6.5: The Promise of Equality

In the United States, consumers are protected by law from companies which engage in “false advertising” by making untrue or exaggerated claims about their products. If a product is packaged or sold in such a way as to give buyers false expectations about its functionality or quality, a court may force the company to compensate the buyers for having misled them.

At various points in America’s existence, its users would have had a compelling argument that their machine was falsely advertised. (Whether now is one of those times is a matter of much debate.) As nobly and high-mindedly as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution described the ideals they were intended to pursue, reality often fell short of expectations, far more for some users than others. Liberty and democracy without equality hardly deserve to be called by their names, though it has often taken Americans longer to understand this than we would like to admit.

Some of the civil rights issues America deals with today have been around in one form or another since before the country itself existed, while others have emerged only recently. America’s working definition of equality has changed over time, and there is every reason to expect it will again in the future, in ways we would struggle to imagine (let alone condone) today. While we can be justifiably proud of how far the United States has come in some domains of civil rights, we must take care not to become too haughty. A hundred years from now, Americans may consider our present-day beliefs about equality and rights as antiquated and shortsighted as we today consider those of Americans a hundred years ago.