The Second Reconstruction and Its Discontents

The new regime is best understood as a constellation of executive action, statutes, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic expansion. The first pillar is affirmative action, which took form in 1965 under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. The order required every contractor generating more than $10,000 of revenues from business with the federal government to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The language, like most of the foundational documents of the second Reconstruction, explicitly forbids discrimination. Yet the same order, together with the federal machinery around it, brought into being a civil-rights bureaucracy that secured the opposite result. The logic of equal opportunity, pursued far enough, comes to license the pursuit of equal outcomes. What the 2010s would christen “wokeness” is already present here, half a century early, in germ.

Buttressing this first pillar is the landmark Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which held that while fixed racial quotas in admissions were unconstitutional, race might still be weighed “as a factor in admissions in so-called affirmative action policies.” Allan Bakke—a white Vietnam veteran and engineer with strong MCAT scores—had been refused by the University of California Davis’s medical school in favor of less qualified black applicants; or so he alleged in his lawsuit, which resulted in the court ordering him admitted. Carl dwells on Patrick Chavis—frequently presented in the press as the black student who had taken Bakke’s place and initially touted by figures as prominent as Ted Kennedy as a vindication of affirmative action promise. But the promise did not hold as Chavis’s subsequent career did not at all comport with the glowing media coverage he received. By 1997, he had been sued for malpractice by some twenty-one patients, one of whom died under his care during a liposuction, and in the following year California revoked his medical license for gross negligence. In 2002 he was killed in an attempted carjacking. The celebratory coverage was likely to invite its own rebuke: Chavis’s life trajectory. The choice of a symbol was governed by everything except a candid assessment of Chavis’s character.

The second pillar is the doctrine of disparate impact, established by Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971. Duke Power was a North Carolina utility company that had relied on a battery of IQ and mechanical-aptitude tests to determine internal promotion. This practice, the Supreme Court ruled, was in violation of the Civil Rights Act simply because the white employees passed the tests at markedly higher rates than the black employees. No intent to discriminate was alleged, let alone proven—the incidentally unequal disparity alone rendered the practice illegal. After Griggs, under Title VII, every private firm has operated at the sufferance of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, free to be prosecuted according to the Division’s own shifting measures of equal outcome. Naturally, the incentive followed: a firm would avoid any practice that might, even inadvertently, advantage white applicants or employees, since disparate impact doctrine is wholly indifferent to intention.

These first two pillars converge upon a third: the dismantling of a right that liberal societies have always assumed without quite naming, the freedom of association. Caldwell traces its erosion further back than Carl does, to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the unconstitutionality of “separate but equal.” The Court, little troubled by the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, found that segregation was “usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group,” resting its judgment on “intangible considerations” and “qualities that are incapable of objective measurement.” The reasoning bears an unmistakable resemblance to the judicial activism conservatives have long deplored. Set within the larger civil rights edifice raised in the years that followed, these pillars amount to the abolition of property rights and of the very idea of a private sphere beyond the reach of the state. The proposition that a polity must perforce tolerate some measure of discrimination in order to preserve individual autonomy and to allow genuine communities to flourish outside state encroachment is an entirely reasonable one; and yet to state it in public is now verboten.

Whenever the question of limiting the state’s reach into society is aired in public, the same scene recurs. An interviewer asks his guest—ordinarily a professed champion of libertarian freedom—whether a free society must include the right even potentially to discriminate, and the guest abandons his own premises on the spot lest he be cast out as a pariah. The damage this recurring capitulation did to libertarianism as a movement is difficult to overstate. It demoralized the faithful, many of whom would go looking, in the 2010s, for a sturdier political philosophy that did not collapse under media censure and, over the generations, resulted in a movement which forgot how to defend the most basic conception of freedom—easing libertarianism’s passage into its present nominal form, a movement whose loftiest vision of freedom is the soma of banal self-indulgence (e.g., marijuana legalization, decriminalizing prostitution, etc.).

