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The article continued to break down the statistics that black people hold a small percentage in the party.

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Democrats and independents grow more diverse since 2008

PRINCETON, NJ -- Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 89% of Republican self-identifiers nationwide in 2012, while accounting for 70% of independents and 60% of Democrats. Over one-fifth of Democrats (22%) were black, while 16% of independents were Hispanic.

These results are based on more than 338,000 interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking in 2012, and clearly underscore the distinct racial profiles of partisan groups in today's political landscape.

Republicans are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white, at a level that is significantly higher than the self-identified white percentage of the national adult population. Just 2% of Republicans are black, and 6% are Hispanic.

Seventy percent of Americans who identify as independents are white, but independents have the highest representation of Hispanics (16%) of the three groups. Eight percent of independents are blacks.

Democrats remain a majority white party, but four in 10 Democrats are something other than non-Hispanic white. More than one in five Democrats are black, roughly twice the black representation in the adult population.

Racial and Ethnic Groups Gravitate Toward Different Parties
Looked at differently, these party composition patterns reflect major differences in the way Americans in various racial and ethnic groups identify their political affiliation.

Almost two-thirds of blacks identify as Democrats, with most of the rest identifying as independents. Only 5% of blacks nationwide identify as Republicans.

Half of Hispanics identify as independents, although the majority of the rest identify as Democrats. This is despite their high level of approval and strong majority voting support for Democratic President Barack Obama. Relatively few Hispanics (13%) identify as Republicans.

Whites are the most politically diverse of the three major racial and ethnic segments, with between 26% and 38% identifying with one of the three partisan groups. Whites tilt slightly toward being independents or Republicans rather than Democrats. The large white concentration of Republican identifiers, in short, is caused by a dearth of nonwhites self-identifying with the GOP, rather than a monolithic Republican orientation among whites.

Although Asians and other races make up a small proportion of the U.S. population, the data show that the political pattern they follow is quite similar to that of Hispanics: they are most likely to identify as independents, second-most likely to identify as Democrats, and least likely to identify as Republicans.
Racial Breakdown of Independents and Democrats Has Shifted Most Since 2008
The racial and ethnic composition of the Republican Party today is similar to what it was in 2008, the year when Gallup began its daily tracking. There have been essentially no changes in the percentage of GOP identifiers who are white, black, and Hispanic.

Independents have become more Hispanic since 2008 (and slightly more black), while Democrats have become more black and more Hispanic. Phrased differently, the independent and Democratic segments of the U.S. population are now less white than they were in 2008, reflecting the uptick in the U.S. nonwhite population over these five years.
Implications
One of the more important realities in American politics today is the substantial divergence in the racial and ethnic composition of the major political parties. Almost nine in 10 Republicans are white, in stark contrast to the racial and ethnic composition of the overall adult population. On the other hand, the Democratic Party is disproportionately nonwhite.

The future of the two major political parties depends on two factors. The first is whether these patterns of party identification change in the years ahead. The ability of the Republican Party to make inroads among nonwhites has been much discussed in recent months, particularly the GOP's efforts to improve on the 13% allegiance that Gallup data show it obtains from Hispanics. Another path to growth for the Republican Party would be an increase in its penetration into the white sector of the population, only 35% of which now identifies as Republican. On the other hand, the Democratic Party will grow if it too can extend its identification among whites, and maintain or strengthen its position among nonwhites.

A second factor that will affect the future of the political parties in the U.S. is straightforward demographics. Projections show that the nonwhite proportion of the American adult population will grow in the years ahead. This means that if current partisan allegiance patterns prevail, the size of the Democratic base will be in a better position to grow than will the Republican base.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 2-Dec. 30, 2008, and Jan. 2-Dec. 30, 2012, on the Gallup Daily tracking survey, with a random sample of 353,334 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia in 2008, and a random sample of 338,703 adults in 2012.

For results based on the total sample of national adults in both 2008 and 2012, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cell phone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cell phones numbers are selected using random digit dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.

Samples are weighted to correct for unequal selection probability, nonresponse, and double coverage of landline and cell users in the two sampling frames. They are also weighted to match the national demographics of gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, population density, and phone status (cellphone only/landline only/both, cellphone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2012 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older U.S. population. Phone status targets are based on the July-December 2011 National Health Interview Survey. Population density targets are based on the 2010 census. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

For more details on Gallup's polling methodology, visit www.gallup.com.

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Democrats Racially Diverse; Republicans Mostly White

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Democrats and independents grow more diverse since 2008 PRINCETON, NJ -- Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 89% of Republican self-identifiers nationwide in 2012, while accounting for 70% of independents and 60% of Democrats. Over one-fifth of Democrats (22%) were black, while 16% of independents were Hispanic.

