LeVar Burton on the "Two Americas" Created by Institutional Racism

There have been significant changes, both positive and negative, in America since this novel was first published in 1997.

Most significantly, at that time, I held neither hope nor belief that there would ever be a black president in this nation, at least not in my lifetime. So the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008 produced in me the feeling that this country had indeed reached a turning point in the fundamental issue America has grappled with since its inception. The all-encompassing, pervasive, and endemic institutionalized racism that has been baked into our social structures since the founding of these United States was mitigated by the civil rights movement of the ’60s, yes; however, I harbored no illusions that America was anything close to post-racial, as many trumpeted at the time.

The fundamental flaw embedded by our Founding Fathers in the document that defines this nation has plagued America for the past two hundred–plus years. By affixing their signatures to the Declaration of Independence on that sweltering summer day in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers doomed Americans of African descent to live, for generations, lives of state-sanctioned terror.

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After all, creating a constitutional federal democracy which claims that all men are created equal is in direct opposition to the enshrinement of chattel slavery, the most cruel and inhumane treatment based on color as a cardinal component of its identity.

More recently, with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, little did we know that his single term in office would result in his purposeful stoking of the flames of some of the ugliest aspects of our American character. The damage he has inflicted on the nation is considerable, and some of the measures undoubtedly inspired by him have already led to dire and dangerous consequences.

Not since the Jim Crow era have we seen the willful and wanton rolling back of the civil rights of those of African, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous heritage, as well as poor people and those who have been marginalized in our society. America, instead, has been obvious and consistent in denying her minority populations the rights and privileges given freely to her Caucasian population.

Throughout the whole history of our nation, there have been two Americas: one with a different set of rules for the majority white population, while those who have been traditionally othered by the majority have been relegated to a different—and in many cases, a substandard—version of the American Dream in areas such as housing, education, and healthcare, to name just a few. Although there has been an historical disparity in how minorities are treated by the law enforcement community in this country, even those who continue to be committed to denying this reality are being met with evidence of such treatment that has been captured and broadcast—incontrovertible proof, evidence, of what the reality of many has been all along.

Like it or not, this nation’s demographics are changing. In just a few short years, the majority population will, for the first time in its history, be Hispanic, not Caucasian, which means that the majority population will be brown people, not white. The majority will have become the minority, and the balance of power in the electorate will also shift.

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