Carl’s chronicle of the erosion of freedom of association leads naturally to a fitting subsequent subject: the history of violence and racial displacement that followed the Civil Rights Movement in America’s cities. His pages here are the beginning of a needed correction to durable myths—that the period’s anti-white violence and the ethnic cleansing of the great cities either did not occur, or were somehow the doing of white Americans unduly resistant to racial integration. To measure how unprecedented the transformation was, he begins with Michelle Obama. On the 2019 tour for her memoir she reproached the white Chicagoans who had abandoned neighborhoods such as South Shore, where she was raised: “unbeknownst to us, we grew up in the period—as I write—called ‘white flight.’ That as families like ours, upstanding families like ours . . . As we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented.” Her family may indeed have been upstanding; but, that is not what their arrival was taken to represent.

The figures are stark. “The South Shore of Michelle Obama’s youth had a remarkably rapid transformation, going from 96 percent white in 1950 to 94 percent black in 1980,” Carl writes; “in 1960, just four years before Michelle Obama was born, South Shore was still almost 90 percent white, and by 1970 it was 70 percent black.”

Carlo Rotella’s The World Is Always Coming to an End (2019), a study of the neighborhood, records what came with the change: crime that climbed “from well under the citywide average to double and almost triple that average, among the city’s highest.” South Shore became one of the most dangerous quarters of a dangerous city, its residents reduced to marking time “by the last crime I experienced, heard about, or read about in the neighborhood,” staying indoors after dark “like a character in a vampire movie . . . scuttling from home to car and back again, as if on a planet with hostile wildlife and unbreathable air.” Rotella’s witnesses make the point in their own voices. Donda West, in her 2007 memoir, recalls a group of children slashing the tires of her 10-year-old son Kanye West’s bicycle and trying to make off with it; the family soon left the neighborhood. Another witness reminds us that this state of affairs still persists to this day. Jedidiah Brown, who took a job as a private security guard after having lost an earlier job after he was filmed storming the stage at a 2016 Trump rally in Chicago, provides a harrowing testimony: “South Shore is the first place where I saw dead people in the street and other people just going about their business around them. Not even Englewood was like that.”

Carl’s larger purpose is to dismantle the vocabulary by which the Civil Rights Era and its aftermath have been explained away. Neither denying nor excusing the interracial violence of the period, he takes up in turn the terms that have served to deflect attention from it—“white flight,” block-busting, redlining, gentrification, and the now-forgotten experiment of forced busing—and declines to let them function as rhetorical decoys obscuring the part that violent crime played in what E. Michael Jones called “the slaughter of the cities.”

Block-busting—the practice by which agents played on racial and economic fear to induce owners to sell cheaply—was real enough. But it was parasitic upon rational calculation, and upon well-founded alarm at the crime that followed closely behind demographic turnover. And this is to say nothing of the psychological toll on white homeowners detailed in “Confessions of a Block-Buster,” the 1962 Saturday Evening Post exposé which Carl quotes in his discussion of the topic:

Actually, block busting probably is tougher on the whites than the Negroes. Nobody who has lived in a neighborhood for years, seen his children grow up there, remodeled his home exactly to his liking and become accustomed to nearby school, church, and shopping facilities likes to be uprooted . . . Several elderly persons have died because of the anguish and upheaval involved . . . Once a block has been busted, some white owners simply stare, almost dumbfounded, as we draw up sale papers for them. Others break down and cry.

Redlining—the denial of mortgage credit to designated homes and neighborhoods—is so routinely offered as a clear case of anti-black discrimination that Ta-Nehisi Coates made it a central lynchpin in his case for reparations in The Atlantic. Yet, Carl reports, “ninety-two percent of homes in the lowest rated areas for redlining between 1930 and 1940 were owned by whites”; even granting some racial motive in the drawing of the lines occasionally, the conventional narrative does not survive the figures. Then there’s the policy of forced busing, mandated by Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971), which wrecked neighborhoods and school systems in the name of a coerced desegregation that consigned white children to schools they had reason to fear. When parents did the predictable thing and withdrew them into private education, they were branded racists—though these were the same families still underwriting, through their taxes, the public schools they no longer dared use. They paid twice: once for the private schooling that kept their children safe, and again for a deteriorating public system rife with violence against students and teachers; and they were lectured, all the while, on their prejudice.

