First, stop supporting racists. – Dan Rodricks

For my Column in today's Baltimore SunI keep my distance from the immediate news of The racist scaremongering of Donald Trump and JD Vance to Haitian immigrants to basically say: If you want a great country, as a starting point, stop supporting racists. For a play I'm writing, I looked back at our 20th century history and asked myself: When are we going to overcome racial prejudice? How can we call ourselves a great nation in 2024 if we're putting racists in public office again?

To be considered a responsible American adult, you must recognize and set aside the biases you learned from the previous generation. Stop tolerating what we once tolerated. Speak out against it, vote against it.

There have been moments over the years when someone has said something ugly – a racist slur, an ethnic insult – and we all shake our heads in disgust, and someone, in a kind of comforting way, has given us these words of advice and promises: “Wait until the old fanatics die out. It will take some time. But with each generation it gets better.”

Maybe I was with my brothers, classmates, or other journalists. Maybe we were reacting to something we had just heard, maybe to news of a hate crime or some other form of racism.

In Boston, it may have been during the tense days of protest against the court-ordered desegregation of schools in the mid-1970s.

Or later, in Baltimore, we might have reacted to the racist comments of a politician who railed against the move of poor black families from public housing to modest rental homes in the suburbs.

Think Racial hatred would be passed down through the generations made sense, because the perpetrators were usually older than us: a friend's father who openly showed hostility and suspicion toward every black person he met; a college groundskeeper who talked to his black workers as if they belonged to him; a white politician who was concerned that Baltimore's black birth rate was higher than that of its white counterparts; a World War II veteran who expressed hatred of the Japanese—and of all other Asians, for that matter.

The “greatest generation” wasn't great when it came to equality. It was only after long marches and bloody martyrdom that the country began to live up to its promise of equality and justice for all, a century after the Civil War.

Many of my colleagues Baby Boomers were determined not to become like their parents.

So we rejected racist attitudes and assured ourselves that if great and lasting change could not take place within one generation, it would certainly happen within two or three generations. Once enlightenment had taken place, nothing could stop it from spreading and one day our children would reach the promised land, surrounded by diversity.

Of course, this is especially a white view of thingsdriven by wishful thinking – the belief that society will naturally progress as time passes and people become more educated, even on the hot tin roof of the race. This explains why for years the Gallup Organization showed a steady increase in the number of Americans who believed that race relations were improving.

But a few years ago, after the police shootings of unarmed black men and the protests that followed, that trend stopped. Gallup's chart showed a downward trend: More than a third of Americans said they were “very concerned” about race relations, more than at any time in the past 15 years.

The Pew Research Center revealed profound differences between black and white adults in their views on race: “Blacks are far more likely than whites to say that blacks are treated unfairly in a variety of areas of life, from dealing with the police to applying for a loan or mortgage. And for many blacks, racial equality remains an elusive goal.”

Whites are far more optimistic about progress toward equality, and I suspect this is due to this belief in a generational shift among Millennials.

But this idea is not tenable, as studies by Sean McElwee for demosa political organization focused on equality. “Age,” McElwee concluded, “has little bearing on the likelihood that whites will harbor racially prejudiced feelings toward blacks. … Waiting until the old whites die out will not solve the problem, because these attitudes are also widespread among young people.”

Defeat hate and racism requires work, education, acceptance of diversity and determined enlightenment. It doesn't just happen over time. You have to preach love and teach peace. And you should never reward a racist with your vote.

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Published by Daniel Rodricks

Dan Rodricks is a longtime columnist for The Baltimore Sun, winner of numerous national and regional journalism awards, radio and television personality, podcaster and fly fisherman. His memoir, Father's Day Creek, was published in May 2019 by Apprentice House at Loyola University Maryland. View all posts by Dan Rodricks