The belief in inevitable racial progress is an ideology obscuring racist reality

Evidence

Inequality lives, in part, because Americans of every generation have been misled into believing that racial progress is inevitable and ongoing. That racial progress is America’s manifest destiny. That racial progress defines the arc of American history since 1619. That “things have changed dramatically.” In fact, this has more often been rhetoric than reality, more often myth than history. Saying that the nation can progress racially is a necessary statement of hope. Saying that the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology, one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1246

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s key idea that origin stories are infrastructure — this is the reframing claim that ‘America’s arc since 1619’ is a contested narrative, not a fact.
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting distinction: ‘can progress’ as hope vs ‘has progressed’ as ideology — one sentence that crystallizes how progress narratives function politically.