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In 1968 the Kerner Commission on civil disorders warned that racism was causing America to move “toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal … with ‘white racism’ chiefly to blame for the explosive conditions that sparked riots in American cities.” It also warned that a policy of separatism then advocated by many black militants “can only relegate Negroes to a permanently inferior economic state.”
In 1993 Kenneth Clark, an African American psychologist who, along with his wife, presented psychological evidence in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, reminisced at the age of seventy-six: “Reluctantly, I am forced to face the likely possibility that the U.S. will never rid itself of racism and reach true integration. … I shudder at how naïve we all were in our belief in the steady progress racial minorities would make through programs of litigation and education. … I am forced to recognize that my life, in fact, has been a series of glorious defeats” (quoted in Mills 1998, p. 172). We are, in fact, two societies. Liberal New York City, for example, has one of the most segregated school systems in the country, both racially and economically.1 Covid-19 is affecting communities of color much more severely than white communities, Black men are being killed by police, and we are witnessing the use of racial “dog whistles.”
Do whites fear that their place at the head of the table is threatened by nonwhites, who will become the majority in the U.S. as early as 2045? The ruthless treatment of nonwhites by the dominant white Europeans is historically undisputed. Some say that this continues today, despite legal prohibitions, with prisons as the contemporary version of Black slavery.