Racism endangers all that’s good in America.
 | | Demonstrators protest the death of George Floyd on Sunday, May 31, near the White House in Washington.Alex Brandon/Associated Press |
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These are times of grief for those of us who love America and its promise; I know people who have been spontaneously breaking into tears, and the rest of us are walking around in a kind of stupor. |
Every day, it seems, brings another indicator of our decline: the can-do nation has become a land that can’t deal with a pandemic, the leader of the free world has become a destroyer of international institutions, the birthplace of modern democracy is ruled by would-be authoritarians. How can everything be going so wrong, so fast? |
Well, we know the answer. As Joe Biden put it, “the original sin of slavery stains our country today.” |
Non-American friends sometimes ask me why the world’s richest major nation doesn’t have universal health care. The answer is race: we almost got universal coverage in 1947, but segregationists blocked it out of fear that it would lead to integrated hospitals (which Medicare actually did do in the 1960s.) Most of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would bear the great bulk of the cost, are former slave states. |
The Italian-American economist Alberto Alesina suddenly died on March 23; among his best work was a joint paper that examined the reasons America doesn’t have a European-style welfare state. The answer, documented at length, was racial division: in America, too many of us think of the beneficiaries of support as Those People, not like us. |
Now, America is actually a far less racist society than it used to be. In 1969 only 17 percent of white Americans approved of black-white marriage. Even during Ronald Reagan’s first term that number was only up to 38 percent. As of 2013 it was 84 percent. (As it happens, my wife is African-American.) |
But as George Floyd could tell you, if he were still alive, racism is far from gone. And while Americans are increasingly tolerant as individuals, racial tensions continue to be exacerbated by cynical politicians, who exploit white racism to sell policies that actually hurt workers, whatever their skin color. |
And racial antagonism is, of course, what made it possible for Donald Trump to become president. It’s hard to imagine someone less suited for the job, intellectually and morally. But he’s a very good hater, who has conjured up many demons — there are far more anti-Semitic insults and threats in my inbox than ever before. And his appeal to prejudice has given him a devoted base. |
So now we’re at a moment of crisis, when all the good things America stands for are endangered by the poisonous legacy of our original sin. Will we make it through? Honestly, I’m not at all sure that we will. |
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