One reason to reach this conclusion is that it is difficult to assess how many Americans today would approve of reinstituting segregation as a national norm, and the existence of that difficulty is significant: The level of urgency of the question seems so minimal that pollsters would be unlikely to bother asking it. Gallup polling does show that Americans’ views about the state of race relations are mixed. But on a specific issue such as interracial marriage, Americans overwhelmingly approve. Even in 1964, Gallup found that almost 60 percent of Americans approved of the act, and it’s hardly unreasonable to assume that the percentage would be far higher today. Consider also Senator Rand Paul’s criticism of the act, in 2010, which drew widespread condemnation, indicating that his view was an exception, not a bellwether of a common or burgeoning opinion.
I also take the liberty of guessing that if at some near-term point the Supreme Court did knock down the act, very few people or businesses would change their practices. In 2022, overt racism would be too repellent to too many onlookers to qualify as good business, and outright moral revulsion would prevent most captains of industry from openly condoning bigotry. In today’s America, many feel that being accused of racism is almost equivalent to being called a pedophile, so toxic that all along the political spectrum, people take great lengths to avoid it. I’ve heard from two people independently that, among their teenage kids’ circles, “racist” is now used as an all-purpose epithet, unconnected to bigotry, with the assumption being that the term is the handiest way to deliver a smackdown or mark someone as conclusively dismissible. On the other side of the coin, you now hear the phrase “interracial couple” far less than you did years ago, probably because interracial relationships are processed as normal in so much of the country.
Most of the members of the Supreme Court grew up in that country. I suspect that just as personal opposition to abortion likely influenced the conservatives among them to strike down Roe, personal opposition to overt racism would hold them off from attacking the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They just wouldn’t go there — or at least no majority of them would.
Shelby, it’s fair to say, facilitated Republican attempts to discourage minority voters via the imposition of assorted noisome requirements, varying in different jurisdictions, with the end goal of lowering the Democratic tally. This is a revolting kind of pragmatism, which many would designate as racist. But it’s still a different matter from condoning the outright barring of Black people from stores, restaurants and various jobs.
I maintain that the latter simply wouldn’t happen. Not today. Paradise, America certainly is not. But some beliefs become inviolable and progress marches on, of a kind that even this Supreme Court would be unlikely to undo.
