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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

So, You Think Nothing’s Changed

William Raspberry Washington Pos

When it comes to race in America, “nothing’s changed.”

It is an assessment I’ve heard from scores of serious-minded people - people who must know, at some level, that it simply isn’t true.

I’m speaking, for example, of people who were personally involved in the struggle to enfranchise blacks in the South, who won that struggle so overwhelmingly that a state as segregated as Mississippi used to be leads the nation in black elected officials, and who still will say with great earnestness and sadness that nothing’s changed.

Press them and they’ll acknowledge that blacks who once were denied the right to vote are now holding elected office. But then they’ll point to the Supreme Court’s congressional districting decision that makes it harder for blacks to elect members of Congress and tell you that, while it may have become more subtle in recent years, racism is racism and, beneath the civil surface, nothing’s changed.

This same dismal assessment applies to virtually every aspect of American life. The increase in the number of blacks climbing the corporate ladder, the domination of the National Basketball Association by black players, the fact that virtually any black high school graduate worth his or her salt can get into a decent college - these things prove nothing. A surreptitiously taped conversation involving Texaco managers, the summary punishment of Latrell Sprewell and the dearth of black law students at UC-Berkeley’s Boalt Hall prove - with near-mathematical certainty - that “nothing’s changed.”

How to explain it? Glass-half-empty myopia? Political gamesmanship? Whining as a substitute for analysis?

My own explanation goes back to that famous 1992 essay of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down.” The burden of that piece, based on the turn-of-the-century work of Emile Durkheim, was that the amount of deviancy in a community is always roughly equal to that community’s capacity for handling deviancy: for example, the number of police officers, courts and prison cells. If the deviancy-handling capacity is overtaxed, the response is to redefine some behavior as no longer deviant until the balance between deviancy and capacity is restored.

Or as Moynihan put it, we “define deviancy down.” The senator was explaining our growing tolerance for out-of-wedlock parenting, incivility and other formerly unacceptable behavior. But, as he also argued, if the amount of actual deviant behavior decreases, we are likely to define deviancy up - that is, to use our existing capacity to punish behavior that used to be considered tolerable.

A permutation of that theory may explain the nothing’s-changed phenomenon. Perhaps we have a finite capacity - organizational, institutional and political - for dealing with racial injustice. And maybe that capacity will tend always to be fully engaged, no matter the actual amount of racial injustice.

Thus, the mechanisms that once were used to deal with the most blatant forms of discrimination are not retired when Jim Crow ends; we merely define racist behavior up and proceed as though nothing’s changed.

Evidence that an apartment manager is turning away black applicants produces approximately the same political and emotional response once produced by cross-burnings. The feeling that one’s intellectual input is not taken at full value by a white corporate boss might trigger the same sort of rage that a whites-only sign might have triggered a generation ago.

I have a friend who very nearly lodged a formal protest against the hostess at the place where he regularly breakfasts. Why? She greeted white customers, but not him, with a cheery “good morning” smile.

His brain knew that her slight came nowhere close to the humiliating treatment he remembered from the days of unapologetic (and legally irremediable) racial exclusion. But his gut said: Nothing’s changed.

I don’t suggest that we should acknowledge the existence of some progress on the racial front and, on that basis, cease our strivings for full justice. I make a smaller point: that the victims of racial, gender or other injustices might find it useful to keep those injustices in perspective - to separate the major from the minor, the urgent from the merely annoying, in order to put the most effort where it is likely to do the most good.

It’s hard to get an intelligent sense of priorities about what to do next when you are convinced that the net effect of all you’ve done to date is that: Nothing’s changed.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post