The Racial Crossroads..
American race relations are at a crossroads. In the years since our current racial bargain was struck in the 1960s, our country has coped with its contradictions and imperfections by the very American method of muddling through. That has worked for a long time, but soon it won’t work anymore. We will have to choose between one path and another. There are two reasons for this, and they are unavoidable.
The first reason is demographic. Our racial bargain was made for a country that was biracial and almost 90 percent white. It will no longer work for a country where white people are a minority and the non-white population includes multiple races, including some that were hardly present in the United States when the racial bargain was struck. There were fewer Chinese Americans in 1960 than there are Egyptian Americans today and fewer Mexican-born Americans then than Venezuelan-born Americans now.
For Generation Z, the beneficiaries of our system of racial benefits are no longer a marginal 10 percent of the population. They are a demographic majority. Non-white Zoomers—and, to an extent, white women as well—benefit from both demographic predominance and an explicit or tacit boost in any head-to-head competition with white men, which, in combination, means that affirmative action is no longer a matter of white Americans sacrificing the occasional promotion. It means white men in particular are effectively shut out of many prestigious fields and institutions, especially in the lower rungs.
This is both unfair and unworkable. Unfair, because a white Zoomer does not feel toward the son of an Indian computer programmer or the daughter of a Mexican illegal immigrant the same moral obligation he feels toward the descendant of slaves. Unworkable, because the challenge of making every institution match our national demographics becomes more difficult as our diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room. Now it means finely calibrating multiple demographics, which requires putting race at the forefront of personnel decisions.
The second reason race relations are approaching a crisis is that our racial bargain was supposed to be temporary. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it was quickly agreed that some racial favoritism was justified to compensate for the black minority’s unequal starting point. The temporary nature of this favoritism was crucial to the deal. The imperative to treat citizens equally under the law was the moral claim on which the whole civil rights movement was based. Race-based remedies were only “transitional,” promised one chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and would “fall into disuse once the job is done.”
At the time, it was sincerely expected that black and white outcomes would converge. A study by the Urban Institute in 1971 extrapolated black progress over the previous eight years and predicted exactly when the catch-up would occur for various metrics such as poverty rates, college completion, and infant mortality. The one that would take the longest, life expectancy at thirty-five years, was predicted to reach white levels in 2019.
In 2003, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote, “We expect that twenty-five years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” in her decision in Grutter v. Bollinger upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan. There were a handful of conservatives at the time who would have told her that this was optimistic, based on the available data, but these voices were marginalized as politically incorrect. The conventional wisdom was with Justice O’Connor.
Today, two years away from Justice O’Connor’s twenty-five-year deadline, the conventional wisdom has changed. Everyone can see that the long hoped-for convergence has not materialized. Affirmative action is still necessary to achieve colleges’ desired racial diversity. We have created a black middle class, but blacks from wealthy households on average still have lower SAT scores and lower credit scores than whites from poorer households. Large disparities in violent crime rates still persist, as do disparities in wealth, in part because houses in black neighborhoods still have persistently lower home values.
Both the left and the right have registered the stubbornness of these racial gaps. The recent popularity among liberals of radical authors such as Ibram X. Kendi, who proposed an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting “racial inequity” and a new government agency to implement it, was a symptom of this disillusionment. As equality of opportunity recedes as a plausible goal for the civil rights regime, having failed to arrive after three generations, there is a growing market for pessimists like Kendi who want to shift the goal to equality of outcome.
So that is the situation we face: The old racial bargain is breaking down, due to a combination of changing demographics and a dawning realization that racial outcomes are not going to converge any time soon. One possible path forward is to throw out the old racial bargain and establish a new one based on equality under the law. The other possible path is to accept permanent racial favoritism at every level of society.
e got a glimpse of the doubling-down option in 2020. Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory name for the ideology that swept America in the summer of 2020. “Critical race theory” and “identity politics” both had their day. “Wokeness” is the term most people have settled on, for lack of a better one. They have even picked it up in France, “ le wokisme .” The main problem with the term is that it sounds frivolous. It makes you think of gender studies professors. But the phenomenon was not frivolous. The goal of wokeness was not gender-neutral bathrooms. It was the redistribution of money and power from disfavored groups to favored groups.
It succeeded. Between 2016 and 2023, the share of management positions held by non-whites grew more than four times faster than it had in the preceding decade, according to a 2026 report by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. More than 30 percent of new board appointees at S&P 500 companies in 2021 were black. The Washington Post calculated in 2021 that America’s fifty biggest companies had pledged $50 billion to racial equity causes since George Floyd’s death, including $45 billion in loans and investment and over $4 billion in direct grants.