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The article showcases the reasoning why parties will continue to be divided racially because of political beliefs as well as goals. Democrats typically appeal to the black populous while republicans appeal to the white populous.

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With Barack Obama sworn in for a second term-the first president in either party since Ronald Reagan to be elected twice with popular majorities-the GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party. The civil rights pageantry of the inauguration-Abraham Lincoln's Bible and Martin Luther King's, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's swearing in of Joe Biden, Beyoncé's slinky glamor, the verses read by the gay Cuban poet Richard Blanco-seemed not just an assertion of Democratic solidarity, but also a reminder of the GOP's ever-narrowing identity and of how long it has been in the making.

"Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?" Kevin Phillips, the prophet of "the emerging Republican majority," asked in 1968, when he was piecing together Richard Nixon's electoral map. The eleven states, he meant, of the Old Confederacy. "Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don't need the big cities. We don't even want them. Sure, Hubert [Humphrey] will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?"

Forty-five years later, the GOP safely has Oklahoma, and Dixie, too. But Phillips's Sunbelt strategy was built for a different time, and a different America. Many have noted Mitt Romney's failure to collect a single vote in 91 precincts in New York City and 59 precincts in Philadelphia. More telling is his defeat in eleven more of the nation's 15 largest cities. Not just Chicago and Columbus, but also Indianapolis, San Diego, Houston, even Dallas-this last a reason the GOP fears that, within a generation Texas will become a swing state. Remove Texas from the vast, lightly populated Republican expanse west of the Mississippi, and the remaining 13 states yield fewer electoral votes than the West Coast triad of California, Oregon, and Washington. If those trends continue, the GOP could find itself unable to count on a single state that has as many as 20 electoral votes.

It won't do to blame it all on Romney. No doubt he was a weak candidate, but he was the best the party could muster, as the GOP's leaders insisted till the end, many of them convinced he would win, possibly in a landslide. Neither can Romney be blamed for the party's whiter-shade-of-pale legislative Rotary Club: the four Republicans among the record 20 women in the Senate, the absence of Republicans among the 42 African Americans in the House (and the GOP's absence as well among the six new members who are openly gay or lesbian). These are remarkable totals in a two-party system, and they reflect not only a failure of strategy or "outreach," but also a history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation's diverse constituencies-blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.

But that history, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party's electoral woes. The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun's ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

This is the politics of nullification, the doctrine, nearly as old as the republic itself, which holds that the states, singly or in concert, can defy federal actions by declaring them invalid or simply ignoring them. We hear the echoes of nullification in the venting of anti-government passions and also in campaigns to "starve government," curtail voter registration, repeal legislation, delegitimize presidents. There is a strong sectionalist bias in these efforts. They flourish in just the places Kevin Phillips identified as Republican strongholds-Plains, Mountain, but mainly Southern states, where change invites suspicion, especially when it seems invasive, and government is seen as an intrusive force. Yet those same resisters-most glaringly, Tea Partiers-cherish the entitlements and benefits provided by "Big Government." Their objections come when outsider groups ask for consideration, too. Even recent immigrants to this country sense the "hidden hand" of Calhoun's style of dissent, the extended lineage of rearguard politics, with its aggrieved call, heard so often today, "to take back America"-that is, to take America back to the "better" place it used to be. Today's conservatives have fully embraced this tradition, enshrining it as their own "Lost cause," redolent with the moral consolations of noble defeat.

In the 1950s, when the civil rights movement began, Republicans helped lead it. The president during this period, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was skeptical about intervening on behalf of black equality and, in his first campaign, courted segregationist officials like James F. Byrnes and Harry F. Byrd. But Eisenhower also "advocated the end of segregation in the armed forces and the District of Columbia and urged the lifting of black voter restrictions," Robert Fredrick Burk writes in The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights. It was Eisenhower, too, who appointed another Republican, his vanquished rival Earl Warren, to the Supreme Court, resulting in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed legalized segregation-a bolder step than many in either party were ready for when it came in 1954.

Yet the Eisenhower campaign also saw potential advantages in Brown-and a possible route, through the nation's cities, to recapturing the House, which they had lost in 1954. "GOP strategists regard this election as a period of maximum opportunity in their dream of shattering the Roosevelt coalition and regaining the allegiance of the Negroes," James Reston wrote in The New York Times. In 1956, the GOP improved its totals in black precincts by double digits in New York and Chicago, and made gains below the Mason-Dixon Line. Overall, Eisenhower received between 35 and 40 percent of the black vote, about 5 percentage points more than he did in 1952.

