Ever since he attained the age of majority some four decades ago, Terence Hamilton, now 57, has voted in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, covering 30 counties across the western part of the state. First drawn in 1986 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the district’s scope has shifted somewhat over the years. But the bottom line has been a majority-black district in a state where African Americans comprise 38% of the population.

Like many of his black neighbors, Hamilton has reliably backed the district’s incumbent US representative, Democrat Bennie Thompson, who’s held his seat since 1993. But the US Supreme Court has now disrupted the pattern, holding that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw majority-minority districts like Hamilton’s. In response, Mississippi Republicans have rushed to redraw the state’s electoral map in a manner that is certain to dilute black votes.

They’re doing this, of course, in the name of colorblindness.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 miles away, Ethan Chen, aged 18, is preparing to attend Georgetown University, not far from his family’s home in Bethesda, Md. It is a bittersweet transition for Chen, who had always considered Georgetown a “safety school.” His dream was to attend either Stanford or one of the Ivy League schools. But during the winter and spring, he received one rejection letter after another, despite a perfect grade-point average and equally impressive test scores.

How did this come to be, after another high-court ruling that barred colleges from discriminating against white and Asian applicants in the name of “affirmative action”? Chen, of course, will never know what exactly went into admissions officers’ decisions to reject him. What he does know is that many schools have continued to use essays and other “soft” factors to practice affirmative action and racecraft under another name.

The college officials, too, claim to uphold colorblind justice.

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These two stories — based on composite characters — illustrate the paradox of race and colorblind justice 250 years since the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” The two recent Supreme Court decisions — on affirmative action and on voting rights — have clarified something profound about American public life. They reveal that two-and-a-half centuries since the Founding, we are trying simultaneously to transcend race and to manage its consequences and even “win” on racial terms. These ambitions pull against one another, suggesting that race will continue to indelibly stamp the American experience.

Consider the parallel nature of the two decisions. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided in 2023, the Supremes prohibited universities from explicitly using race in admissions. In Louisiana v. Callais, they sharply constrained the use of race in congressional redistricting under the VRA. On the surface, both decisions advance the same constitutional ideal of “colorblindness”: government should treat citizens without regard to race. Yet in practice, both rulings immediately generated what one might call a politics of proxies.

Universities didn’t abandon the pursuit of racial diversity after the high court proscribed affirmative action. Rather, university leaders shifted emphasis toward other considerations, some of which are strongly correlated with race: economic hardship, neighborhood disadvantage, first-generation status, personal adversity, and essays narrating the experience of marginalization. Formally speaking, these are race-neutral criteria. But everyone understands that they may also function as indirect means of sustaining black and Hispanic representation at selective institutions, as they appear to be doing.

Meanwhile, in the voting-rights context, a similar proxy logic holds. Red states attacking minority-majority districts increasingly invoke race-neutral partisanship, rather than race, as the guiding principle of line-drawing. Since black voters in much of the South overwhelmingly support Democrats, partisan gerrymanders often produce substantial racial consequences without having to explicitly classify voters by race.

The symmetry is striking. In both cases, non-racial instruments are being employed that have predictable racial effects. But political partisans see the cases differently. Conservatives who object to universities using race-correlated proxies to preserve minority enrollment often defend partisan districting as constitutionally neutral. Meanwhile, liberals defend “holistic” admissions criteria as part of a legitimate effort to broaden opportunity. This, even as the Left often condemns partisan gerrymanders precisely because their racial effects are foreseeable. Both sides, in other words, alternate between formal and substantive understandings of equality depending on context, thus illustrating what I call the colorblindness paradox.

This suggests that the stakes are deeper than ordinary partisan inconsistency. The real problem lies in the incoherence of colorblindness itself when race remains deeply embedded in the social structure. For decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly embraced a view of the Constitution that is suspicious of racial classification. The central danger, in this account, is the government sorting citizens by race and allocating benefits and burdens on that basis. This principle — suspicion of government racecraft, even when it’s used for “positive” or non-invidious reasons — dominates the high court’s equal-protection jurisprudence. Rightly so, in my view.

