The civil rights movement after three decades

Abstract

If there is a new development in thought about American race rela? tions, it is a new pessimistic outlook. The belief that racism may be a permanent feature of American life is now held by some former liberal black participants in the civil rights movement. Though this pessimistic view has been in the air since the 1980s, it was Derrick Bell, in Faces at the Bottom of the Well, who finally expressed what a number of liberal black intellectuals felt but could not bring themselves to say, namely, that white America will never grant blacks full citizenship equality. The previous perspective on American race relations, derived from changes during the 1960s, viewed civil rights reform as part of a progressive and irreversible evolution, destined to integrate black Americans into American life. But with the Reagan-Bush era's reversals of many hard fought 1960s civil rights victories, that expectation has been shattered. In consequence, many black intellectuals who had possessed a deep faith in the liberal democratic ideals of a racially equalitarian society, a faith evi? denced by the dedication of their professional careers to the struggle for civil rights, felt betrayed, embittered, and painfully disillusioned. Bitter disillusionment in black American history is hardly novel. But what makes this new pessimism peculiar, in contrast to past black American experiences of disappointment, is that it finds no solace in black nationalism or any other alternative to liberal integrationist ideology. And in this, it reflects the predicament of a sizable portion of the contemporary black middle class. Having abandoned the liberal ideals of social integration between the races and the black nationalist ideals of a separate and self-sufficient black community, they find themselves ideologically adrift, groping for a different, more practical conception of black America's place in American society. Will blacks exist in some new form