In late 1955, the Eisenhower administration began drafting a civil rights bill, with voting rights at its core. Its passage through Congress took almost two years, with intense debate on a provision authorizing federal judges to enforce voter rights from the bench, instead of leaving each case up to local (often all-white) juries. It was killed by Southern Democrats, who formed an alliance that included Senator John F. Kennedy, an avowed liberal eager to appease the Dixie senators who denied him the vice presidential nomination in 1956 and might thwart his presidential plans for 1960. The weakened bill that passed, in September 1957, established the federal Civil Rights Commission and added a Civil Rights Division to the Justice Department-far short of what many hoped for, yet "incomparably the most significant domestic action of any Congress in this century," according to The New York Timeseditorial page. Not one Republican senator voted against it. All 18 No's came from Democrats. "White southerners viewed the bill as Republican legislation," Joseph Crespino writes in his recent book, Strom Thurmond's America.

The GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party.

Then, within weeks, an authentic crisis arose. Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, defied a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School, bringing in the National Guard to surround the school and block a group of black pupils from entering, while a shrieking mob threatened violence. Unable to compromise with Faubus, Eisenhower federalized the Guardsmen and also sent in 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. government troops, armed with bayonets, "occupied" a state in the old Confederacy.

A Republican president and his party now stood at the forefront of civil rights in America. Yet within a few years, this advantage would be lost and the party would be defined thereafter by its resistance to civil rights. Why did this happen? The reason was a historical coincidence: Just as the civil rights movement became a national concern, movement conservatism was being born.

A cherished myth today, at least on the right, is that National Review ( NR)arrived at a moment of widespread hostility toward conservatism. In fact, the opposite was true. Two brutally disruptive decades, the 1930s and 1940s, a time of extremist ideology and world war, had given way to the infant nuclear age and with it a universal longing for a politics of consolidation and stability. "In the thirties it was socialism that many American intellectuals adopted as their paper money. ... [I]n the fifties it seems that notes on conservatism are being printed in inflationary quantities," the British political theorist Bernard Crick wrote in July 1955. The "notes" included ambitious books by the "New Conservatives" Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck, and Clinton Rossiter, as well as important work by Leo Strauss (on "natural right") and the French conservative Bertrand de Jouvenel (on "power"). For most of these writers, conservatism was more a matter of disposition-a belief in order, tradition, the revival of humanist values-than of developing or sharpening a political program.

Some of the right's heroes supported civil rights-for instance, William Knowland, the Senate minority leader who had marshaled the GOP votes for the 1957 bill. NR's favorite politician, Knowland wrote the lead article-an attack on the Geneva summits-in its first issue, published in November 1955. And NR editors diligently promoted him for the presidency. For Knowland, beingboth anti-communist and pro-civil rights made sense, part of the "hearts and minds" campaign the United States was waging in the Third World. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had both warned that Little Rock would feed Soviet propaganda mills.

But the intellectuals at NR interpreted all this differently. William F. Buckley Jr. had strong libertarian leanings, as did many of his colleagues. Some had come to NRby way of its predecessor The Freeman, "a fortnightly for individualists." This seemed fertile ground for making the case that Southern blacks were being denied the rudimentary means for self-advancement owing to a state-contrived caste system. Buckley, in fact, supported the first important modern civil rights protest-the Montgomery bus boycott-on the principle that blacks were "exercising, in legitimate fashion, their right to protest whatever laws or customs they deem offensive." Buckley and NR would make the same argument in defense of the student-led boycotts and sit-ins of 1960, "a wholly defensible-we go so far as to say wholly commendable-form of protest [and] a form of social assertiveness which we must understand, and can sympathize with."

This alone was a breakthrough of sorts. Both Buckley's parents came from the South, and he and his nine siblings were raised with "culturally Southern" attitudes. The family and its servants, some of them black, wintered in Camden, South Carolina, on an estate that had once belonged to Mary Chesnut, the great Civil War diarist. Buckley's father, in particular, was an ardent segregationist and was convinced blacks were inferior. Conscious of these attitudes, and of their prevalence on the right, Buckley avoided contact with racist organizations and counseled others to do the same. He also closely guarded NR's reputation. He was incensed when a Q&A with Richard Russell, the Georgia senator leading the fight against civil rights, which read like "a fanatical and highly subjective polemic against miscegenation," made it into print. And when Strom Thurmond, a friend of Buckley's father, jointly praised NRand The American Mercury-a right-wing monthly that included articles like "Quotations from the American Jewish Yearbook" and "Rothschilds and Rockefellers: Dedicated Monopolists"-Buckley beseeched him not to lump the two publications together, since the Mercury had"degenerated into an irresponsible anti-Semitic sheet and has considerably embarrassed conservatives who were once associated with it."