But implementing that principle is another matter altogether. The difficulty here is that race in America remains highly correlated with countless other variables that public institutions may legitimately consider when allocating scarce benefits or opportunities. Educational attainment, neighborhood quality, wealth, family structure, social networks, geography, and partisan affiliation — all continue to bear the imprint of racial history. And they all are relevant when exercising the government’s discretionary powers.

As a result, banning explicit racial classification needn’t preclude racially differentiated outcomes. It merely changes the mechanisms through which those outcomes are pursued — or avoided. The colorblindness principle provides little guidance here. This is why our public arguments about colorblindness increasingly revolve around debates over the use of proxies.

Take college admissions. If a university gives special weight to applicants who overcame severe educational disadvantage, is it pursuing a morally defensible concern for human development? Or is it covertly pursuing racial “balancing”? The answer isn’t obvious, since the non-racial criteria that serve as proxies for race are themselves neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. Educational disadvantages are real. Unequal access to stable schools, family resources, mentoring networks, and social capital is real. Moreover, non-racial criteria that correlate with race may genuinely identify talented students (of all races) whose capacities were developed under adverse conditions. Thus, it is legitimate for an admissions process to consider them.

But such consideration also predictably shapes the racial composition of entering classes, and it is plausible to suspect that this is precisely why some institutions are using them more heavily now than before the 2023 anti-affirmative-action ruling. If so, those institutions are violating the spirit if not the letter of the court’s holding, as Chen in our narrative learned to his chagrin.

Or consider redistricting. A legislature produces a map to maximize Republican advantage, knowing that such a map will reduce black electoral concentration. Is this merely ordinary political hardball with unfortunate racial side effects? Or is it something uglier — partisanship masquerading as a cover story for anti-black animus? Again, the answer isn’t straightforward. Political affiliation is itself a legitimate organizing principle in democratic politics. Yet in a society in which race and party remain so tightly aligned in some regions, the distinction between partisan and racial intent is hard to discern.

The difficulty here is that, while the court can forbid the explicit consideration of race, it can’t forbid the use of statistical signals that correlate with racial identity. Everything turns on the motivations of officialdom, which aren’t easy to determine.

This points toward a deeper conceptual confusion in our racial discourse, which arises from our conflating two very different ideas: racial blindness and racial indifference. A society may prohibit explicit racial classification while remaining intensely concerned with racial outcomes, embracing blindness while rejecting indifference. Indeed, that is precisely our current situation. Universities remain deeply invested in racial diversity even after affirmative action. Voting-rights advocates remain deeply invested in preserving black political representation even after the court’s retrenchment. The disappearance of explicit racial language hasn’t produced indifference to racial disparities. It has simply displaced racial management, and racial politicking, into more indirect forms. This distinction matters, because it exposes the limits of purely procedural solutions to racial inequality.

I have spent much of my professional life arguing that durable inequality isn’t sustained merely by discriminatory transactions at the point of selection. It is sustained through differences in social development — differences in the networks, norms, institutions, and cultural practices through which human capacities are formed. Opportunity travels along the synapses of social networks. Human-capital formation depends upon family stability, educational culture, neighborhood order, mentoring relationships, and access to trusted institutional pathways. These developmental processes unfold long before a university admissions office reviews an application or a legislature draws district boundaries. And racial identity figures prominently in these processes of social development in the United States.

This is why legal and administrative efforts to engineer proportional representation at the endpoint often feel unsatisfying. They attempt to correct downstream disparities via anti-white “reverse discrimination,” which the Supreme Court now decries, while leaving untouched the upstream developmental inequalities from which those disparities partly emerge.

