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.
“The old racial bargain is breaking down.”