And yet when it came to discussing the concrete realities of race in America, NR had almost nothing to say, and the little NR said did not differ much from what was appearing in the Mercury. Other small-circulation journals, including The New Republic and The Nation, sent reporters to the South, commissioned articles from Southern journalists, and combed the local press, black and white, for up-to-date information on school desegregation campaigns, sit-in strikes, and protests. But none of these were covered or even seriously discussed in the country's most ambitious and high-minded conservative journal.

Its editors were instead clarifying and reiterating two objectives, rolling back both communism abroad and the New Deal at home. Every federal action that hinted of "statism"- Brown, Little Rock, even civil rights legislation-freshly imperiled liberty, even if undertaken on behalf of those who were plainly being denied it in the South. It was a new civil war, a struggle not "between the states" or even between the states and the federal government, but rather between autonomous individuals and a homogenizing liberalism. While many saw the government moving cautiously on civil rights-with the Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive each addressing issues as they emerged- NR's editors saw an interlocking pattern of state-enforced dogma.

"'Integration' and 'Communization' are, after all, pretty closely synonymous," one of the magazine's most eminent contributors, Richard Weaver, a Southern agrarian perched at the University of Chicago, wrote in July 1957, when the civil rights bill was being debated. From this perspective, the Little Rock Nine, far from personifying the hopes of a community, were instead the "pawns and guinea pigs" of liberal social experimenters. The actual conflicts were almost irrelevant. "Segregated schooling, in terms of the larger issues involved, is about as important as Jenkin's Ear," Buckley wrote in 1956. And the judicial enforcement provision in the original 1957 Civil Rights Act, which some saw as a practical necessity, was for NR's editors a potential "extension of unchecked federal power ... without precedent in our history or in that of any Anglo-Saxon nation since the decline of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings."

The movement had a voice, however strident. What it lacked was an organizing principle. In America, there was just one place where rigorously conservative theory could be found: the South. In the antebellum period, it had yielded a surprisingly rich and rigorous school of political argument.

The most brilliant figure in this "reactionary enlightenment" was John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina political giant. Vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, he became the great philosophical defender of the South. He led the protest against the protective "Tariff of Abominations," which favored the industrial North over the agrarian South. Later, when the states divided bitterly over the issue of expanding slavery into the new western territories, he helped spur the conflict that led to the Civil War. Calhoun, "the Great Nullifier," was "Lincoln's deepest and most intransigent opponent," John Burt writes in his new book, Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism,"and it was with Calhoun that the issue was joined whether the United States is to be a liberal society, offering civil rights and possibly even political rights to all persons by virtue of their being human, or a merely republican society, offering procedural equality only to a handful of elite players."

Calhoun's innovation was to develop a radical theory of minority-interest democracy based on his mastery of the Constitution's quirky arithmetic, which often subordinated the will of the many to the settled prejudices of the few. At the time of the constitutional convention, the total population of the Union, as reported by the most recent census, was just under 3.5 million; yet, Calhoun pointed out, the four smallest states, "with a population of only 241,490, something more than the fourteenth part of the whole, could have defeated the ratification." In other words, "numerical" or "absolute majorities" were severely limited in the actions they could take-or impose on others-especially on questions that put sectional interests at odds with the "General Government." One of Calhoun's classic arguments, the Fort Hill Address (1831)-written at and named for his home-defended South Carolina's "Ordinance of Nullification" of the tariff on the principle that the Union was a confederation of equally sovereign states, each in effect its own nation, its autonomy codified in the Tenth Amendment. And since the Constitution was itself "a compact, to which each state is a party . . . the several States, or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions" and to exercise it through the "right of interposition" (a term he got from James Madison). "Be it called what it may-State-right, veto, nullification, or by any other name [it is] the fundamental principle of our system. ... [O]n its recognition depend the stability and safety of our political institutions." In sum, each state was free to override the federal government, because local and sectional imperatives outweighed national ones.

Today, Calhoun is often described as a kind of crank-and with some reason. He called slavery "a positive good" and ridiculed the Declaration's "all men are created equal." ("Taking the proposition literally ... there is not a word of truth in it.") But in the early cold war years, when so many intellectuals, left and right, rebelled against the numbing dictates of consensus and conformism, there was a Calhoun revival. He became "the philosophic darling of students of American political thought," Louis Hartz wrote in The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955. A liberal like the historian Richard Hofstadter was stimulated by his bold theories on class and labor ("the Marx of the master class"), and conservatives were drawn to his protest against encroaching big government. Calhoun, Russell Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind(1953), was "the most resolute enemy of national consolidation and of omnicompetent democratic majorities" and had valiantly uncovered "the forbidding problem of the rights of individuals and groups menaced by the will of overbearing majorities." The Calhoun apostle James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, wrote a defense of segregation, The Sovereign States (1957), that had an epigraph from the Fort Hill Address and exhaustively catalogued examples of "interposition" dating back to the origins of the Republic. Kilpatrick repeated the exercise in an attack on the Little Rock intervention, published in NR.

