Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klansman involved in murdering three civil-rights workers in Mississippi 41 years ago, will serve his 60-year sentence in isolation due to fear of retaliation by other prisoners. “It’s kind of a race issue,” said a state official, “in that our [prison] population is 70 per cent black.” This is what I find perplexing about the “race issue” in the United States. They seem to deal with it impressively. And they don’t seem to deal with it at all.

Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote his 1944 book, An American Dilemma, on the race issue. He said U.S. society could never meet its basic challenges without confronting its racism. In those years, southern blacks could not vote and lynching was common, as was segregation (even in the army). Ten years later, a cover on a sports magazine of a white actress with an arm around a black ballplayer still provoked an outcry. Ten years after that came the Mississippi murders, over efforts to register black voters.

Forty years on, there has been massive change. I know many thoughtful people would call the changes token and superficial. But it is normal now to have black mayors or police chiefs in parts of the United States where it would have been impossible. It would have been unthinkable for the armed forces to be led by a black general in the first Iraq war — for him to then become secretary of state, be succeeded by a black woman, and for it all to seem routine. The president who appointed them is a modern good ol’ boy; you can see his ancestors in In the Heat of the Night. The type still exists, but he’s changed, too.

Had you told anyone 40, 50 or 60 years ago about the state of race in the U.S. now, they’d have had trouble believing it. Or they’d have argued that racism is so rooted in American reality, such changes could never occur without a radical makeover of the whole society. Yet, however much the United States has changed, it remains fervently capitalist, globally interventionist and busily religious in a traditional or fundamentalist way. It has, in other words, managed to accommodate a lot of racial change without seeing its basics profoundly undermined.

Does that mean racism was not as deeply rooted in the national gestalt as it seemed? Just to confuse things further, among the basic things that haven’t changed are the overall social and economic situation of most blacks. There are obscenely disproportionate incarceration rates, high unemployment, severely lagging health levels. How can a society deal so widely, successfully and, I’d argue, fairly earnestly with race — yet still not have dealt with so much of it?

You can try saying the changes happened only on the level of personal attitude rather than underlying socio-economic structures, and that what remains ensconced is “systemic racism,” a less tractable force. So the U.S. can close the book on the personal mode of racism, as in Mississippi, without touching the other, systemic type. Think, for example, of racial profiling. It’s easy to picture cops who will gladly serve under a black chief but still methodically target black youth. That’s how odd it can get.

It makes you think about feminism, which also transformed our world in a short time — making it almost unrecognizable. Yet, in other ways, little changed for women. Is power really the only issue that truly counts: how it gets wielded, shared out, imposed, passed on — while all the isms and reforms come and go?

U.S. writer Julius Lester began his career with a 1968 book called Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama. But the droll tone showed he doubted black power would ever do more than say boo to whitey or power itself. He moved on to dozens of books for kids, recorded folk music, taught university. Yet he also knew his great-great-grandfather had been a German Jew who migrated to Arkansas — and he converted! He’s spent much of his later life lecturing in synagogues and singing Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur, while renouncing nothing of his earlier self.

What’s my point? I dunno. But it does no harm to pursue more resoluble interests, while you continue to try to help vexing issues like race and power get sorted out.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.