In my 1997 book Why People Believe Weird Things, in a chapter on race and racism, I summarized the scientific research to date on the subject. My deeper motive in this exercise was my belief that in my lifetime we could achieve—or at least approach in an asymptotic curve—a post-race society in which such superficial characteristics as skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits would be considered the least important thing to know about a person. Nearly twenty years later, in my book The Moral Arc, I suggested that we had made so much moral progress toward this end that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” was at last coming true and so, I concluded, “we are living in the most moral period in our species’ history.”
How naïve I was. Conversations about and coverage of race and race-related incidents have since become omnipresent in our culture, from social media to mainstream media. Government, corporate, and academic collection of data on all matters race has become ubiquitous, driven further along by racial (and gender) sensitivity training programs, of which I have partaken.