For NR, Calhoun was the Ur-theorist of a burgeoning but outnumbered conservative movement, "the principal philosopher of the losing side," whose championing of the Tenth Amendment "may have the effect of shaking inchoate states-righters out of their opportunistic stupor" and give rise to a new politics.

In his most notorious editorial, "Why the South Must Prevail," Buckley drew on Calhoun's championing of the "concurrent voice" to defend voting restrictions since "the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically," even if it meant violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Buckley repeated the argument in his book Up From Liberalism(1959), suggesting that African Americans needed to be properly educated and trained before they were brought up to the level of the enfranchised whites who were holding them down. And just as Calhoun had defended the "positive good" of slavery, so Buckley defended Jim Crow as being born of "custom and tradition ... a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores." As long as the South did "not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class," segregation was acceptable.

These early writings would be forgotten had they not formed the ideology that shaped a generation of conservative politicians, including Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Goldwater, the movement's first national leader, "was by no means the obvious man for the job," Rick Perlstein notes in his book Before the Storm. "He had gone to the 1952 convention as an Eisenhower delegate, had voted for a higher minimum wage and to extend Social Security, and had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills." But then, partly under the influence of NR, Goldwater had become more ideological, a champion of states' rights, which he defended in terms that echoed the nullifying passions of the antebellum period. In 1959, he electrified an audience in Greenville, South Carolina, when he said the Brown decision, because it was "not based on law," ought "not be enforced by arms"-an overt reference to Little Rock. Goldwater's manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), written by Buckley's brother-in-law (and NR columnist) L. Brent Bozell, had chapters on both states' rights and civil rights, elevating the first above the second whenever they came into conflict: "I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence of course, to preserve their rightful powers over education."

In July 1963, Goldwater joined with Dixie senators in attacking the Pentagon's newly announced policy of shunning segregated businesses located near military bases in the South. A year later, he joined the Dixie contingent again when he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed with a large bipartisan majority, including 27 out of 33 Senate Republicans. "It is at least conceivable that Goldwater would have welcomed an opportunity to vote with the majority," Richard Rovere wrote, in puzzlement, after the bill was passed. "But for Goldwater the opportunity had been all but foreclosed by Brent Bozell-or some other hand guided by the 'guiding hand'-in The Conscience of a Conservative. In that book, Goldwater allowed himself to be committed to a states'-rights position that Jefferson Davis could hardly have found acceptable."

By this time, Goldwater stood on the verge of the Republican presidential nomination, thanks to the work of campaign strategist F. Clifton White and NR's publisher, William A. Rusher. Together, they plotted a new Southern route to electoral victory-not by explicit race-baiting (which could be left to hard-core racist Democrats), but by high-minded appeals to affluent whites "in the southern cities and suburbs, where the tides of social change are tending to run fastest," as Rusher wrote in NR. The politics of defiance, tinged with nullification, might hold the seeds of an eventual majority.

But Goldwater was only one herald of a new racially driven politics in 1964. Another was the Democrat George Wallace, the Alabama governor who had become the voice of a white-supremacist populism. With his cry of "segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever" and his promise of "rebel" protest against "communistic amalgamation," Wallace entered Democratic primaries in Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin, and did shockingly well, especially in cities where there were inter-ethnic conflicts over schools and "fair housing," and where Wallace's promise to stand tall against what even liberals were calling "the Negro revolution" spoke directly to the anxieties of Northerners. When he ran again in 1968, this time on a third-party ticket (shades of Thurmond's Dixiecrats), he burnished his appeal with the "constitutional" language so favored by nullifiers and adopted by later GOP insurgencies.

Wallace captured five Southern states in 1968, and 13.5 percent of the popular vote, meaning Kevin Phillips's majority was an election away. Yet he presciently saw where it would come from: defecting Democrats. Whites " will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party," he predicted. "Wallace is helping, too-in the long run." The axis of the realignment, based on the politics of nullification, was settling into place. "[W]atch us in [nineteen] seventy-two. Our tabulations and techniques will be perfected by then; we'll have four years to work on them, and all the resources of the federal government. I'd hate to be the opponent in that race." It was George McGovern, who absorbed one of the worst drubbings in history.

