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Episode 178: The Palliative Pop-History of American Social "Progress"

Added 2023-03-22 16:15:09 +0000 UTC

"Our progress has been part of the living history of America," President Jimmy Carter declared in a 1979 speech. "America is a nation of progress, of moving forward," Senator Chuck Grassley stated in 2022 on the Senate floor. "The story of America is a story of progress and resilience, of always moving forward, of never, ever giving up. It's a story unique among all nations," President Joe Biden announced in his 2023 State of the Union.

For decades - even centuries - policymakers, and media on their behalf, have employed some variation on the same rhetorical theme: the United States is a nation of progress, especially so-called "racial progress." Though our Great Experiment has been imperfect, we're told, it's constantly improving, steadily and automatically forging ahead toward its ideal state. Yes, we've been home to the violent oppression of untold sums of people, but look how far we’ve come!

There have objectively been political gains for all groups historically and currently denied basic rights in the U.S. This is obvious. But the trajectory is far from linear, raising the question: How far have "we" really come? Are people, especially Black, Latino, and Native people, less likely to suffer through poverty than any time before now? Are police and prisons any less violent? To what extent have U.S. law and policymaking really evolved?

On this episode, we dissect the liberal assertion that social, particularly racial, progress in the U.S. is inevitable, that there's this comforting "arc" of history bending towards justice. We examine how this idea came to be, who gets to define the metrics of "progress," and why it's dangerous to advance the tidy Vaseline-lens narrative that societal improvement is part of some preordained future.

Our guest is Dr. Julian M. Rucker.

Guest

Julian M. Rucker, PhD, (@jruck_psych) is a Social Psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Rucker previously served as Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity Fellow.

Show Notes

Toward an understanding of structural racism: Implications for criminal justice

Julian M. Rucker and Jennifer A. Richeson | October 14, 2021 | Science

Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress

Jennifer A. Richeson | September 2020 | The Atlantic

The Magnitude of Our Mythology

Jennifer Eberhardt and Jennifer A. Richeson | December 29, 2021 | Association for Psychological Science

The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons

Ashley Nellis, Ph.D. | October 13, 2021 | The Sentencing Project

Disrupting Beliefs in Racial Progress: Reminders of Persistent Racism Alter Perceptions of Past, But Not Current, Racial Economic Equality

Ivuoma N. Onyeador, Natalie M. Daumeyer, Julian M. Rucker, Ajua Duker, Michael W. Kraus, and Jennifer A. Richeson | August 20, 2020 | Society for Personality and Social Psychology

White Americans Overestimate Racial Progress. But Certain Attempts to Remedy That Could Backfire.

September 2, 2020 | KelloggInsight

Are We There Yet? Perceptions of Racial Progress Among Racial Minorities

Stacey Greene | August 12, 2020 | Political Science & Politics

The myth of “progress” helps to obscure the truth—we are still marching for civil rights

Sherronda J. Brown | June 3, 2020 | Black Youth Project

On the Intentionality of Cultural Products: Representations of Black History As Psychological Affordances

Phia S. Salter and Glenn Adams | August 29, 2016 | Front Psychol

Why Sandra Day O’Connor Saved Affirmative Action

Evan Thomas | March 19, 2019 | The Atlantic

The Illusion of Progress in the Story of American Democracy

Rebecca Brenner Graham | May 29, 2018 | Black Perspectives

Against Teleology in the Study of Race: Toward the Abolition of the Progress Paradigm

Louise Seamster and Victor Ray | 2018 | Sociological Theory

Whites Have Huge Wealth Edge Over Blacks (but Don't Know It)

Emily Badger | September 18, 2017 | The New York Times

Narratives of Progress and the Colonial Origins of Schooling

David Hemphill and Erin Blakely | 2015 | Counterpoints

Historians of Color Are Revolutionizing the Narrative of ‘American Exceptionalism’

David Levering Lewis | September 1, 2015 | The Nation

Today’s racial wealth gap is wider than in the 1960s

Simone Pathe | February 18, 2015 | PBS NewsHour

Does the Narrative of Human Progress Hold Up?

Orion Jones | February 4, 20215 | Big Think

Why progress endures

John Yemma | January 25, 2015 | Christian Science Monitor

The Color of Politics

Peter J. Boyer | January 27, 2008 | The New Yorker

Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma

Derrick A. Bell, Jr. | 1980 | Harvard Law Review

The Nation: To All on Equal Terms

May 24, 1954 | TIME Magazine

The Great Nation of Futurity

John L. O’Sullivan | November 1839 | The United States Democratic Review

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can find transcripts of past episodes and News Briefs here.

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