From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
DOWNLOAD PDF
Americans recently marked and celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the past half-century, a wide variety of antidiscrimination laws, civil rights protections, and equal access rules have been enacted by the full range of authorities and jurisdictions, from small towns to the United Nations. These measures, in addition to a broad array of policies and programs having to do with education, voting rights, social welfare, and economic opportunity, have in many ways helped to make more real what might otherwise have remained only an ideal of “equal citizenship.” As President Barack Obama remarked on the anniversary of the Act, it “brought us closer to making real the declaration at the heart of our founding—that we are all created equal.” We continue to disagree, reasonably even if strongly, about the precise content of this ideal, the best ways to implement it, and its coherence. Even if the “idea of equality” is not entirely “empty,” it is certainly more easily and more often admired than understood. This is not surprising and does not detract from its being a shared ideal. In any event, and in the President’s words, the “journey continues.”
88_493