How did we get here from the late 80s to this moment? Matt Cooper speculates.
After I read Matt’s post it occurred to me that I hadn’t given this particular slice of this moment that much thought. The comparisons to fifty years ago seem like the more obvious ones. But while I’m five or six years younger than Matt my recollections are similar. Twenty years ago was a very different time in America in racial terms.
Some of this, I think, is simply time. Some people and some ways of thinking will never really change until the people themselves move off the stage. In a political sense I think a lot of the jagged coalition politics in the Democratic party were assuaged in the 1990s and then that less divided state was locked in during the Bush era. One thing I don’t think we can ignore, though, is that American mass culture found a more useful scary other: Arabs and Muslims. That’s a key thing that isn’t pretty but I think is also true.
With all that said though, it is amazing to me, when I think about race relations and gay rights, how benighted and archaic even the 1980s looks to me now when I think back on it.
