In the context of the case itself, the fact that black voters comprise roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, the court held, doesn’t automatically require the state to redraw its congressional map to give that group proportional representation in a third of its six congressional seats. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito reasoned that Section 2 remedies require a clear showing of racial animus — “a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

Mainstream liberal headlines greeted the ruling as another cruel blow to democracy, another attack on racial minorities, another dark day in civil-rights history. NAACP President Derrick Johnson declared it “a major setback for our nation that threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for.” Former President Barack Obama warned that the decision frees “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities — so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias.’” Liberal Justice Elena Kagan stood to read her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare gesture used to underscore her strong disagreement with her colleagues.

These liberal stalwarts aren’t entirely wrong that something significant has ended. But what has ended isn’t the protection of minority voting rights. What has ended is a decades-long political strategy that used the moral language of civil rights to accomplish something the civil-rights movement never actually intended: the expansion of deliberate racial sorting of American voters into engineered electoral districts designed to favor the Democratic Party.

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Anti-Trump judges sparked a legal crisis

By josh hammer

The concept of “using race to fix race” is a pillar of the legal architecture that arose from the 1960s civil-rights era: affirmative action in college admissions and employment being its most explicit and controversial examples. But “using race to fix race” was never understood to be a feature of the Voting Rights Act. Congress designed the VRA to stop state governments from excluding minorities from the ballot box — not to mandate racially engineered outcomes.

But decades after the civil-rights movement, something shifted in how Democratic-aligned rights groups understood the VRA. The law stopped being primarily a shield against racial discrimination and became a sword to expand minority political power by compelling states to draw new districts. Strangely shaped maps that snaked across counties and clustered racial minorities into artificial majorities were no longer per se bad. They could be a useful tool, so long they benefited Democrats. (To justify their gerrymandering, liberal civil-rights litigation recasts residential racial integration — one of the genuine achievements of the post-civil-rights era — as intentional “vote dilution,” requiring the judicial remedy of clustering racial groups into artificially drawn maps.)

That strategy accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Section 5 provision of the VRA that had required states with a history of discrimination to get federal preapproval before changing their election rules. Stripped of that powerful administrative lever, liberal groups turned to Section 2, the VRA’s general anti-discrimination provision, to litigate similar outcomes through the courts.

Over the following decade, a web of organizations — the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, LatinoJustice, and a constellation of Democratic-aligned law firms led by the Elias Law Group — went into action. They turned to a 1986 Supreme Court precedent to advance the theory that Section 2 requires the creation of majority-minority districts wherever the demographic math could be made to support one. 

With this logic, these groups won federal court orders in dozens of redistricting cases compelling governments to redraw maps at every level, from school boards in Alabama to statehouses in North Dakota and Mississippi. The targets expanded with each cycle: first majority-black districts, then majority-Latino, then Native American, and, most ambitiously, “coalition districts” combining black, Latino, and Asian voters into a single legally protected class.

The deeper problem with this strategy is one mainstream coverage consistently refuses to examine. Racial clustering isn’t an expression of civil rights. Deliberately drawing maps that concentrate people by race is a form of segregation, regardless of the political justification. It was wrong when white Southern legislators used it to dilute Black voting power in the 1960s. It is wrong when liberal lawyers use it to manufacture safe Democratic seats today. 

The principle doesn’t change based on who draws the map.

What the Democratic civil-rights industrial complex built was, at its core, a system that treated black, Latino, and Asian voters not as individual citizens with rights to be protected, but as demographic raw material to be sorted and clustered to the party’s benefit. In 2024, not a single Republican won a majority-minority district anywhere in the country. Instead, these were guaranteed seats for Democrats with no competition, no accountability, and no reason for an elected Democratic representative to do anything other than perform the expected cultural politics of their carefully created constituency. 

The question worth asking, which the Democratic Party has thus far avoided: what did those guaranteed seats deliver for the racial minority communities they were designed to represent? The most Democratic-run cities in America, anchored by these safe majority-minority districts, are also among the most expensive, most unequal, and most poorly managed. Guaranteed seats for Democrats didn’t produce good government. Instead, they set a permanent stage for racial grievance politics that reliably generated fundraising and turnout while delivering remarkably little in the way of material improvement for these captive constituents. 

The new Callais ruling curtails the ambitions of the liberal coastal elites who control the Democratic Party and its various legal and advocacy apparatuses from expanding this captive electoral model through Section 2 of the VRA. There will be short-term costs, to be sure. Republican state legislatures will redraw maps. Some black and Latino Democratic incumbents will face genuinely competitive races for the first time. 

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By vincent lloyd

But discomfort for a political party and injustice for a minority racial group aren’t the same thing. Minority voters dispersed into competitive districts produce something the majority-minority district system never could: real pressure on candidates of both parties to earn those votes. In the long-term, the GOP will have to compete for black voters in Georgia, Latino voters in Texas, and working-class minority voters across the South. This is a better arrangement than one that would simply corral those voters into packed Democratic districts. It also allows Republicans the time and opportunity to build persuadable platforms to absorb the coming demographic wave of post-1960s naturalized Americans voters and their offspring, who will play an increasingly important role in future elections.

