As MacArthur Foundation fellow Jennifer Richeson noted in The Atlantic in 2020, Americans love to perpetuate narratives of racial progress, regardless of whether that narrative is aligned with reality.
We saw this in a recent New York Times essay that claimed the change in Covid-19 death rates is a laudable example of the U.S. overcoming racial injustice. Pointing to improvements in vaccination rates in Black and Hispanic communities, Times senior writer David Leonhardt wrote that the racial gap in death rates has also disappeared. “In a country with deep racial inequities, where Covid was initially another tragic example,” he went on to say, “the virus is no longer disproportionately harming Black and Hispanic Americans.”
And once again we are implored to use the story of redemption to whitewash the story of racial injustice.