Back when Kennedy was elected president in 1960, everyone congratulated themselves on the death of religious bigotry.  Before that, we congratulated ourselves on the death of racism when we elected Irish and Germans to high office.

While prejudice against these groups may now seem as quaint and draw as little emotional reaction as prejudice against star-bellied sneeches, back in the day prejudice against these groups was severe.

The groups against whom prejudice is directed have always changed, and when prejudice against a group lessens we've always congratulated ourselves even as another group took the place at the bottom of the social ladder.  It's not that I believe that we aren't making real progress, so much as that the extent of it is greatly overstated by watching the status of any particular group.

Hispanics and in particular Mexicans and not Blacks are now at the bottom of the social ladder, and prejudice against them is getting worse instead of better.  Similarly things are getting worse for our enemies of the moment, Arabs and Muslims.  Polls results don't seem to look all that rosy to me either.

It seems to me that the real prejudice nowadays doesn't exactly follow racial lines anymore, and that this is responsible for people saying that they would elect someone of a different race.  It's O.K. with most people to be Black or Hispanic so long as you don't "Act Black" or speak very little English, etc.

I wrote this mainly because I'm not sure myself how to look at the situation.  I'm relatively young (26), and yet I can remember a time when I couldn't imagine a black man or a woman being elected president.  Heck, when Hillary Clinton ran for Senate and everyone was talking about how it was setting the stage for a presidential run, I thought it would never happen.  Even now I'm shocked that Jindahl ended up winning Louisiana (on the Republican ticket, no less).  On the other hand, it's also pretty clear that there's still a lot of prejudice and racial inequality (although I think a lot of it is based more on class than race, per se - it just happens that at this point minorities tend to be more economically disadvantaged than whites).  Another thought - perhaps the best political strategy for minorities is to run as moderate members of the Republican party?  It seems like that might be the easiest way to come into the mainstream - by playing against type, it would assure voters that the candidate is not purely interested in redressing race-based inequalities, but rather is interested in serving as a candidate of all the people (Obama certainly seems to be playing this strategy to the hilt - I almost wonder if he wasn't happy when the talk started that he " wasn't black enough"...).