Progress is not only possible, it has consistently occurred since the dawn of the 20th century - prefer overwhelming statistical evidence

Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to an end or nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and sexuality of women.1 People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation.2 We call these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying degrees, in most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of what we call civil rights or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights—the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall—is a stirring chapter in the story of human progress.3 The rights of racial minorities, women, and gay people continue to advance, each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year 2017 saw the completion of two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement movingly captured by First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” Barack Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote; she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year. In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.4 And in 2015, just a dozen years after it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme Court guaranteed the right of marriage to same-sex couples. But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society—which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing after decades of struggle. Like other forms of progressophobia, the denial of advances in rights has been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly publicized killings by American police officers of unarmed African American suspects, some of them caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an epidemic of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. And one of the most heinous crimes in American history took place in 2016 when Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three. The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history of the universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of the American electoral system in 2016. During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we had never made progress in the first place. The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of the current that carries equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond? Does it easily change direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a mighty stream? I’ll end with a coda about progress in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children. By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6 (American police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing. And to this day it is unclear whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia, sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for posthumous notoriety that motivates most rampage shooters. Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values and from vital statistics. The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion.7 The shift is visible in figure 15-1, which plots reactions to three survey statements that are representative of many others. Other surveys show the same shifts.8 Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it.9 As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going.10 Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline in prejudice or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long haunted social scientists, but recently the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has discovered an indicator of attitudes that is the closest we’ve come to a digital truth serum.11 In the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine, together with many you can’t imagine. (Common searches include “How to make my penis bigger” and “My vagina smells like fish.”) Google has amassed big data on the strings that people search for in different months and regions (though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them. Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that searches for the [n word] (mostly in pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial prejudice across regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than expected for a Democrat.12 He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of private racism. Let’s use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we’re at it, private sexism and homophobia as well. Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or have private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they privately don’t find it as amusing.13 And contrary to the fear that the rise of Trump reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline through his period of notoriety in 2015–2016 and inauguration in early 2017. Stephens-Davidowitz has pointed out to me that these curves probably underestimate the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who’s Googling. When the records began in 2004, Googlers were mostly young and urban. Older and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are the ones who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the proportion in later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google doesn’t record the searchers’ ages or levels of education, but it does record where the searches where the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “[n word] jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “[f*g] jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘[b word] jokes.’”) Stephens-Davidowitz also got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks the searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches for “[n word]” is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior citizens, such as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra.” The main exception was a sliver of teenagers who also searched for bestiality, decapitation videos, and child pornography—anything you’re not supposed to search for. But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts. Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights. Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.16 As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children’s readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in happiness.17 Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)18 The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians.19 Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.20 At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it’s premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year. The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were ironic hoaxes, and many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.21