Propaganda measured racial progress against the past rather than the present.

Evidence

Like their predecessors, the writers of this pamphlet situated the past, not the present—or in some cases, the status of individual Black elites, not the masses—as defining the standards of measurements for progress. Over the past fifty years, progress for “the Negro” had occurred in all areas “at a tremendous pace,” according to The Negro in American Life. The pamphlet disclosed the existence of “large landowners,” of “wealthy businessmen,” of professionals, of tremendous advances in literacy rates and college enrollments. “Much remains to be done,” because the average income of white Americans was still “substantially better than that of Negroes,” the pamphlet stated. But the “gap is closing.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely pins down what ‘progress’ rhetoric is: a measurement gymnastics that benches current conditions against a distant past baseline, and elites as proxies for the masses.
• XREF: This is the same measurement-frame move the reader is hunting across the whole book — how origin stories define what counts as deviation vs. design; here the reframing contrapositive: anchoring the baseline in the past lets any improvement read as convergence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism is subtle: selecting a temporal baseline and a proxy population silently defines what ‘progress’ means at all — a rhetorical frame that recurs every era and in every policy domain.