin Powers girls are African American.
Blacks before the 1960s could barely have imagined racial preferences ardently defended by white administrators or that there would be black studies departments in universities nationwide. Black politics in the United States are reflecting this changing reality. Increasingly, the African American grimly convinced that the only difference in American race relations between 1964 and 2004 is in window dressing and etiquette is less an archetype than a personality type.
There are no indications that voting Republican will become the norm among blacks any time soon -- and a good thing, too, because being a slam-dunk voting bloc for a single party means that neither party has any reason to court your vote with meaningful proposals. But more and more, black politics are moving to a constructive center, wary of sad realities but open to the fact that change does happen.
In a poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in 2000, for example, 74% of blacks were registered as Democrats. By 2002, that number had fallen to 63%, with about one in four blacks -- many of them younger voters -- registered as independents.
In a 1995 Gallup poll, almost all blacks favored affirmative action in the form of outreach to minorities, but 78% were opposed to hiring minority applicants when they were less qualified than white ones.