As for the Democrats, the high court has effectively curtailed the efforts of party operatives to use the VRA to lock in more racial minorities in state redistricting following every US Census. This is a decidedly good thing, because majority-minority districts for decades have left black and Latino voters captured by one party with nowhere else to go. The result was a party that allowed itself to believe that symbolic representation could replace actual representation; and that racial-justice rhetoric could be substituted for material economic results. 

For many observers, it has been obvious for some time that the long-term Democratic strategy was to use Section 2 to create more majority-minority maps, eventually allowing the “coalition district” concept to be held constitutional to cluster two or more racial minority groups to create new districts as the demographics of the United States reflect not just greater number of Hispanic and black voters, but increasing numbers of Asian immigrants.

Long term, Callais is about something larger than redistricting. For more than 60 years, since the passage of the major civil-rights legislation, race became the organizing logic of Democratic electoral strategy because racial sorting was electorally useful. It filled campaign coffers, it guaranteed political seats, and it gave consultants and lawyers and civil-rights organizations a lucrative and powerful position near the center of the party’s operation. The latest court ruling sets the upper limits of the legal architecture the party sought to expand to capture an increasingly diverse electorate. Now if the Democrats want new voters, they will have to earn them.

This is deadly earnest stuff, pitched like a sermon: in a lesser writer’s hands it might tilt toward the sentimental. But in Baldwin’s voice (which, by that point in his career, was nearly the same in talking as it was in writing), it is graceful, perennially relevant, and true. These days, when even the word “empathy” sounds to some like the language of stuffy social justice activism, the mere mention of race or sexuality only sets off the same dull culture-war script we’ve been playing out for decades. In our general hangover from the whole “Woke Era” (for lack of a better term) — which essentially canonized Baldwin as a kind of guiding shaman/saint — we run the risk of forgetting the pressing racial and sexual issues that era ultimately failed to address. We may be tired of hearing about them; we may resent the proliferating academic vocabularies with which they were often  discussed; but we’re still not free of them. Nor are we free from the insight and genius of James Baldwin himself, who really was one of the most important writers on the intertwined evils of racism and sexual bigotry.

Though really, Baldwin was one of the finest American writers full stop: an excellent novelist and a moral essayist without any peer in the 20th century. He was also an unbelievably complex man: self-loathing and self-indulgent; courageous; jealous; a born performer, who enjoyed his fame, yet remained essentially religious in his sincerity and commitment to civil rights campaigns in America. These were the same paradoxes out of which he penned numerous of the most personal stories and essays of his time — and it’s this picture of Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs’s tremendous new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, gets perfectly right. The key is in the subtitle, A Love Story. Since, at least in Baldwin’s writing, everything always came back to that most easily over-complicated, easily-dismissed, ubiquitous four-letter word.

In pursuit of its subtitle, Boggs’s book divides itself into sections, according to the great male loves of Baldwin’s life. The first — not a sexual relationship, to be clear — spans his early years under the influence of his mentor, the great Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin met as a young man in Upper Manhattan. The rest of the book covers several longer periods, in each of which a particular man (generally a bisexual, often married, man) became the focus of Baldwin’s artistic and romantic imagination: first the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, then the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, then the French artist Yoran Cazac. These periods roughly correspond to those passages of time which Baldwin spent in France, in Turkey, and finally, in France again. Indeed, despite his many trips back to America — particularly in the Sixties — Baldwin spent most of his life in relative exile from the United States, bouncing between paramours.

Besides his many smaller love affairs, Baldwin’s greatest romances revolved around vague domestic fantasies about these “mostly heterosexual” men, and the commingled “family” of people he gathered around him: artists like Delaney, friends like Mary Painter, or personal assistants like David Leeming, Baldwin’s eventual biographer. Boggs is exhaustive in his attempts to tie these romantic pursuits — along with Baldwin’s developing sense of himself as a black, gay man in a time of absolute upheaval around American society’s relationship to those identities — into the progression of his novels, from Go Tell it On the Mountain (1952) to Just Above My Head (1979), and his greatest works of non-fiction, from Notes of a Native Son (1955) to The Devil Finds Work (1976). There is almost nothing in Baldwin’s own books which Boggs can’t trace back to what was happening in the writer’s life as he planned, wrote, and revised these works, sometimes over years.

