Steven R. Lerman
Dean for Graduate Education
I vividly recall as a child traveling to the southern parts of the country during a time when facilities such as bathrooms and public drinking fountains were clearly marked as being for whites and blacks. I recall the feeling of moral superiority I derived from the sure knowledge that we in the northeast were innocent of such institutionalized racism. Then, as I grew older, I heard people around me routinely use racial epithets while others around them nodded their heads in agreement. Zoning laws, school districting and in some cases outright intimidation were routinely used to ensure that public schools systems and neighborhoods in the "enlightened north" were every bit as segregated as those in the "the bigoted south."
While we have largely eliminated legalized racial discrimination in our laws, widespread racial bias is still manifest in housing and employment practices. We continue to have large, and in some areas growing, racial inequities in the quality of public education, family income, health care, criminal justice and other aspects of everyday life that are central to a society's well-being.
The hard truth is that racial attitudes are deeply engrained in our collective psyche; regional differences matter far less than we would like to believe. All of us live today with the legacies of slavery, legalized discrimination and socially accepted prejudice. This is true whether you trace your ancestry to people who got off the Mayflower or you arrived as an immigrant yesterday.
The problems of race relations in the United States now lie in that gray zone between being "better than a generation ago" and "nowhere near what they need to be." The more troubling question, at least for me, is whether we have given up on sincere efforts to make things better in the future than they are right now. Have we lost the collective will to make true racial equality one of our country's grand challenges? Are we willing to accept the status quo as either good enough or the best we can do? If this is true, then we have abandoned one of our noblest goals, and we have become far more impoverished in spirit than anyone could have imagined. We simply cannot allow this to happen.