With this, Calhounism went into remission. Nixon, like Eisenhower before him, was neither nullifier nor rearguardist. True, he had appeased the right-energetically campaigning for Goldwater in 1964 when liberal Republicans had renounced him. But Nixon was an ambidextrous courter of all sections and factions. He nominated Southern judges to the Supreme Court and at the same time urged Northern unions to recruit black workers. Yet nullification didn't die. It found its new target in Nixon's policy innovations, which seemed to be advancing liberal heresy. Nixon's urban adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, went so far as to say Nixon's intention was not to undo but outdo the Great Society. To an ideologue like Rusher, the GOP itself was now the enemy. Nixon had betrayed conservatives, operating from inside an establishment eager "to 'pay off' their minority-group allies with all sorts of cultural and economic goodies," including "posts in a burgeoning bureaucracy, admissions quotas in elite universities, welfare benefits of assorted kinds, quotas in the job market, etc." Rusher proposed a third party, suggesting as its tribune Ronald Reagan, who had a history of sympathy for Southern nullifiers. Early in his career, he had shared the stage with Faubus and other segregationists, and in 1980, he flew directly from the nominating convention to Philadelphia, Mississippi-where three civil rights workers had been slain in 1964. Reagan dismissed the sitting chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,Arthur Flemming, who warned that the Reagan administration's handling of school desegregation cases reflected the doctrine of "separate but equal." There was a protest as well from state agencies. The chairmen of 33 of them signed a letter warning that Reagan had created a "dangerous deterioration in the Federal enforcement of civil rights."

It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.

The largest targets in these years were affirmative action programs. They had begun under Nixon with the support of some conservatives, including Buckley, who favored "preferential hiring" by businesses. So did Garry Wills. When he was at NR in the '60s, he had urged Goldwater to advocate such programs even if "some conservatives have cynically borrowed the very egalitarian professions they normally condemn in order to support a faceless 'equality' among those seeking jobs." The attack came from others on the right, the rising faction of neoconservatives, who denounced "affirmative discrimination." Liberal policymakers formed a "new class" of social engineers who had devised a "spoils system" that rigged "outcomes" and stigmatized and perhaps even harmed those who advanced through the system. This argument coincided with a new literature that revived the doctrine of black inferiority, genetic or cultural, and dominated the race debate in the 1980s and 1990s. But efforts by the Reagan administration to roll back affirmative action failed. And later attempts did, too. In 1995, Bob Dole, the GOP Senate leader, introduced legislation to end all federal affirmative action programs, only to drop the issue from his presidential campaign once polls showed that, while voters disliked "quotas" and "preferences," they supported the broader principle of inclusion and diversity, especially when they realized its beneficiaries included not only blacks but also women. Latinos, another growing population, were enjoying the advantages, too.

This was a conservative strategy built for an earlier moment, when a party could prosper by exploiting the anxieties of white America. But many now were adjusting to the reality of a diverse society, multicultural and multiracial. Modernity could not be nullified. Some Republicans recognized this. George W. Bush, for one. Conservatives who were dismayed by Romney's dismal showing with Latinos (27 percent) remember the 40 percent share of the Latino vote Bush won in 2004 and suggest that a more humane immigration policy might close the gap. But Bush's success with Hispanic voters grew out of an established record of sympathy dating back to his Texas governorship, when he proposed an innovative tax plan, including a levy on "professional partnerships" (doctors, lawyers, accountants, and more) that would have increased financing for the state's poorest (in most cases Latino) school districts. The plan was squelched by his own party, just as Bush's attempt at an amnesty program was squelched by it in 2007.

Bush, of course, was unable to build the "permanent Republican majority" envisioned by Karl Rove. Yet, it is startling how little he managed to move the rhetoric and worldview of his party, which remains largely stuck where it was a generation ago or longer. Romney seldom addressed black audiences during the campaign. When he did venture into the inner city, meeting with teachers and administrators at a charter school in Philadelphia, he suggested they instruct students in the virtues of "getting married and having families where there's a mom and a dad together. ... That's critical down the road for those that are already in a setting where they don't have two parents." Paul Ryan said much the same thing: "The best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity ... to help teach people good discipline, good character."

Character, he presumably meant, like that exhibited by Republican delegates in Tampa, who thrilled to the refrain "We built it"-with the identity of the "we" all too visible to TV audiences-just as the inimical "they" were being targeted by a spurious campaign to pass voter-identification laws, a throwback to Jim Crow. Romney's disparagements of the "47 percent" and his postmortem assessment that Obama won because of the "gifts" he had lavished on blacks, young people, and women also repeat the dogma of an earlier time.

