WAS AMERICA MORE DIVERSE IN THE 1950s?

There is greater visibility for minorities, and interracial marriage has produced younger generations that tend to see people and personalities and not color. This is a singular accomplishment, the great social leap forward of the last half century,

Yet further down on the scale of moral importance, in the areas of music, books, general knowledge, cars, conversation, and fashion, the United States was far more diverse in the 1950s. The racial progress in America has led to a reflexive dismissal of everything else the culture produced prior to the civil rights victories of the 1960s. Marinating in self-regard for our progress, we reject previous eras as bland black-and-white prisons, a patriarchal matrix of Mad Men-style sexual harassment, racism, bland pop music and TV dinners. We now measure our ethical stature by our propinquity to “people of color,” forgetting that by every other measure Americans in 2015 have become one undifferentiated blob of bland sameness.

Everyone follows Taylor Swift on Twitter. We all know who Kim Kardashian is (but not Kurt Elling). We dress alike, in our jeans, t-shirts, yoga pants and cargo shorts. We go to the same superhero movies, slurp our coffee from Starbucks, use iPhones, and lunch at Chipotle. We know pop music and political correctness, but not symphonies, great visual artists, philosophers or challenging novels.

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