The period found an unlikely opponent of busing in Joseph Biden, who in 1975 went so far as to float a constitutional amendment against it. “Biden would eventually join forces with arch-conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms to offer an amendment to a 1975 school funding bill that would have banned busing,” Carl writes; “he would later attempt to bar the Department of Justice from effectively mandating court-ordered busing,” and in 1976 he cosponsored a measure to strip the federal courts of their jurisdiction over desegregation. His objection to forced busing plans was cast as anti-racist in its own right:

That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son. That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?

Joe Biden would later earn the bitter reprimand for these comments during the 2019 Democratic Party primary from none other than his future vice president, Kamala Harris.

Carl does not confine the anti-white character of American government to the simple black-white axis. Immigration, he suggests, may matter still more to the diminishing standing of white America within the nation as a whole. As with the civil-rights settlement, the immigration regime inaugurated by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 has been discussed almost exclusively in the language of celebration, its demographic consequences admissible only as cause for praise and never for critical scrutiny. Yet immigration is precisely a question of who is to belong to a political community—who shares its collective voice and its common destiny. The irony is that the question ought to press hardest in a democracy that grounds all its authority and legitimacy in the consent of “the people,” yet questioning who “the people” even are has been, until very recently, treated as totally impermissible.

American immigration policy, like Western Europe’s, is close to unique in the world; so too is the self-conception it has produced. Japan and China admit very few newcomers, most of them from elsewhere in Asia; immigrants are under 1 percent of Mexico’s population. The notion that America is “a nation of immigrants,” Carl argues, is itself an artifact of “1950s ethnic group pressure”—no older than that. When Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835 “he did not mention the words ‘immigrant’ or ‘immigration’ once.” In 1830 the foreign-born were under 2 percent of the population, and until nearly the twentieth century the overwhelming majority of arrivals came from Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Germany. “Before 1881, a period encompassing approximately two-thirds of our history, Northwest Europe provided 86 percent of American immigrants,” Carl writes.

After the larger European waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which sharply curtailed immigration for decades. When John F. Kennedy, in the late 1950s, pronounced America a nation of immigrants, immigration stood near “one of its lowest points in history.” Those who did arrive were largely skilled; there was then—and had never before been—anything resembling a welfare state to underwrite their coming and settling, and many in the end returned home. But whether they stayed or left, from the first settlements to the late twentieth century, across more than 350 years, the people in question were almost entirely white:

Virtually all of the even modest Latin-American immigration to the United States before the Mexican-American War in 1848 was into states and territories on the border. There were only 25,000 Hispanics living in the historic core of the United States outside of states bordering Mexico, out of a population of approximately 24 million. That’s a bit more than 0.1 percent of the population, 240 years after the first European settlement. Another 85,000 were incorporated into the United States after the Mexican-American War. The Chinese American population, which made up the vast majority of early Asian Americans, was just 4,000 in 1840 and in 1940 was just 106,000, also less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. population.

Meanwhile, the first Indian to gain U.S. citizenship did so only in 1909, and he was a “white” Parsi (that is, an Indian of Persian descent). Fewer than 50,000 Indians total immigrated to the United States before 1965. Today, there are well over 6 million South Asians living in America. There were just 130,000 African immigrants in the United States as late as 1980.

Prominent Democrats—Lyndon Johnson, Edward Kennedy—misrepresented the likely effect of Hart-Celler and the magnitude of the demographic change it would set in motion. To be charitable, though not excessively so, the civil-rights settlement and the law built around it display a recurring phenomenon: a logical and bureaucratic inertia, something like Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” that does not halt even when later developments plainly contradict a law’s original spirit. Few sponsors of the 1964 act would have endorsed disparate impact; few sponsors of Hart-Celler would have endorsed the scale of third-world immigration now seen. Nevertheless, there is a political and psychological process of evolving justification in history that serves as a pretext for continually more novel and radical changes than what the mere text of a law would suggest, but as they unfold they are interpreted as more closely fulfilling the true spirit of the initial act. Whether by design or not, Carl argues, the long process of mass nonwhite immigration has allowed the Democratic Party—now the repository of unassimilated minority interests—to achieve something without precedent:

