the extremes are a risk factor for violent ethnic conflicts such as civil wars and deadly riots.19
Now imagine policies that are designed to be the diametric opposite of the exclusionary ones. They would not only erase any law in the books that singled out an ethnic minority for unfavorable treatment, but would swing to the opposite pole and mandate anti-exclusionary, un-eliminationist policies, such as the integration of schools, educational head starts, and racial or ethnic quotas and preferences in government, business, and education. These policies are generally called remedial discrimination, though in the United States they go by the name affirmative action. Whether or not the policies deserve credit for preventing a backsliding of developed countries into genocide and pogroms, they obviously are designed as the photographic negative of the exclusionary policies that caused or tolerated such violence in the past. And they have been riding a wave of popularity throughout the world.
In a report called “The Decline of Ethnic Political Discrimination 1950–2003,” the political scientists Victor Asal and Amy Pate examined a dataset that records the status of 337 ethnic minorities in 124 countries since 1950.20 (It overlaps with Harff’s dataset on genocide, which we examined in chapter 6.) Asal and Pate plotted the percentage of countries with policies that discriminate against an ethnic minority, together with those that discriminate in favor of them. In 1950, as figure 7–5 shows, 44 percent of governments had invidious discriminatory policies; by 2003 only 19 percent did, and they were outnumbered by the governments that had remedial policies.
When Asal and Pate broke down the figures by region, they found that minority groups are doing particularly well in the Americas and Europe, where little official discrimination remains. Minority groups still experience legal discrimination in Asia, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and especially the Middle East, though in each case there have been improvements since the end of the Cold War.21 The authors conclude, “Everywhere the weight of official discrimination has lifted. While this trend began in Western democracies in the late 1960s, by the 1990s it had reached all parts of the world.”22
Not only has official discrimination by governments been in decline, but so has the dehumanizing and demonizing mindset in individual people. This claim may seem incredible to the many intellectuals who insist that the United States is racist to the bone. But as we have seen throughout this book, for every moral advance in human history there have been social commentators who insist that we’ve never had it so bad. In 1968 the political scientist Andrew Hacker predicted that African Americans would soon rise up and engage in “dynamiting of bridges and water mains, firing of buildings, assassination of public officials and private luminaries. And of course there will be occasional rampages.”23 Undeterred by the dearth of dynamitings and the rarity of rampages, he followed up in 1992 with Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, whose message was “A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that the coming century will see it closed.”24 Though the 1990s were a decade in which Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Colin Powell were repeatedly named in polls as among the most admired Americans, gloomy assessments on race relations dominated literary life. The legal scholar Derrick Bell, for example, wrote in a 1992 book subtitled The Permanence of Racism that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.”25
FIGURE 7–5. Discriminatory and affirmative action policies, 1950–2003
Source: Graph from Asal & Pate, 2005.
The sociologist Lawrence Bobo and his colleagues decided to see for themselves by examining the history of white Americans’ attitudes toward African Americans.26 They found that far from being indestructible, overt racism has been steadily disintegrating. Figure 7–6 shows that in the 1940s and early 1950s a majority of Americans said they were opposed to black children attending white schools, and as late as the early 1960s almost half said they would move away if a black family moved in next door. By the 1980s the percentages with these attitudes were in the single digits.
Figure 7–7 tells us that in the late 1950s only 5 percent of white Americans approved of interracial marriage. By the late 1990s two-thirds approved of it, and in 2008 almost 80 percent did. With some questions, like “Should blacks have access to any job?” the percentage of racist responses had dropped so low by the early 1970s that pollsters dropped them from their questionnaires.27
FIGURE 7–6. Segregationist attitudes in the United States, 1942–1997
Sources: “Separate schools”: