A new survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago shows that while older white Americans still question the long-term effects of slavery on modern race relations, younger people accept that slavery created a racial dynamic in the United States that carries over into the present day.
While 84% of African Americans, the people most affected by the legacy of slavery, said that the history of slavery “affects black people in American society today” either “quite a bit” or “a great deal,” only a bare majority of whites believed that it did. In fact, 45% of whites said slavery’s impacts were little felt today by African Americans. A group we might think of as “neutral” in the debate, Latinos, said by a wide margin of forty percentage points that slavery has a big impact on African Americans.
As big as the difference of opinion by race, there was an even bigger difference by age. Only 51% of Americans over the age of 60 think slavery still plays a large role in black lives, while 73% of those under 30 say it does.
I think that some of the difference by age may be due to education. When I was a student 50 years ago, we were taught that slavery ended and was done with in 1865. “How,” some of my contemporaries asked, “could black people still suffer from a system that had been dead for a hundred years?” Students graduating in the last two decades learn a different history. They are taught that to maintain slavery, American society developed rigid and brutal racial categories and laws to enforce the supremacy of whites. These laws and practices did not end after slavery itself was abolished. In addition, slavery socially stygmatized blacks as inferior. While most of the overtly repressive laws were abolished in the 1950s and 1960s, the social and economic discrimination has been harder to get rid of. So, hopefully young people can speak to their white parents and grandparents to help us develop a more thorough understanding of our history.
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