Liberalism that was laughed at

For years the concept of "reverse discrimination" and the idea behind it have been a subject of ridicule - that blacks receive preference over whites because they had been oppressed by slavery, without which America's accumulation of material wealth could not have taken place. Everyone mocked the concept: Whites told stories about how they were barred from jobs because "a black was needed," while the American right's ethos implicitly espouses the theory of "white supremacy." Many people on the left scorned it as a cosmetic attempt to right America's wrongs. Some claimed that reverse discrimination created a black middle class at the expense of lower-class whites, and there are many poor whites in the United States.

It was not the only liberal measure aimed at giving the United States a facelift. Political correctness was also ridiculed (here too) as a linguistic regime designed to weed out inherent racism from the language. Here in Israel we laughed at how Americans switched from using the word "negro" to using "black." As part of an adopted ideology, U.S. television shows and Hollywood movies always featured blacks, whether the films were set in outer space or World War II. A few decades have passed since the days when Sidney Poitier was the only black actor in Hollywood, and the silver screen has been necessary to change and represent the United States, which is no longer exclusively white.

The United States chose to pursue this liberal agenda not because whites decided one day that the time was right to behave differently. After all, when America went to war against Nazi Germany, its black soldiers were considered "less than human" and were segregated in all-black units and even used separate showers and toilets. Later, blacks in the United States became a strong and even menacing political force, requiring the country to reform. The huge movement led by Martin Luther King threatened the old order. We know this from FBI surveillance reports and wiretaps. His assassination reflects how he was perceived. The Black Panthers were also quickly quashed. Some of them were executed in a "violent confrontation with security forces," but nobody believes that this organization that sent a strong message to the U.S. public disappeared of its own accord.

That is how change began. And very little has changed since: Blacks still live in ghettos. Their numbers in prison are still high. They are subject to law enforcement not imposed on whites. Blacks are the majority of those executed in the only Western country that still permits capital punishment. Poverty among blacks is still widespread. Still, U.S. society has slowly started to change since the Supreme Court ordered the University of Alabama to permit black students to enroll following protests by blacks demanding their rights for equality as laid down in the Constitution. Mayors, including in major cities, congressmen, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, cabinet members and the last two (Republican) secretaries of state all represented a slow process of change to America's identity. This identity is no longer white, nor is it black; there is no one identity. The country has many. A typical American identity no longer exists.

Tens of millions of people in the United States went to the polls and decided that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) tradition that reigned in America does not work. November 4 was a victory for the Constitution. U.S. democracy won - U.S. democracy as expressed by granting human rights to everyone regardless of their creed, color or native language, which though still English officially, is often Spanish. Anyone, on the right or the left, who mocked this liberalism, should pause for a moment and say: "If only it would happen to us."