At times, this gives the reader an insightful look into Baldwin’s actual creative process. Yet Boggs’s biographical literary-critical method verges on becoming a vice, hewing pretty closely to the most clichéd ideals of writing-as-therapy, sometimes leaving little room for the possibility that Baldwin’s creations might have come from a deeper imaginative space, and not just from an attempt to achieve personal catharsis. Still, if it is a vice, it’s the only one, in what is otherwise a remarkable book of social and personal history. Some passages are so vividly rendered, Boggs manages to do the near-impossible, making one of the most tumultuous times in American history — the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and 1964 — seem furiously present-tense and unpredictable. This is especially true of the episode encompassing Baldwin’s near-breakdown, while trying to stage his first play, Blues for Mister Charlie, with Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York. Baldwin’s unbelievable levels of stress make sense, when one realizes he had only recently traveled to a violently desegregating South, afterwards organizing his infamous meeting with Robert Kennedy, to get more explicit support for civil rights campaigners. He had also just participated in the March on Washington, where his scheduled speech was pulled, partially due to Baldwin’s reputation as a known homosexual.

Given his intimate relationships with fellows artists like Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, and Lorraine Hansberry — as well as his his brief friendships with civil rights leaders like Malcolm X, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael — it’s no surprise that a biography of Baldwin also doubles as a social history of American culture from the Forties to the Seventies. It reveals him as one of his own time’s greatest and sharpest moral voices — a man writing with unforgiving clarity about the inner struggles of black Americans and sexual minorities, not to mention the moral rot of a white America that couldn’t let go of its racial divisions (nor its deep psychosexual angst about those divisions, something Baldwin insisted was irrevocably intertwined with the roots of white supremacy). And at a certain point his expatriate exile and homosexuality both left him nearly adjunct to the newly forming canon of black American art.

Yet what remains most inspiring and influential in Baldwin’s writing is how he recognized, from the start, that the struggle for freedom for Black America (and White America, too, in the end), was inseparable from his own search for personal freedom, for the freedom to create himself. Like his close friend (and fellow genius) Nina Simone, the righteous rage which radiated out from his words was an undeniable personal rage, not just a greater, symbolic one. For Baldwin, the need to be free — free as a gay man, and as a black man — in a society set up to punish him for being either, was no different from the call for greater freedom across America, or across the globe. Yet for him the American Dream was a fairly monstrous myth, a myth of American innocence: one in which the country’s vision of freedom always came at the expense of the enslaved and the persecuted. Real freedom would require those who profited the most from the arrangement — white Americans — to let go of their innocence, to realize the horrors which had been required to create that naïve Dream.

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That is, seriously grappling with American racism would mean understanding just how much it had to do with sexual fear and jealousy (as all racism ultimately does). But what was clear to Baldwin — one of his darkest but most important insights — was that there is no greater nightmare than America’s perennial wish to believe in that innocence. As he stated many times over, the creation of “white” as a category not only built a framework excluding black people from free society, it corroded the souls of white Americans, too — by only ever allowing them to be white. Reducing their lives and identities, to arbitrary ideals of racial purity, which would have to be defended (no matter how absurd, or immoral) in order to preserve the institution of slavery. For Baldwin, the restoration of abused black Americans, after centuries of horrors, would mean getting to the bottom of the historical disaster that was “whiteness” — which had left white Americans as confined to that destructive racial category as their black compatriots were to theirs.

Of course, there is a kind of fatalism that crops up, when we consider just how long this historical situation went on, how much it still defines American society. Baldwin himself spent much of his career growing weary and pessimistic about the hope for this kind of large-scale change. There are echoes of his later stance — his sadness about how little could be done to really achieve equality for black Americans and sexual minorities — in the general pessimism which has plagued so many social justice movements this century. Indeed, there is still widespread exhaustion with how much still has to be done, not least in combating poverty, or dismantling America’s hellish prison system (not to mention the kinds of outright white supremacist rhetoric and sexual bigotry which the MAGA movement has been happy to popularize again, even ironically). Across the 2010s and into the early 2020s, this pessimism tended to manifest as a directionless obsession with guilt, atonement, and the moral surveillance of other people — something our social media panopticons make too easy. Yet puritanical strains of social justice campaigning simply run counter to reality: freedom can’t be achieved by defining and enforcing any particular creed or morality. In order to be free, people must, as the philosopher Hegel once said of Shakespeare’s characters, be able to become “free artists of themselves” — a phrase which fits Baldwin’s own personal mission of freedom perfectly.

Baldwin was adamant, always, that though the world may be broken, though pessimism may in fact be realistic, people still always have a choice to love. We may call that trite, or dismiss it as sentimental. We may complain about how unrealistic it is, or about how many complicated political issues there are that get in the way of ostensibly simple ideals like love and peace and, yes, empathy. Yet if we don’t accept the possibility that love is always a choice — vulnerability, difficulty, pain be damned— then we doom ourselves (and each other) to hate, violence, ignorance, and evil. In a way, it’s exactly as simple as this. A lot of political rhetoric is only designed to make it seem ridiculous compared to, say, the realpolitik of immigration or law enforcement (as if human morality and spirituality could ever be reduced to a political argument). But if there is any lesson to be taken from James Baldwin’s life and work, it is that no matter how fatalistic we are, no matter how “realistic” we may wish to be, the only things that matter in the end are the things we do out of love. And that real human freedom would be the highest possible expression of that love.

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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By Glenn Loury

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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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.