They have achieved electoral preeminence while consistently losing the votes of the supermajority ethnicity. (This supermajority has ranged from an 89 percent white electorate in Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 to a 67 percent white electorate in the 2020 victory of Joe Biden.) Over this time, the Democrats have won six presidential elections and the popular vote in two additional elections without once winning the vote of white voters. There is no other modern multiracial democracy of which I am aware where a party has achieved electoral success while perennially losing the votes of the supermajority ethnicity.

Here again the twisted asymmetry holds: demographic replacement may be named freely when the naming is celebratory, but to discuss it critically is to be charged with paranoia and conspiracy. For the most part it has simply been excluded from public discourse, and those who broached it have met severe ostracism. Only the felicitous combination of social media and the iconoclasm of Donald Trump has won the argument against mass immigration—legal and illegal—even a hearing.

The book ranges further—through school curricula, entertainment, technology, medicine, religious bodies, and the military—and finds the same animating principle wherever it looks: public and private institutions that increasingly serve the anti-racist, which is to say anti-white, project rather than their nominal purposes. The purpose of that project, for Carl, is reparation—“to create an intellectual and cultural environment to justify the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites while instituting a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.” The only sure defense, he concludes, is to refuse the principle of mass racial reparation entirely, for the demand—indirect now—will in time grow explicit:

The final destination is a world in which whites have been stripped of political power and resources, which are then redistributed to nonwhites using both “legal” and “democratic” processes. Again, this is already underway, but its speed and scale will dramatically increase as white political power diminishes.

On the practical question, Carl frames his proposals with the assumption that the new reality of a multiracial America is not going to change any time soon. He brings up a few ideas. One builds on Eric Kaufmann’s notion of “whiteshift”: encouraging those already here to identify with white America rather than with a minority category. This would mean, among other things, retiring “Hispanic” from the census—a classification that dates only to 1980—in favor of linguistic markers (native Spanish speaker, or born in a Spanish-speaking country), and reforming civil-rights law so that such groups are no longer rewarded, by a system of preferences, for identifying as nonwhite. A second proposal is outreach to Asian-Americans, a group for which Carl reserves some of his harshest words. Although they sit awkwardly within the anti-racist coalition, the task of persuasion remains difficult: Carl faults Asian-American activist organizations for subordinating their own communities’ interests to the Left’s good opinion—above all, he argues, in letting their public account of the early-2020s wave of anti-Asian violence follow an ideological script rather than the data. Few minority activist lobbies in recent memory have behaved more deceitfully than Asian-Americans, who engaged in a years-long campaign of misleading the public about who was perpetrating virtually all the assaults, robberies, and murders of innocent Asian Americans in the early 2020s, further inflaming the anti-white hysteria of the time. The deeper irony is that the group whose very success in America most refutes the “white supremacy” narrative has chosen to further commit itself to a coalition built upon it, rather than reckon with the contradictions implied by its own status. More concrete suggestions include a “massive lawfare operation” against institutions that discriminate against poorly represented groups like whites and Asians, citing America First Legal as a paragon; net-zero or even net-negative migration; the abolition of affirmative action; a “wholesale reform” of civil-rights law; the dismantling of the DEI apparatus; and a broad empowerment of law enforcement.

While The Unprotected Class is an unparalleled resource in its rich documentation of anti-white policies and has much to offer to policymakers seeking concrete solutions, its true significance lies in the fact that it exists at all. The American right is undergoing a transformation wherein previously under-discussed or forbidden ideas—ideas that, not too long ago, were defensible on their own merits—are now finally palatable. This is a positive development, but it is also crucial that these ideas are carefully ushered in by someone who understands the delicate nature of the subject and one who appreciates how explosive the implications of these ideas are. Jeremy Carl manages to express both in this timely book.