In his New York Times column on Sunday, Bob Herbert offers a useful reminder of how bad things used to be not very long ago, and observes, quite sensibly:
So in some sense it’s remarkable that by the end of the 20th century so many battles against racism had been won and a broad national consensus in favor of a more tolerant, more inclusive society had been reached.
The crucial point that he misses is that the “broad national consensus” that he rightly celebrates was, finally, agreement on the fundamental principle that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong.
That consensus was shattered when the civil rights forces — which had advanced that principle consistenly since the 1830s — abandoned it abruptly in the late 1960s, after its great victory in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Herbert argues that the colorblind principle is discredited by the fact that it is espoused now by some who were racists back then. That is no more true than his mirror-image fallacy of believing that the principle was discredited when he and his friends abandoned it.