And there is another drawback to the method. Formal neutrality can itself become morally evasive if it ignores the historical conditions that continue to shape social outcomes. A society can’t simply declare itself colorblind and thereby escape the consequences of its past. The legacy of racial exclusion remains embedded in institutions and inherited patterns of advantage and disadvantage. The Terence Hamilton in our opening narrative might be the great grandson of a slave and the son of a father who endured de jure racial apartheid. Those historical realities and their consequences don’t disappear the second a court in Washington holds them irrelevant.

Thus our predicament: the paradox of colorblindness. On the one hand, permanent racial management threatens to entrench precisely the kind of group consciousness that a liberal democracy ought to transcend. A political culture organized around endless racial accounting risks weakening common citizenship. The more every institutional disparity is interpreted through the lens of racial representation, the harder it becomes to encounter one another simply as fellow citizens. On the other hand, abstract invocations of neutrality may fail to reckon adequately with the developmental realities that shape unequal outcomes in the first place.

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America oscillates between these two poles because we seek both transcendence and remediation. We wish to become a society in which race no longer governs public life. Yet we also seek to offset the stubborn consequences of racial history. These goals aren’t fully compatible.

Indeed, the deeper paradox may be this: the more persistently racial disparities remain visible, the harder it becomes to sustain genuine colorblindness. But the more aggressively institutions organize themselves around racial outcomes, the harder it becomes to achieve a society in which race recedes in civic importance. No constitutional doctrine can fully resolve this tension, because it doesn’t arise merely from law. It arises from the unfinished social condition of the nation itself.

I supported affirmative action many years ago because I regarded it as a temporary bridge across inequalities inherited from Jim Crow. I remain sympathetic to the moral impulse behind such policies. But over time, I have grown skeptical that endless procedural adjustment at the point of selection can substitute for the harder work of social development. Nor do I believe that a healthy republic can indefinitely sustain a politics in which every important institution is expected to produce racially calibrated outcomes.

The Supreme Court’s recent interventions are therefore both understandable and welcome, but they are also incomplete. They reflect an effort to limit explicit racial administration in public life. Yet they can’t eliminate the underlying realities that make proxy politics inevitable, and inscrutable, in the first place.

For that reason, the real challenge before us isn’t simply legal. It is civic and developmental. If we want a politics in which race matters less, then we must build a society in which the capacities required for flourishing are more broadly and deeply cultivated across all communities. No amount of doctrinal refinement can spare us that obligation.

The paradoxes will remain. But 250 years after a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson penned his majestic words, perhaps we can at least begin speaking about them honestly. Indifference to the roots of racial inequality is actually inconsistent with achieving colorblindness in the conduct of our public affairs.

Now, along comes artificial intelligence.

A major question — and source of anxiety — provoked by AI concerns its effects on economic outcomes: who will thrive, and who will be displaced? Will firms require far less human labor to produce greater output, consigning vast swaths of workers to the margins? Or will entirely new forms of work emerge, sustaining broad-based prosperity?

These are important questions. But they aren’t the most fundamental ones. The deeper issue is how artificial intelligence will interact with natural human intelligence — and thus how it will reshape the relationship between cognitive ability and economic reward.

Crucially, this isn’t simply a question about what AI is, as a technology. It is a question about how it is used, and by whom. Whether AI widens or narrows inequality will depend not only upon its technical capabilities, but on the social and developmental conditions that determine who is able to use it effectively.

Economists capture this distinction by asking whether two inputs are complements or substitutes. If artificial intelligence is a complement to human intelligence, it makes capable people more productive. Those who are already skilled can use AI to extend their reach, scale their output, and outperform others by an even greater margin. If, by contrast, AI is a substitute, it performs tasks that previously required human intelligence, thereby reducing the advantage of being especially smart. Work that once demanded elite cognitive ability becomes accessible to a much broader range of people.

The difference matters enormously. In one case, inequality widens; in the other, it may narrow.

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Much of the anxiety surrounding AI assumes the first scenario. People fear the emergence of a permanent over-class of AI-enhanced cognitive elites, with the majority relegated to precarious and lower-value work. That outcome is certainly possible. But it isn’t inevitable.

