Since 1945, there can be no one with the least grasp of the facts that denies there has been significant progress made with respect to race relations among whites, blacks and Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics are better off in American society than ever before, in terms of social status, income, education and political representation. The problem is that though there has been a great deal of progress made, there is still an enormous way to go until America is a true melting pot wherein all participants have equal access to education, employment and politics. Myriad challenges still face race relations in America when it comes to blacks and Hispanics, from police brutality targeted at these minorities to a pervasive and enduring racism that still exists engendered over centuries of oppression by whites. While racism is much less overt today, the subtle forms it takes still represent a major challenge to equality of access for blacks and Hispanics. This analysis will cover many of the challenges posed by race relations in modern American society, despite the enormous change that has occurred since the 1940s.
The world of race relations in the 1940s was a dour one, particularly where being black or Hispanic was concerned. Rampant racism, lack of political representation, poverty, brutality, and a lack of education hampered blacks and Hispanics in America, mainly because they existed within a system which defined “white” values as good and all other values as “not-good”. In such a society, it was difficult to formulate a concept of self or identity because the “norm” did not include people of “color”. As James Baldwin (35) writes in Nobody Knows My Name, about the commonality among blacks in America and the rest of the world, “What they held in common was their precarious, their unutterably painful relation to the white world. What they held in common was the necessity to remake the world in their own image, t...