The ideology of 2020 has a historical antecedent in the theories of decolonization developed in 1960s, which held that all of the Third World—Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even the ghettos of the United States—was united in a single struggle between white oppressors and people of color. In that struggle, people of color were entitled to seize the wealth of whites because that wealth had all been stolen from them in the first place. This “Third Worldism” was essentially a variation on Marxism with people of color in the place of the proletariat.
Though the modern version has continuities with Third Worldism, the problem with Third Worldism as a term is that makes it sound foreign. Today’s Third Worldists do care about foreign policy, especially the war in Gaza, but most of their agenda is domestic and their ideology was certainly not imported from abroad.
The term that I prefer for the ideology we saw in 2020 is race communism. The term “gay race communism” originated with the pseudonymous X account Drukpa Kunley in 2022 and entered the public record when it appeared in print in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. It started as a jokey epithet, but, as a straightforward description, it has much to recommend it.
“Race communism” captures the fact that race holds something like the place in our ruling ideology that the working class held in communist countries. Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is the source of the state’s moral legitimacy; decisions about jobs, promotions, housing, and university admissions are all tilted toward favored groups. Proficiency in the ruling ideology is a criterion for advancement in any kind of career. Every large workplace has an ideological enforcer whose job it is to make sure the institution is aligned with the ruling ideology publicly and internally.
“Communism” makes people think of gulags and the midnight knock on the door. But for most of its existence, the Soviet empire was a fairly normal place to live. Its uniqueness lay in the way it put Marxism-Leninism at the center of society and judged every program, event, or phenomenon by whether it advanced its particular notion of progress. Race has come to play a similar role in the United States.
Race communism is a blunt term. I came to accept it only by a slow process. It started when I noticed how normal it had become to speak in dehumanizing terms about white people. When Sarah Jeong had her position on the New York Times editorial board called into question in 2018 over social media posts such as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” her defenders said that her posts were just part of the Millennial online vernacular. This was true, and that was the problem.
This talk sometimes had the fig leaf of being about “whiteness” rather than white people. According to Kendi, “whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity.” It was not just academics who talked like this. A diversity training module for Coca-Cola employees told them to “try to be less white,” meaning “be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive.” Whiteness was talked about as something to be eliminated or abolished.
The next step came when I noticed how race was intruding into completely unrelated topics of conversation. Reading a book about euthanasia in 2021, I was jolted to see a quote in it to the effect that, since over 90 percent of people who seek assisted dying are white, we shouldn’t worry about it. Economist Adam Posen, in a viral clip of a conference panel in 2022, dismissed worries about America’s manufacturing base as “part of the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they’re in.”
When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered a speech about “equity and racial justice in infrastructure,” it was good for a laugh, but it wasn’t a joke when he put $1 billion toward it. The Federal Trade Commission in 2021 declared its intention to target racial bias as an unfair business practice. Some states put whites with multiple comorbidities behind non-whites with none in their distribution of the Covid vaccine. Everywhere I looked, people were spending real money and making real decisions based on the idea that non-white people deserved more consideration than their white counterparts.
Powerful people talked about the need to reorient institutions toward the goal of fighting white supremacy. Joe Biden said he decided to run for president after the “Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis” at Charlottesville in 2017 showed him a “battle for the soul of this nation” was underway. The executive editor of The New York Times responded sympathetically to a staffer who said in an employee town hall in 2019 that “racism is in everything, it should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored a bill to add racial equity to the mandate of the Federal Reserve.
The call to make anti-racism central to our institutions is framed as aspirational, but we are nearly there already. Our race laws have become all-pervasive in part because there are simply more people running around who qualify as their beneficiaries—more claimants, more claims. That is why there can be no going back to some ideal moment when our civil rights regime struck a better balance. There is no way to maintain our current laws and our current demographics without our entire politics revolving around race.
A new generation of Democrats is emerging to whom this style of politics comes naturally. They grew out of the socialist wing of the party that rallied behind Bernie Sanders in 2016, but with an emphasis on racial justice. “The fact that he’s a brown person who speaks to all these marginalized communities in a place like New York is a part of the difference between him and Bernie,” a supporter of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Vanity Fair . These Democrats tend to support amnesty for illegal immigrants, reparations for black Americans, and Palestine—all issues that fit the narrative of white oppressors and non-white oppressed.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Race communism is a blunt term. I came to accept it only by a slow process. It started when I noticed how normal it had become to speak in dehumanizing terms about white people. When Sarah Jeong had her position on the New York Times editorial board called into question in 2018 over social media posts such as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” her defenders said that her posts were just part of the Millennial online vernacular. This was true, and that was the problem.
This talk sometimes had the fig leaf of being about “whiteness” rather than white people. According to Kendi, “whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity.” It was not just academics who talked like this. A diversity training module for Coca-Cola employees told them to “try to be less white,” meaning “be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive.” Whiteness was talked about as something to be eliminated or abolished.
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A long article but a good look at the issues.
