Introduction
The subjects examined in this book have taken on renewed urgency. The country is deeply polarized over race and politics, while challenges to American democracy have become increasingly evident. Rights and liberties that Americans have long taken for granted are being challenged, along with the governmental institutions and constitutional structures that protect them. An authoritarian movement that seeks to rewrite American history to serve its political agenda has also emerged in America.
My generation was the last to come of age during the era of Jim Crow. From my birth in 1945 through the first two decades of my life, I lived in a society where segregation was enforced by law and custom, voting rights were denied to millions of African Americans, and equal opportunity was severely restricted. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped dismantle that system. Those laws not only restored a measure of democracy to African Americans, but they also strengthened the principles of American democracy for all citizens.
For the past decade, I have devoted much of my intellectual life to studying race in America. Through On Race in America (onraceinamerica.com), I have written many essays and followed reporting, scholarship, and commentary from a broad range of national and international sources. That sustained engagement has deepened my understanding of how profoundly race remains connected to questions of democracy, citizenship, inequality, culture, and national identity. This book grows out of that work but also out of a lifetime spent observing the distance between America’s democratic ideals and its lived reality.
One of the guiding arguments of this book is that the freedom struggles waged by African Americans have significantly influenced the trajectory of American democracy. From abolition and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement and the continuing struggle for equal citizenship, African Americans have repeatedly compelled the nation to confront the contradiction between its democratic ideals and its practices. Without African American insight, resistance, sacrifice, and demands for full citizenship, American democracy would be a profoundly diminished version of what it is today.
Race has shaped the American experience from the nation’s founding to the present day. It has influenced where people lived, how they were educated, the opportunities they received, the institutions they built, and the stories they told about themselves and one another. To understand race is not simply to understand African Americans or other racial groups. It is to understand America. Here we apply race as the lens, history as the methodology, and democracy as the subject.
This book is organized into four parts:
I. Memory asks what we remember, what we forget, and why those choices matter.
II. Hierarchy explores the ideas and institutions that created and sustained systems of racial inequality.
III. Culture examines the extraordinary ways African Americans transformed struggle into achievement and built a cultural and institutional life that profoundly influenced the nation.
IV. The American Future considers the choices confronting a nation undergoing profound demographic, economic, political, and cultural change.