Journey for racial justice is not over

Eli Hager:

In our national conversation about race and other forms of inequality, presidential candidates and the media have fostered a consensus that the civil rights movement is finished. The February groundbreaking for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for example, celebrated the "history" of racial injustice. Republican candidate Mitt Romney noted that month that we shouldn't be "concerned" about economic injustice -- by now, he averred, that problem has been solved. Even Martin Luther King Jr. has been widely reimagined as a genial, nonpartisan man who would be satisfied with the legalistic gains black Americans have achieved yet unconcerned about their substandard socioeconomic status. Civil rights activists who disagree are said to be stuck in the 1960s or harbor, as Romney put it, a "resentment of success." They are accused of playing the "race card," engaging in "class warfare" or generally disrespecting the sound-bite-consensus that this country has moved beyond the racial and economic complications of its past.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 16, 2012 1:10 AM
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