Race communists making race the be all and end of all their morality and politics, means race will only becoming increasingly more divisive as time goes on. A party who's entire reason to exist is to discriminate against the basis on race is going to have a hard time balancing their own coalition, who will want to enjoy the perks of discriminating against others as the class that is being discriminated against continues to shrink demographically.
I think we can all agree, if we are honest, that race relations in America have deteriorated. After we had achieved so much following the civil rights movement of the 60s, the question becomes why?
How have we gone from the success of changing attitudes of the vast majority of the white population and the rise of a Black American middle class to racial animosity mostly among blacks to the point where somebody like Camelo Anthony, who went to a track meet with a knife in his backpack and used it to murder a young white man, gets championed by a good deal of the black community?
How did the Black community wind up with the shocking crime levels and single parent home levels that now plague it?
How does the superstar of the Women's Basketball Association get systematically targeted by black players based on race and both the league and the media plays it down?
When you begin adding up all of this, it is clear that something has gone wrong. I'll give our readers one guess who is responsible.
We only need go back to the 80s & 90s when it seemed that Black Americans were doing well in sports & entertainment and politics. Many Black Americans had reached middle class status. Keep in mind that "race" was incidental, it did not define people as it suddenly has. There are many mixed societies that are subject to tribalism, we had escaped that fatal flaw.
In 2008 Barack Obama was elected president. He said he was going to heal all of us. He did just the opposite. Almost immediately he got involved in all things involving race. With the Louis Henry Gates incident, he began emphasizing race and he said things that were simply not true, such as the police were systematically more likely to shoot young black men who were unarmed vs white men (a lie). Affirmative action which was supposed to be a temporary "solution' for 60 years morphed into DEI under Obama and anyone who was not white would be included in DEI. These would include immigrants/migrants from India, Mexico and much of the third world. At that point all of them could join in past grievances against the white population. Thus, the universities and the federal bureaucracy institutionalized that anger & resentment. He took a page out of Marxist ideology: There is no middle. There are only the oppressors and the oppressed.
That is how we got saddled with this mess.
Wow. Those racists tropes yet LIVE and HAUNT! Nobody (smart) takes such one-sided bungo seriously. (The operative word being, "smart.")
What "tropes" are you seeing?
The racist ones. . . see 1.1.
So you also only want to call members racist.
It seems that post 1.1 is solid. Truth is beauty.
Thank you.
Seems. . . meems. . . .
Truth is beautiful. Get some. . .beauty. 
You're welcome.
Fucking xenophobic lunatics. Get over yourselves already and move on, there's nothing wrong with diversity, there's nothing wrong with being white or any other skin color or culture. Let people be who they want to be, and I even believe that for the stupid, inbred bigots who stay up at night worried about their 'white culture' disappearing, the sad sorry stupid fucks. They may be dumber than rocks but they have the right to exist and a right to their racist opinions. I just believe those opinions should stay out of our schools, courthouses and government, same as where religion has no place.
The perfect example of the race communism Andrews wrote about. Buzz words, orwellian manipulation of the language and incoherent rage. Not even an attempt at substance.
They can't admit their support for race discrimination so they pretend criticizing race discrimination is criticizing generic "diversity" It's such a feeble deflection one wonders why anyone bothers with it.
You don't see irony in that statement?
That post is a perfect example of blame-shifting.
Black people and white people made a bargain?
I swear, racist white angst is so exhausting.
Not only is it exhausting, but it's also incredibly childish and weak. They're like little crybabies running to their mommy to complain that the world isn't bowing down to them anymore. Fucking whiny weak weasels.
What 'f-ing' racial bargain, is that? Apparently something was agreed to. . . wonder whom that deal was cut with? And I wonder why the hell MAGA supporters think we should honor it now?
And there it is. . . the bastards that have kept racist practices, tactics, and strategies. . . fear the success of their fellow marginalized community. (We have been here since the damn beginning with them. . . through all the joys and bullshits. . . and now all I can say is "they SEE US"-finally when the chips are 'down.' And guess what? Obviously being marginalized and needing someone to feel their demotion and accompanying 'pain' is not a good feeling.
Welcome to our 'world' - our existence, you stubborn ______! Can you UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE abused, mistreated, and neglected. . . just a 'little' bit now?!
You are celebrating the pain racial discrimination inflicts on innocent people. Rarely does the mask slip so profoundly.
Well, my 'mask" can't slip because it's permanent. . . and yet some people know that already. In fact, "those people" celebrate the permanence! And in case you have not observed over the many years I have been around here, I am an innocent-wishing some people well in their own menagerie of life just as long as they keep their incredibly greedy and 'thirsty' bullsh-t corralled closely to their environment or 'compound' and leave the rest of us to enjoy parallel existences apart from the constant, life-long, pain and sufferance of themselves.
