David McElroy

What was the key to changing Americans’ attitudes toward race relations in the ’70s? Some would argue that it was political activism or congressional action or even street protests. I’d say that “All in the Family” was more important than any of those.

Do you remember “All in the Family”? If you lived through the ’70s, you probably saw it as a first-run sitcom. If you came along after that, you probably saw some episodes in syndication. After a shaky start — on a network with no real expectations for it — “All in the Family” took off to become the monster sitcom hit of the ’70s, with a long period during which it was No. 1 rated.

The show was about a lovable bigot and his family — his dim-witted wife who sometimes had the biggest heart and best insights, their ultra-liberal daughter and her even more liberal new husband. It might sound like a typical sitcom family, but the subjects were anything but typical. It confronted racial issues and bigotry (among other social issues) in a very up-front way.

The show as a success because it was funny. It was well-written and well-acted. It felt as though its biggest mission was to entertain, not to preach. And that is why it worked better than all the preaching in the world.

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It’s been almost 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech about dreaming of the day when blacks would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Sadly, many black political leaders still haven’t gotten his memo.

The alleged purpose of the civil rights movement was to bring about an end to racial discrimination, but the Orwellian nightmare we’ve built around race in this country requires that we pretend some racial discrimination is good, while other racial discrimination is bad.

In the county where I live, the city government of Birmingham — which includes the core older parts of the metro area, but almost none of the suburbs — is building a $60 million baseball stadium for a minor league team. In a newspaper story that came out Sunday, the mayor’s chief of staff bragged about the fact that 61 percent of the money is being contracted to minority-owned firms, suggesting that the color of the owners’ skin was a bit more important than either the content of their character or the quality of their work:

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When the charges came out five years ago, it was easy to write them off as lies or exaggerations. Iraqi police accused U.S. military forces of capturing 11 people — including women and children — and then simply executing them.

Even those of us who oppose the war found that hard to believe. It had to be lies, because Americans soldiers just don’t do things like that. Except … well … it appears there’s a good chance U.S. soldiers did do that, based on at least one of the secret U.S. cables released last week by Wikileaks.

The initial news report from 2006 quoted the Iraqi police report:

“The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”

The U.S. military denied everything. In fact, a military spokesman denied ever having even heard of the allegations. There were promises to “get to the bottom of this” and find out the truth, but we never heard anything more about it.

It turns out that a UN special investigator — a law professor now teaching at New York University — pursued the story at the time, because his investigation told the same story that the Iraqi police had concluded. One of the newly released secret cables includes a document from the investigator:

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