Even those closest to the technology appear uncertain. Some suggest that AI may erode the value of highly specialized technical skills while elevating more general capacities — judgment, communication, adaptability. Others anticipate the opposite: that those best able to harness these tools will pull further ahead. These conflicting predictions aren’t especially informative in themselves. But they do highlight a central point: how we implement the AI revolution will determine whether machines will primarily amplify human intelligence or replace it.

To see what is at stake, consider how technology has historically amplified talent. As the economist Sherwin Rosen demonstrated, prior to the advent of music streaming services, a slightly better singer could reach millions more people than her nearest competition. A top singer would have access to resources, such as record deals, radio airplay, television appearances, and prime concert venues, that the second-best singer might not, translating a marginal edge into a massive payday. AI might operate on the same principle — as a “superstar” enabler. 

A top-tier lawyer, equipped with AI tools, can survey vast bodies of case law, identify relevant precedents, and draft arguments more quickly, while still relying on unique human judgment to determine what matters. A skilled programmer can generate, test, and refine complex systems at unprecedented speed. In such cases, the technology doesn’t replace human intelligence; it amplifies it. Those who are already highly capable benefit the most.

In this world, where AI and human intelligence are complements, exceptional minds multiply their output, while routine cognitive tasks — data entry, basic analysis, even portions of coding — are increasingly automated. The result is a steeper earnings curve, with modest differences in cognitive ability yielding large differences in income. We’ve seen glimpses of this already. Tech giants like Google and OpenAI are hoovering up talent, paying premiums for the brightest, while entry- and mid-level jobs in fields like journalism or graphic design face AI encroachment. At the same time, the economic rents generated by frontier AI systems may accrue disproportionately to a small number of firms and their owners, further concentrating rewards.

But there is another possibility. Artificial intelligence might instead function as a substitute for certain forms of human cognition. In that case, it would reduce the premium placed on raw intellectual ability by making high-level performance accessible to a broader population.

An analogy may help. Eyeglasses once revolutionized life for the visually impaired. They didn’t turn everyone into hawks with perfect vision, but they prevented poor eyesight from being a lifelong handicap. Bad eyes no longer meant exclusion from reading, driving, or fine craftsmanship. Now, with a few exceptions, poor eyesight is irrelevant to one’s employment prospects. AI could do something similar for intelligence, acting as a corrective lens for the mind. It might not make us all geniuses, but it could mitigate the penalties of average cognition, allowing more people to compete on equal terms. A nurse practitioner using diagnostic tools might approximate aspects of specialist judgment. A small-business owner could perform functions that previously required multiple professionals.

In such a world, what matters less is the speed or depth of one’s unaided reasoning, and more the ability to deploy these new tools effectively — to exercise judgment, to work reliably, and to integrate machine outputs into meaningful action. Traits like discipline, judgment, and social intelligence could become relatively more valuable.

It is tempting to think that whether AI complements or substitutes for human intelligence is a fixed property of the technology itself. But this is misleading. The same tools can function differently depending on the context in which they are used. Where individuals are well-trained and capable of directing these systems, AI will tend to amplify their abilities. Where such capacities are lacking, it may instead replace them.

My own expectation is that, at least in the near to medium term, AI will function more as a complement than a substitute for high-level human cognition, thereby intensifying inequality before any equalizing diffusion takes hold.

Even so, markets don’t stand still. People and institutions adapt. As the value of certain skills rises, individuals respond by acquiring them, and organizations adjust how work is structured accordingly. Over time, these processes may soften the initial effects of technological change. This raises another issue — one that is emphatically social, not technological.

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Adaptation is sure to be uneven. Families with resources — stable homes, access to quality education, and strong social networks — are better positioned to respond. They are more likely to cultivate the habits and dispositions that make effective use of these new technologies possible. Others may lag behind not because they inherently lack relevant abilities, but because they lack access to environments that support their development.