Nonsense. What he's pointing out are the millions of innocent people who have been feeling that pain for decades, centuries even, and now some ungrateful conceited white Americans are experiencing a tiny fraction of marginalization after having to compete on a more leveled playing field and can't handle it for even a second. It's like an entire segment of America are Karens bitching about a minority parking in their spot. "Why are they even here, what are they doing here, they shouldn't be here, that's my spot, oh my God! Im gonna call the cops, they need to get the fuck out of my neighborhood, they don't belong here, inconveniencing me, they belong in jail! I'm an American!"
A thought came to me earlier as I was thinking about those who are still having to overcome the long legacy of racist hate and discrimination inflicted on minorities since our founding.
It took small and large actions for centuries to finally get to where American society isn't shocked by wealthy people of color living in the high rent districts and being CEO's and CFO's and bank managers and doctors. The last century our nation has made huge strides in recognizing black and minority Americans in all kinds of fields that 100 years ago would have seemed like an unrealistic fiction. And that's what makes this nation great, that is progress and it took millions of butterfly wings of every color, white, black, brown, every shade and every texture to get us here.
Why can't that bitter third of bleached bigots who want to maintain some fantasy white Christian antebellum culture understand that just because America has become more diverse, that does not eliminate 'white culture'. White culture has always been borrowing things from around the world. White European culture came largely from Roman culture which had conquered the known world and brought back little bits of culture and words and ideas from everywhere. I believe white American culture really is just a collection of all the different white immigrant cultures which borrowed theirs from all their empires all over the world and then when they came here, they were swaddled in an American flag. That means American cultures doesn't disappear as the Americans in the swaddle look less white or are praying to different Gods. No. The beauty of America is that regardless of your skin color, regardless of your faith, it's the flag, the constitutional Republica that should bind us. America is big enough for all of us, it's not about space, it's about those Americans who have been marginalized being allowed space in the center as well. We should all be embracing a culturally, socially and religiously diverse America. Those who whine and gnash their teeth are clearly just vestigial parts that need to be snipped if they can't adapt.
I think it was JD Vance that latched onto an idea he called "heritage American" or something like that. The idea being that the only way to be a real American is to be able to trace your ancestry back to many generations in this country. Therefore anyone whose family originated from a "shithole" country can never be a "real" American.
Exactly! 5 out of 5 stars! Sadly, I, we, all, will have to keep telling bigots that, because bigots insist on PREYING on the hearts and minds of our community through insistence that if bigots are not in charge. . . the country. . .the world. . .with all its joys and pleasures. . . will collapse in on itself.
It’s has nothing to do with “heritage Americans.” it’s about stopping racial discrimination. Democrats are quite happy racially discriminating against the child of a single mother who is a maid who immigrated from Poland.
alization after having to compete on a more leveled playing field and can't handle it for even a second
Calling blatant race discrimination a leveled playing field is just blatantly dishonest. You can’t admit what you support (race discrimination) so you use transparently Orwellian phrases that fool no one but yourself.
just admit you you support racial discrimination against white kids born when Obama was president and stop hiding behind weasel words.
Race being the deciding factor for jobs over merit. What happens when progressives obtain power.
No, you support racial discrimination and take obvious pleasure in some of the people the people it victimizes. Read your own words.
CAUTION! Psychological Projection used above ↑!!!
I know DAMN WELL you are not attempting to lecture me about (black/white) racial politics. Really?! I appreciate (sarcasm) the try. . . but, you don't have the chops to do this as long as I have lived it. . . so, it's best that you stop right here.
Calling over 200 years of white affirmative action 'a level playing field' just because you removed the 'whites only' signs is beyond dishonest.
Now that is rich! Whatever happened to just letting people rise and fall on their own merit. . . without making race an issue? That is, stop the bullshit tribalism and racial nepotism that was pervasive in and after the 1960s ending (briefly) in the 1970s and once again has reared its head in the form of Trump/MAGA: One leader and his many pack followers in the conservative "movement" that is poorly running the country.
People are people. Time this fool who wrote the article learn that and get with the future that is coming.
BTW, minorities in this country don't want to RULE white people, generally do not come here to invade or plunder white "America." They come for the ATTRACTION to a good land of promise that is different from other good places-more or less—or worse!
The real promise >>here<< is WHITES that think that somebody has GIVEN them a country of a multiplicity of different people from different cultures around the world, "the melting pot," and they, bigoted whites," can stir said pot to their liking without any true input from those they "otherize."
News Flash! This land is for ALL AMERICANS! All of us 100 percent born, bred, raised, and fed here!
Bigoted Whites do not own this land of 'many peoples' that should be living and acting as One! Now then can't stupid and hateful bigoted people go pack sand and bury themselves in it! WE ARE SO DONE WITH YOUR BULLSHIT! DONE! OVER IT! (And, stop penning ridiculous racist projection materials!)