Q: Did Boomers have higher tolerance for racism?
A: What I know to be true is when I was growing up, a popular phrase in the news media was “A long hot summer.” What that meant was race riots. In 1967, there were 159 race riots in American cities. That’s just one year. It doesn’t count the Watts Riots of 1965. It doesn’t count the riots after the assassination of MLK.
This is not about a high tolerance for racism. This is about a natural ordinary revulsion of people about serious injustice right in front of their eyes. In other words, it’s not that millions of ordinary people put up with racism, it’s that millions of ordinary people faced a level of harsh brutal violent racism that led to serious rebellion. Not symbolic rebellion. Not virtue signaling. Not the odd 20 pounds of racism but 2 tons of it. When a tank rolls over you and crushes your leg, you scream, you don’t write a legal theory and tweet it.
It’s important to recognize that you didn’t have to think very hard in 1960 that the average Negro you met was probably economically poor and poorly educated and stuck in very limited social position in the Jim Crow South. There were only 19 million.
By 2010 we had a black President and there were 42 million spread all over the nation in practically every walk of life. You could even argue that the net level of racist attitudes in America didn’t change, but black Americans were too strong to be held back.
It’s not that simple. But remember that those were times, in the violent 60s where the nation’s attention could be focused on a boycott and march of 10,000 over the matter of three cashier jobs at Woolworths.
Now there are wealthy black Americans who give TED Talks about race to audiences of millions, who can say to open applause that we ought to have more black Americans in the US Senate. You can’t possibly expect black Americans to sit still for the same racism that plagued this nation 55 years ago. They don’t. Nobody does. That’s why we don’t have 150 race riots a year. There simply isn’t any brutality that justifies it and that brutal racist that does exist simply doesn’t affect the fortunes of black America as it did the Negro of the 1950s.