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As European societies grapple with problems posed by an influx of immigrants from the
Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, the United States is often held up as a model of
assimilation. But while America has proven relatively successful at the integration of
immigrants of differing cultures, nationalities, and skin colors, it still confronts serious
problems stemming from the unequal status of African Americans. If the United States can
claim that it is uniquely welcoming to immigrants from around the world, it must also
acknowledge that, as was the case at the founding of the republic, racial injustice is the
Achilles’ heel of American democracy. The continuing plight of black Americans is
accentuated by the fact that the United States has become, in commentator Ben
Wattenberg’s phrase, the world’s first multinational society. Instead of a simple black-white
racial divide, there is today a divide between blacks and a constellation of groups that
includes both whites and immigrants from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and
other parts of the world.
Moreover, the fact that America has truly become a “diverse” society has affected the
debates over a series of social-policy issues that were once identified as pertaining almost
exclusively to the status of African Americans. Among these are affirmative action,
residential segregation, education, and the tension between assimilation and separateness.
And while many observers object strongly to the application of lessons from the immigrant
experience to the question of black advancement, the fact that nonwhite newcomers have
made important strides toward participation in the American mainstream has affected and
will continue to affect public opinion, government policy, and the intellectual debate over
strategies to accelerate the pace of black progress.

While America’s history of slavery and legal segregation is well known, it is important to
note that the United States was unique in the size of its slave population, that population’s
geographical concentration, slavery’s legal duration, the fact that slavery was ended
through civil war, and the discrimination, humiliation, and violence to which blacks were
subjected after slavery was abolished. Other societies maintained slaves, but no society
has suffered a legacy of slavery that equals the American experience.

The United States is also unique with respect to the number and magnitude of the laws,
policies, and enforcement and monitoring agencies that are meant principally to curb racial
bias, enhance racial integration, and direct public attention to actions and policies deemed
to have an unfair impact on African Americans or other minorities, most notably Hispanics.
Likewise, America is unusual in the degree to which racial concerns and sensitivities
permeate public life. Incidents in which the police kill or beat black suspects continue to
spark national debates about the role of racial profiling or racial bias in the broader
society. The proportion of minorities in the ranks of professional sports coaching is a
perennial controversy, as are the use of race in legislative redistricting, the relationship
between race and standardized tests used for university admissions, and the racial impact
of environmental decisions.

The issues associated with immigration, especially immigration from Latin America and the
Muslim world, are dealt with in other chapters in this volume. But as this study does focus
on the state of freedom in the period after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it is
worth stressing how little the developments of the past five years have influenced the core
debates over American race relations and the status of African Americans. Indeed, the key

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