Facing the Past, continued

When will we achieve the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.?  Joshua DuBois offers a different perspective from the last post.  

My first instinct has always been to answer that open-ended inquiry with an equally squishy response, one that we will hear again and again from politicians, preachers, and activists during the next week: “We’ve come so far, but we have so much further to go.” I’ve said this line myself, as recently as this past Wednesday, in the pulpit of a Black Baptist church. 

It’s a phrase that sounds practical, realistic, and even useful. But the problem is: I think it’s wrong. And more than just wrong, it is perhaps the primary barrier to real racial progress in this nation…. 

Instead of being in a state of perpetual struggle, an endless existential march, I believe there is far more evidence to support the idea that we are right on the verge of Zion. And the only thing that will stop us from getting there is the hopeless belief that we can’t. 

For example, in the early 1970s, following the major accomplishments of the civil-rights movement, 28 percent of black men dropped out of high school. Today that number is around 14 percent. For whites, it’s 12 percent. So we don’t have “so much further to go”—we have 2 percent to go. Tough, but doable. 

Four decades ago, the life expectancy for African-Americans was 66 years old. Today, it is 72. For whites, the number is 77. We don’t have many hills left to climb—we have to close the gap by five years of life, when we’ve already done six. Difficult, but possible.   

One major area where our country has actually fallen woefully behind is in the percentage of young black men who are incarcerated, shooting up from 2 percent in the 1970s to 5 percent today, while the percentage of whites in jail grew by less than 1 percent in that same period. Attorney General Eric Holder recently documented some of the reasons for this phenomenon, but he also proposed some real, practical solutions. This is a problem we can actually fix.