Obama points to ‘ white progress,’ comic says
Chris Rock’s riff on changing attitudes bears sad ring of truth, writes Christopher Ingraham.
Chris Rock wants you to stop talking about “black progress,” and consider “white progress” instead.
In an interview with Frank Rich of Vulture, he says “to say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.”
“So, to say (U.S. President Barack) Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president,” Rock said.
“That’s not black progress. That’s white progress.
“There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. ... The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beau- tiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced.
“Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”
Those last two sentences are at once sad, hilarious and quantifiably true.
If Obama had been born 50 years earlier, for instance, he would literally have had zero chance of becoming president — in 1958, only 38 per cent of Americans said they would vote for a black presiden- tial candidate, according to Gallup. By 2012, that number was 96 per cent.
That 58- percentage- point change didn’t happen because blacks somehow became smarter and more qualified relative to whites during that period, but rather because many — although by no means all — white Americans abandoned the overt prejudices that kept talented blacks from getting ahead.
The General Social Survey, a massive public-opinion poll conducted since 1972, documents some of these changes in white attitudes.
In 1972, for instance, nearly twothirds of whites said homeowners should be able to discriminate against blacks when selling their homes. That number fell to 28 per cent by 2008.
The share of white Americans who would disapprove a family member’s marriage to a black person has fallen rapidly since the 1990s, yet remains rather astonishingly high. Fully one quarter of whites said they would oppose such a marriage in 2008, the same year America elected the son of a white mother and a black father to the highest office in the land.
More than four in 10 white Americans still say whites are more hard-working than blacks, and one in five say whites are more intelligent. Similarly, a majority of whites say that lack of willpower among blacks is driving racial inequality, and one in 10 say that blacks are poor simply because of a lesser ability to learn.
You can read the data two ways: as a story of changing white attitudes — “becoming nicer” — over time, or as a marker of just how much progress remains to be made.