A key constraint, then, isn’t simply access to AI tools. It is access to the conditions under which people learn to use those tools well. The relevant “skill” here is judgment — knowing when to rely on the machine, when to question it, and how to integrate its outputs into meaningful action. Consider a junior analyst using an AI system to generate a financial report. The machine can produce a polished document in seconds — complete with charts, projections, and plausible-sounding explanations. But the real task is not producing the report; it is knowing whether the underlying assumptions make sense, whether the data are reliable, and whether the conclusions follow. A less experienced worker may accept the output at face value. A more seasoned one will probe it, adjust it, and in some cases reject it entirely. The difference is not access to the tool, but the judgment required to use it well.

The question, therefore, is not simply what AI will do to us, but what we will do with it. If it becomes a tool that extends the reach of those already advantaged, inequality will rise. If it becomes a widely usable aid to competence, it may narrow the gap.

Either way, the decisive factor will not be the machine itself, but the social arrangements through which human capacities are formed and deployed. For despite AI’s power, it cannot determine how we use our new and improved vision. But it will force us to reckon with the world we’re building. The degree to which AI polarizes or equalizes us will depend upon our values and our foresight. Major technological disruptions inevitably reveal our flaws — in social organization, in the ways we apportion rewards, in our determination of virtuous living — but technology alone does not determine our fate. That’s the difference between us and our eyeglasses.

He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

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But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

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Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

That moment, captured on video and shared with the world, changed the country. Whatever debates linger about the precise medical cause of Floyd’s death, we all saw what happened: a man’s life ebbing away beneath the knee of an officer sworn to protect and serve. The immediate reaction focused on the alleged racial dynamics at work: white cop, black victim. 

But was this a racial incident? Or were we just making it one? And what happens when the world ceases to recognize the difference?  

The outrage was instant, visceral, and — to a point — understandable. But what struck me then, and still troubles me now, was the totalizing confidence with which commentators, politicians, and activists announced their verdict: George Floyd was murdered because he was black. The phrase “racist cop” became redundant. The nation’s moral diagnosis was rendered before the autopsy had even commenced. 

The moral panic that followed Floyd’s death imposed a set of demands on the country at large, but specifically on white Americans: acknowledge the nation’s past and ongoing crimes against African Americans; either submit to “antiracist” reeducation or admit to complicity with America’s ubiquitous white supremacy; accept that whiteness itself confers ineradicable social privilege (regardless of one’s actual social position); acquiesce to biased policies that compromise meritocratic selection processes; and, above all, do not voice any objections. 

I worried that white Americans who resented the imposition of these unworkable demands would revolt against them. I worried that a backlash would ensue, and that black Americans, and blackness itself, would bear the brunt of it. And now, five years later, racial politics in the United States have reached an inflection point, and the future of black America hangs in the balance.

The summer of 2020 witnessed the largest protest movement in US history. Millions of people — young and old, white and black, urban and rural — flooded the streets to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Their anger was not limited to Floyd’s death. They invoked a roll call of tragedies: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Walter Scott. The litany of the dead took on a universal symbolic meaning that outstripped the evidence: this is what happens to black men in America, because of their race. 

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However, there was something else animating those demonstrations. After months of confinement during the pandemic, Americans were restless and afraid. Many had lost jobs, loved ones, or simply faith in the institutions that governed their lives. The protests became, in part, a national exorcism — a chance to affirm one’s moral standing in a world turned upside down.

The protests were not entirely baseless. The research of economist Roland Fryer had shown that police use of non-lethal force was indeed more frequent against black suspects than white ones. Yet the movement’s rhetoric quickly escalated to the metaphysical. Protesters called for abolition: of the police, of prisons, of “whiteness” itself. What had begun as a demand for reform metastasized into a crusade against a civilization. Reminders of the great achievements of that civilization — the enshrinement of the rights of free expression and protest, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of full citizenship to all Americans regardless of color, and so on — fell on deaf ears.

