The New Road

Generation by generation, getting better

I heard a really interesting statistic from Paul Krugman recently, he said that in the mid-1970s 30% of Americans thought that inter-racial marriage was 'acceptable', and that this year, thirty year later, 77% of Americans think it's 'acceptable'. That's a huge shift from overwhelmingly negative, to overwhelmingly positive in just 30 years. It's a huge cultural shift in the right direction.

It certainly mirrors what I have seen. Growing up I remember clear casual racism among my parents and their peers; jokes, concern about housing prices, issues at work and so on. When I started working in the mid-80s I found that race based jokes and such were discouraged. Now I would say that straight up racist talk will get you severely reprimanded if not outright fired. Again, a shift to the better.

I think it's just a shift among the generations. The blatant racism of the generation from the 40s and 50s is dying out and giving way to the boomers who were by-in-large more accepting. And they are in turn giving way to my generation whose views on gay marriage are largely favorable. And I'm sure my daughters generation and her peers will be even more accepting than I am, and so on. It's the natural progression of things when you don't have artificial institutionalized bigotry like slavery or apartheid.

I'm optimistic. Bill O'Reilly's audience is dying, literally, and along with it his ideology. Watch his ads, it's all about the retirements homes and reverse mortgages. The same thing with my local radio station KSFO. They are the radio station of barber shops. And as the last of the barber shops give way to Supercuts, so will their audience and ideology. Sure there will be holdouts, there always are. Just like there are kids today who like to the big band music of the 40s. But bigotry in America is slowly fading away. Becoming part of our collective memory as a sad chapter from a less civilized era.