It Really Is Better Now for Blacks by John McWhorter

There are those who think that I am naive about racism or that I downplay it. The kinds of people who think so are often themselves accused, from other quarters, of being "stuck in the past," unable to admit that things truly change. Interestingly, I often feel that it's actually I who am stuck in the past.

I mean that I cannot help, at all times, comparing now with what it was like on a daily basis for those who came before us. Take this week, when we are marking the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr..

Many remind us that we have come only so far. I, on the other hand, think just as much -- and probably more -- of the fact that we really have come so very far.

Let's go back a hundred years from this exact month. What was it like to be black in April 1911? The handiest way to find out is with the issue of the NAACP's magazine the Crisis. And it leaves me thinking that if it makes me naive to feel much, much better about things than those people did, then naive I most definitely will stay.

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