Messages of self-help, cultural pathology, and free markets are seized as excuses from a responsibility to create a more just community. The counterrevolutionaries are flatly wrong to peddle partial explanations of inequality and inherited legacies of disadvantage as complete accounts of an America so long divided by color. In the theft of the century the counterrevolutionaries swiped the message and even the language of the true movement. And they are getting away with it, as was shown by the misleading language of California's Proposition 209. More than stealing language, they are stealing history, too.
Most societies are terrible at dealing with difference, and our future holds only more of it.
Ignoring our differences is not the solution for us any more than it was a sensible strategy in Central Africa or Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland. Patterns of residential segregation by color and class are worsening in much of the country. In today's America color still gets in the way. In that sense, affirmative action is a flash point for policy. It is also inseparable from the grander issue of how we will handle the challenges of difference and the inherited legacy of disadvantage.