This remains the perspective of the American right, only today the minority of "concurrent voices" speak in the bitter tones of denial, as modernization and egalitarianism go forward. In retreat, the nullifying spirit has been revived as a form of governance-or, more accurately, anti-governance. Its stronghold is the Tea Party-inflected House of Representatives, whose nullifiers would plunge us all over the "fiscal cliff." We see it too in continuing challenges to "Obamacare," even after it was validated by the Roberts Court. And we see it as well in Senator Rand Paul's promise to " nullify anything the president does" to impose new gun controls. Each is presented not as a practical attempt to find a better answer, but as a "Constitutional" demand for restoration of the nation to its hallowed prior self. It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.

"American politics," Wills wrote in 1975, "is the South's revenge for the Civil War." He was referring to the rise of Southern and Sunbelt figures-the later ones would include Jimmy Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the two Bushes-whose dominance of presidential politics ended only with Obama's election in 2008. However, the two parties dealt with race differently. Carter and Clinton had pro-civil rights histories and directly courted black voters. But as the GOP continued remolding itself into a Southern party-led in the '90s by the Georgian Newt Gingrich and by the Texans Dick Armey and Tom DeLay-it resorted to an overtly nullifying politics: The rise of the Senate veto as a routine obstructionist tool, Jesse Helms's warning that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he ever traveled to North Carolina, the first protracted clashes over the debt ceiling, Gingrich's threat to withhold disaster relief, the government shutdown, Clinton's impeachment despite public disapproval of the trial. All this, moreover, seemed to reflect, or at least parallel, extremism in the wider culture often saturated in racism: Let's not forget Minutemen and Aryan Nation militias, nor the "anti-government" terrorist Timothy McVeigh, whom the FBI linked to white supremacists. The war on government-and against agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives-had become a metaphor for the broader "culture wars," one reason that the GOP's dwindling base is now at odds with the "absolute majority" on issues like gun control and same-sex marriage.

Reformers in the GOP insist that this course can be reversed with more intensive outreach efforts, better recruitment of minority candidates, and an immigration compromise. And a new cast of GOP leaders-Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio-have become national favorites. But each remains tethered to movement ideology. At the recent National Review Institute conference in Washington, Cruz even urged a "partial government shutdown," recalling the glory years of the '90s, but downplaying its destructive outcome.

Denial has always been the basis of a nullifying politics. Calhoun, too, knew he was on the losing side. The arithmetic he studied most closely was the growing tally of new free territories. Eventually, they would become states, and there would be sufficient "absolute" numbers in Congress to abolish slavery. A century later, history pushed forward again. Nonetheless, conservatives, giving birth to their movement, chose to ignore these realities and to side with "the South."

Race will always be a complex issue in America. There is no total cleansing of an original sin. But the old polarizing politics is a spent force. The image of the "angry black man" still purveyed by sensationalists such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza is anachronistic today, when blacks and even Muslims, the most conspicuous of "outsider" groups, profess optimism about America and their place in it. A politics of frustration and rage remains, but it is most evident within the GOP's dwindling base-its insurgents and anti-government crusaders, its "middle-aged white guys." They now form the party's one solid bloc, its agitated concurrent voice, struggling not only against the facts of demography, but also with the country's developing ideas of democracy and governance. We are left with the profound historical irony that the party of Lincoln-of the Gettysburg Address, with its reiteration of the Declaration's assertion of equality and its vision of a "new birth of freedom"-has found sustenance in Lincoln's principal intellectual and moral antagonist. It has become the party of Calhoun.

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, is working on a biography about William F. Buckley Jr.

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With Barack Obama sworn in for a second term-the first president in either party since Ronald Reagan to be elected twice with popular majorities-the GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party.

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The article reads that America is projected in many ways that gives off the perception that America is the new "promise land" however key statistics shows the opposite.

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Credit: Commondreams.org. Some rights reserved.

I constantly battle a myth within me. It formed me-as ancient stories do-and its logic crops up unbidden as I go about my life. I notice it as I walk along the shore of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga and the land vibrates with history. Making my way over the bridge to the business district, the streets swarm with students and tourists visiting an aquarium, a museum, a theater, and restaurants. In the midst of business, I remember that my city is known for being a Bible-based city. It is one of the most Christian towns in the nation.

When I descend the steps to the river's edge, another story emerges. Native symbols line the stairs, and murals mark our essential elements of wind, fire, earth, and sun. The walls call to the four corners of the earth, lending me a compass that grounds me as I honor the Cherokee Nation that once thrived on this land, before their forced removal created a Trail of Tears along which thousands of people died from disease, starvation, and exposure.

As I stand at the water, I remember how I've prayed along these shores with their members and elders. Our chants matched the rhythm of beating drums as they scattered ash into the flowing river, lifting up those who died along the terrible path. When I walk along the river, my internal mythic battle ensues.

