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.