This escalation did not come out of thin air. For years, the intellectual soil had been fertilized by theories — not least, Critical Race Theory — that framed America as a systemically racist project whose every structure was implicated in white supremacy. By 2020, these ideas had migrated from the academy into the bloodstream of our public life. Politicians mouthed the movement’s slogans, often without understanding their implications. 

Whiteness came to animate even seemingly innocuous institutions and cultural practices, inhabit our speech and thoughts, and possess our history. “Systemic racism” became a liturgical phrase that purported to explain every racial disparity. Corporate executives and elected officials at every level knelt in performative penitence. Schools rewrote curricula to emphasize racial oppression as the organizing principle of the republic.

Many of those who embraced this rhetoric did so cynically — seeking votes, donations, or absolution. Others were simply afraid. Either way, the effect was the same: moral panic masquerading as social criticism. That era’s stunts — the BLM signs in storefront windows, the black avatars on social-media accounts, the demands to “take a knee” at public events, the untold millions spent on struggle sessions at corporate retreats — look in retrospect like embarrassing, panicked attempts to preempt accusations of racism, that did nothing about inequality in the end.  

The irony is that the people most harmed were the black Americans in whose name this theater was performed. Calls to “defund the police” produced predictable results: officers pulled back from proactive policing. Fryer’s later research documented what followed — rising homicide rates that disproportionately victimized black residents. To those proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, the black lives themselves were apparently beside the point. Meanwhile, resentment grew in those who disagreed with these self-conscious displays of faux-solidarity, but feared the consequences of saying so.

I feared this outcome from the start. What worried me most was not that the Black Lives Matter movement would succeed in “abolishing” anything, but that it would provoke a furious reaction. And so it has. 

When people are compelled to mouth pieties they do not believe — when they must sit through hours of racial-sensitivity trainings, nodding along to theories that brand them as beneficiaries of invisible systems of guilt — resentment festers. Such “spirals of silence,” to borrow a phrase from political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, are unstable. They end abruptly, when someone decides to call the bluff. That moment arrived, in part, with Donald Trump.

Trump’s 2020 campaign drew strength from the backlash against progressive overreach. He presented himself as the tribune of the silenced, the man who would say aloud what others only whispered. His supporters were not, for the most part, the caricatured racists of media imagination. They were, in the main, ordinary Americans who felt unjustly accused — white citizens born long after Jim Crow, bewildered at being told that their country and their color made them complicit in murder, and angry at the institutions that, they felt, abetted their exclusion from respectability and honor.

The reactionary energies unleashed by that resentment have not yet subsided. We see them today in the rollback of affirmative action, the shuttering of diversity offices, and the rise of aggressive “anti-woke” politics. Granted, some of these developments were overdue; many of those programs had outlived their usefulness. But this backlash comes with a creeping repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

By this I mean not a wholesale excision of blackness from public discourse, but a constellation of phenomena that view blackness as a cause for skepticism. Black public employees regularly face, without evidence, charges of being “DEI hires” — a code phrase meant to imply incompetence. Videos of black teens acting out circulate with comments suggesting that we should expect nothing better. The Trump administration has scrubbed mention of historic black figures — like Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen — from government websites. After the chaos of 2020, an increasingly vocal segment of the country seems eager to wash its hand of what it regards as an unassimilable minority.

We might ask why such elisions would be wrong, given the excesses of 2020. For in this moment of retrenchment, it is tempting to retreat to a comforting slogan: colorblindness. Indeed, conservatives have, with varying degrees of sincerity, championed colorblindness as an antidote to the lingering effects of societal bias, and as an alternative to post-Civil Rights Movement entitlements. This sounds plausible. Indeed, I have long argued that colorblindness is a necessary condition of social justice. But it is not sufficient.

True justice in matters of race requires more than the refusal to see color; it demands the cultivation of conditions under which color ceases to determine opportunity. A just society would not be indifferent to this concern. To allow blindness to justify indifference is to betray the very ideals of the Civil Rights Movement. One needn’t be a critical race theorist to appreciate this point.

