A Better Direction: Race, Wrongs, and Remedies

For several decades in the mid-twentieth century the gap between black and white Americans steadily narrowed by most economic and social measures. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the civil rights movement seemed to fulfill its legal goals with the passage of several key civil rights laws and President Lyndon Johnson’s imposition of the first federal mandate for racial preferences.

Sadly, progress toward equality did not continue but halted. Why? And can we revive it? Liberals answer that blacks bear crippling wounds from past mistreatment and face continuing discrimination, if not from racial animus, from ostensibly neutral social systems that disadvantage them, often in subtle ways. According to this view, we must toughen anti-discrimination laws, revamp systems to eliminate disparate racial impacts, implement bigger, racially targeted social welfare programs, expand racial preferences, and perhaps make racial reparations.

A substantial minority of blacks