Racial-progress triumphalism peaked in the 1990s as the crimes act surged

Evidence

By the 1990s, the gulf between the rhetoric of racial progress and the reality for millions of Black Americans had grown wider, as the former became more and more triumphant. In 1995, four years after the LAPD brutally beat Rodney King, Dinesh D’Souza, a former Reagan aide, published a book titled The End of Racism. This was the year of the O. J. Simpson trial, with its racially polarizing verdict and revelations of racist LAPD behavior, and the beginning of the apex of Black incarceration rates during the War on Drugs, after Bill Clinton signed the devastatingly punitive 1994 crime bill. Two years later, in their 1997 blockbuster America in Black and White, Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Thernstrom and her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, argued that “few whites are now racists” and that what dominates current race relations is “black anger” and “white surrender.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1289

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s larger reframing argument about how origin stories (post-racial triumphalism) define what counts as deviation versus design.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and framing-argument approach: how triumphant rhetoric about progress is contradicted by punitive policy in the same era.