We can acknowledge racial disparities without invoking the language of white supremacy. And we can pursue equality without promoting guilt or resentment. The work of the great reformers of the 20th century remains incomplete — not because they failed, but because their victories created new, more subtle challenges. To complete their work, we must balance two imperatives: to transcend race as a moral category; and to honor the historical particularity of the black experience.

Implicit in those aims is an underlying claim about identity: blackness has content that is relevant to American politics. It is not, as some would have it, a matter of genetics or phenotype. It is the inheritance of a history: of slavery and emancipation, of migration and struggle, of spiritual creativity and cultural innovation. It is a social and moral formation — an evolving conversation among those whose forebears endured a particular ordeal and made of it something enduring. To be black in America is to inhabit an existential predicament shaped by that past. It is to grapple with the meaning of freedom in a country that once denied your ancestors their humanity. It is to claim a stake in the American story not as perpetual victim or permanent outsider, but as co-author.

That past is plural. There is no single “black experience.” The son of Nigerian immigrants in Houston does not share the same historical consciousness as the descendant of slaves in Mississippi. Yet both participate, however differently, in the ongoing project of defining what blackness means in the 21st century.

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It’s the Groypers’ America now

By Richard Hanania

To imagine that the end of racial politics will mean the end of race itself is to mistake the symptom for the substance. We may aspire to a future in which racial identity no longer structures opportunity or moral worth. But we should not yearn for a future in which the memory of blackness — its music, its language, its ironies, and insights — has been erased. And that is what the anti-race backlash threatens to do. 

Preserving that memory entails acknowledging that the racial question in America is changing. The old binary of black and white, which structured the politics of the 20th century, is giving way to a mosaic. Immigration has diversified the country. Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial Americans are reshaping the demographic and cultural landscape.

In this new dispensation, the claims once made in the name of “the Negro” or “the black community” may carry less political weight. The vocabulary of guilt and redress that dominated midcentury liberalism is losing its purchase. The very category of “race,” as a political identity, is being transformed apace with the nation’s demographics.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. But where does it leave blackness?

It could wither into irrelevance — reduced to a museum exhibit, a set of grievances recited on anniversaries, a dead limb on the political body. Or it could evolve into something richer: a cultural inheritance accessible to all Americans, a moral resource for understanding suffering, resilience, and renewal.

The choice is ours.

The task before us is not to erase race from public life, but to reimagine its meaning. The formal remedies that remain — equal access to quality education, fair enforcement of the law, investment in families and communities — should aim not to privilege, but to prepare. We must attend to the formation of our citizens in addition to the fairness of our procedures. But while we rightly prize meritocracy, it loses its moral force under conditions where individuals experience sometimes vastly unequal opportunity to acquire skills, knowledge, and experience. Rightly understood, meritocracy is not the cold calculus of test scores, but the cultivation of human potential across lines of class and color. This is a thick meritocracy, grounded in opportunity and responsibility alike.

In the face of persistent racial disparities, the alternative is grim: a society divided between those who weaponize grievance and those who hide behind denial; a politics oscillating between sentimental guilt and punitive backlash. We already have an inkling of what such a society could look like: hobbled democratic institutions, ethnic tensions, loose talk of civil war, and increasing social and geographical segregation between those with conflicting beliefs. 

It was not inevitable that the summer of George Floyd would lead us this close to the brink. But I fear it has. The lesson to draw from that moment is neither that America is irredeemably racist, nor that race shouldn’t matter. Rather, we must distinguish between seeing race and being ruled by it. 

Many years ago, when I began writing about race for a public audience, I declared that the Civil Rights Movement was over — that the strategies, programs, and policies of the past were unfit for the present. But the spirit of that movement — in its ambitions for true equality to reign as the guiding principle of the nation as a whole — is still alive. Its work remains unfinished, and we must complete it.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

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The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

By Tomiwa Owolade

This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

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What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kaufmann

One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

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Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

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Kamala Harris was set up to fail

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

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Designated Criminal

By David Mamet

So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.