The last mile of equal rights is the hardest – Saunders

Doug Saunders on the challenges of reaching the last holdouts on equal rights:

Likewise, after several decades of extremely difficult activist struggles and hard-fought public-opinion victories, getting 80 or 90 per cent of the population to embrace the concepts of racial and sexual equality, and to stop tolerating discrimination and abuse, happened surprisingly quickly and easily. A generation came of age who were nearly unanimous in those beliefs.

But that last 5 or 10 per cent pose a set of very different challenges: These are the hard cases that actively defy majority opinion.

Economists Laurence Chandy and Homi Kharas noted recently that poverty is such a problem: Half as many people are in absolute poverty as 30 years ago, but halving the last bit will be much tougher: those “persistent pockets of poverty” are in economies and cultures far more resistant to change.

Their advice for poverty should be ours for equal rights: The last bit won’t take care of itself. New movements, and new and tougher government initiatives, will be needed. It’s time for a final civil-rights movement. The last mile is always the hardest, but it’s also the most important.

I suspect, however, the idea that we will attain 100 percent eradication of poverty, or 100 percent eradication of racism and sexism, is unrealistic.

Not an excuse not to try, but just to be realistic in expectations.

The last mile of equal rights is the hardest – The Globe and Mail.