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Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government geared up to fight a long, twilight struggle to root out Jim Crow, starting numberless government agencies to combat discrimination, such as the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
But, deprived of government support, Jim Crow collapsed almost immediately because, ever since a streetcar company had sued to get rid of discriminatory laws in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, bias had been recognized as bad for business.
Similarly, sex discrimination in employment had been outlawed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act by a Southern solon who proposed an amendment preventing discrimination against women in hiring as a trollish prank: After all, while respectable opinion in 1964 disapproved of bias against black men, it also felt that married men with children should be paid more to help them support their families, while mothers should be home looking after their children. But the amendment passed anyway and within a dozen years or so had inadvertently brought about a social revolution in gender roles in the workforce as corporations realized they loved being able to hold down wages by increasing the supply of labor.
“The liberal establishment view has been that civil rights laws exist not to benefit all American citizens like they appear to read, but solely to benefit nonwhites.”
Much like the LGBT NGOs that refused to declare victory and close down shop after winning on gay marriage, but instead moved on to instigating the disastrous transgender mania, federal antidiscrimination agencies doubled down on eradicating the last hints of racial discrimination.
Of course, the harder the feds work to catch and punish even the most debatable examples of bias against blacks, the more sense it makes for employers to protect themselves by discriminating in favor of blacks and against whites instead, especially if nobody is too sure whether the federal government is serious that the 14th Amendment’s demand for “equal protection of the laws” applies to whites and men as well as blacks and women.
The logic of discriminating against whites in hiring and promoting became especially obvious after the government began pushing affirmative action for blacks in 1969.
In 2025, we are 56 years into the affirmative action era.
Are two generations enough?
The Trump administration thinks so, and has been waging a strikingly vigorous campaign against all the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies that have piled up over the past half century and then metastasized during the Racial Reckoning. Contrary to the dawdling first Trump term, the second term has seen the White House go on the offensive on numerous fronts.
The half-dozen or so conservative investigative journalists, such as Aaron Sibarium and John Sailer, have been enjoying a field day documenting a few of the innumerable big institutions that issued press releases during the George Floyd whoop-de-do promising to, in effect, discriminate even harder against white men than they had been.
Amateur crank historian Nikole Hannah-Jones (the part-black lady who dyes her hair like Bozo the Clown), who briefly became a huge intellectual celebrity for her ethnocentric “1619” speculations about how blacks are the true founders of the United States, is utterly outraged in The New York Times Magazine that Trump is, so far, getting away with enforcing the Constitution. Whatever happened to the good old days of 2020, she wonders, when vast corporations and universities declaring their hatred for white men was not only de facto legal, but it was also cool?
The liberal establishment view has been that civil rights laws exist not to benefit all American citizens like they appear to read, but solely to benefit nonwhites, even at the cost of injustice to individual whites. But anyway, whites can’t be the victims of racism today because their ancestors were powerful in the past and, therefore, today’s whites racially deserve to be the victims of discrimination.
Before 2023, the Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices tended to make rhetorical gestures toward the Constitution and civil rights laws being for the protection of all races, such as in John Roberts saying, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
But they weren’t willing to do all that much about enforcing equal protection of the laws because, after all, whites had acted badly toward blacks for a long time, so suspending the 14th Amendment for a while seemed reasonable, even if they couldn’t quite come out and say that’s what they were doing.
Yet, the notion that the obvious violation of the Constitution that is affirmative action should endure forever never appealed too much to the conservative side of the Supreme Court. Thus in a 2003 college admission case upholding racial preferences on the 25th anniversary of the Bakke decision, Sandra Day O’Connor’s controlling decision declared that this would only be in effect for the next 25 years (fifty years following the 1978 Bakke decision).
But what if today’s racial inequality in intelligence and work ethic didn’t originate in 1619, but in the Out of Africa event 50,000 years ago?
After twenty years, in the 2023 Harvard case, the Court’s conservative majority decided they’d had enough by then.
In contrast to elites, the public has, on the whole, never appreciated the morality of discriminating against living whites to make up for discrimination against dead blacks. Thus, in liberal California at the peak of the racial reckoning in 2020, the people voted against racial preferences 57–43.
Why is this?
Most Americans without graduate degrees find it difficult to conceive of justifications for discriminating on the basis of race.
And it’s pretty obvious that the woke are motivated by racist animus against whites, which most working-class non-whites find distasteful.
For example, the typical mestizo Mexican-American male voter can imagine a future in which his hard work and that of his children leads to his grandchildren being, due to earning good marriages, notably whiter than he is. In any case, if he’s ever heard of Nikole Hannah-Jones, he despises her for winning $625,000 from the MacArthur Foundation for being a purported “genius.”
The hardworking Hispanic men who voted half for Trump in 2024 really don’t like semi-black women like Hannah-Jones blaming whites for the troubles of black layabouts.
Another reason for the demise of the great awokening is that virtually nobody outside of elite circles realizes how big is the racial gap at the far right edge of the bell curve.
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a supporter of racial preferences for you but not for her. She was too important to accept less than the most brilliant clerks. She hired approximately 159 law clerks during her forty years as a federal judge, but only one black was ever meritocratically good enough to clerk for her, Paul J. Watford, an outstanding legal mind who was long on Obama’s short list of Supreme Court nominees.
Being a Supreme Court law clerk is one of those jobs where you can see the arguments both for meritocracy (it’s really hard) and for racial representation (it’s really influential).
Very few non-elites realize that in a purely fair hiring and promotion meritocracy, blacks would tend to be underrepresented by about an order of magnitude at the highest end. I’ve often joked that the Harvard Presidents’ Book of Secrets would turn out to be a padlocked yet heavily dog-eared copy of The Bell Curve.
Ironically, awareness of the racial gaps in IQ, which have only been growing in recent decades as Asians become ever more dominant, has been so suppressed that most Americans are clueless about how big the problem is.
The average citizen assumes that only flaming racists believe the IQ gap between the races is more than marginal, and that it could be solved quickly by blacks trying a little harder on their homework.
Liberals went so extremist about how IQ can’t possibly be due to both Nature and Nurture, but just has to be 100 percent Nurture, that they are going to get affirmative action taken away from them, because nobody is allowed to point out that African Americans need quotas to be well represented.