A steady racial-progress narrative dominates the American creed across parties

Evidence

Obama was embracing a national mythology in which America was marching forward and righting past wrongs, an epic, righteous journey that had led to his own election eight years earlier. This mantra of steady incremental change has long been a part of the American creed. Politicians of all races and parties convey it constantly. I once believed it. Sure, the country may have begun in slavery, but it fought a war to end it. It passed three new amendments to the Constitution to end slavery and give citizenship to those formerly enslaved, and to grant the men among them the right to vote. And though, in the decades that followed, those rights were violently denied, eventually the nation’s institutions acted to ensure them. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. A decade later, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. President Johnson appointed the former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. Into the 1970s and ’80s, the Black middle class started emerging and became more visible in culture, media, and politics. There were figures like Ed Bradley, who became the first Black White House television correspondent in 1976, and Harold Washington, who became the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 and inspired Obama’s generation. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton appointed what was at the time the most diverse cabinet in history. At the end of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first, Black women and especially men were visible in politics, sports, entertainment, and mass media—people like Michael Jordan, Carol Moseley Braun, Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston, Tiger Woods, Denzel Washington, Jay-Z, Spike Lee, Robin Roberts, Halle Berry, and Bryant Gumbel. By 2003, media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Robert L. Johnson had become billionaires. All the success stories of these individuals ostensibly demonstrated the forward march of the Black community. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1237

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘gradual progress’ mythology that the book’s foundational-slavery reframing thesis counters — the key contrast for the reader’s deviation-vs-design distinction.