As a white woman who grew up as a conservative Christian, the European colonizers' story mixed with my theology in awkward ways. I internalized those triumphant ideas of Manifest Destiny-that the American people hold special virtues, that we are exceptional, and that it is our divine right and destiny to remake others in our own image. In our history, as settlers moved west to take more land, Manifest Destiny reverberated through pulpits, proclaiming that we were a Christian nation, a ' shining city on a hill.'

Growing up, the Religious Right echoed this message and I often heard it. We co-opted the stories of the Jewish people. In our Sunday school classrooms, we learned under the glowing visage of Warner Sallman's Jesus. The curriculum recounted narratives with flannel-graph figures in the shape of a blonde Moses leading his pale-skinned followers through the wilderness to the Promised Land. As our teacher tried to make the lessons of an ancient nomadic people applicable to our 10-year-old 1980s lives, we understood that the U.S. was our Promised Land, given to us by God, so that we could have religious freedom.

As we moved from our classrooms into the sanctuary to hear the pastor expound, our national narratives became more confused with the stories of the Bible. We learned that God blesses certain nations, and God was blessing America. It was our duty to defend our country, fight for its Christian identity, and inspire its people to uphold the highest moral purity.

The clear evidence of God's favor was our wealth as a country. We were to be a light to all nations. In my pew, the words of Jesus began to sound a lot like Ronald Reagan's addresses. When we belted out, "Onward Christian Soldier" and "God bless America," our hearts soared and our eyes watered, because we believed that we were exceptional. We had reached the Promised Land, and we intended to defend it against any physical, religious, or moral threat.

Now, thirty years later, I have broken with my Religious Right heritage and have written about healing from the damage it has caused. I became a social justice Christian and a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA). As I walk along the shores of the Tennessee River, I realize how mixing God and white nationalism together has had devastating effects on my country, particularly when it comes to inciting wars, suppressing religious freedom, and encouraging the spread of unbridled capitalism.

First, in the military actions of the United States, we have heard the echoes of crusader language coming from those who want to use religion to frame armed missions abroad. Conjuring God to ignite warfare has been an effective mobilizing tool since the days of the Emperor Constantine, but peace between nations is impossible when suspicious politicians drag faith onto their battlefields. President Trump's ban on immigrants from seven Muslim countries shows how the war on terror has been set up as a religious war, and how politicians have used 'God and country' rhetoric to incite public support for it.

In order to stop this flagrant use of Christianity to foment violence, we must realize that American soil is not the Promised Land. Instead of allowing faith to be dragged into war, we have to unravel our deepest beliefs from the possession of property and economic gain. Only then we can look to the ancient wisdom of different religions to inspire peace, forgiveness, and dignity between faiths.

Second, the concept of religious freedom-the right of people to practice their faith and not persecute people of any other faith or none-has long been upheld by the religious Right. Yet instead of understanding this right as celebrating all faiths in a diverse country, they perceive themselves as persecuted. Conservative Evangelical Christians often understand the idea of religious freedom to mean that they have the right to uphold certain beliefs, even if that belief causes discriminatory action or physical harm to another citizen.

For example, they might explain that a baker should not be forced to bake a cake for a couple's religious ceremony if the baker does not agree with same-sex marriage. Or they might maintain that a business owner should not have to provide insurance coverage for a woman's reproductive health. But when the rights of Muslims are severely curtailed, many of these Christians don't seem to feel the same passion to defend religious freedom.

When we understand that American Christians are not God's chosen people we can begin to uphold the right of all people to practice religion, or not to practice it. If we begin to uphold the religious convictions of all people, then we must recognize the dignity of those who celebrate a religious ceremony, women who need access to reproductive health, and refugees who travel across borders for sanctuary, because above all, we are people who have been called to lives of love.

Third, the idea of a God that blesses people with wealth has seeped into our national dialogue so deeply that many Christians do not begrudge an economic system that encourages the increasing disparity between rich and poor. In fact, they have baptized it as holy, because they imagine people with wealth and health are blessed by God. On the other hand, those who struggle to pay their debts or cannot access medical care are seen as morally flawed. But the American system of high student loans, limited access to healthcare, and low wages makes solvency untenable for most of the population. As U.S. influence expands to other countries, the economic interests of the USA have taken on a missionary fervor.

Yet Christians must know that their faith has been co-opted. When they go back to their texts, they see that Jesus claimed that the poor were blessed, and he compels us always to be looking after the "least of these." Jesus said that when we feed a hungry person, clothe a naked person, or welcome a stranger, we welcome God.

As I look over the Tennessee River and stand with the ghosts of the past, I'm reminded that Christianity does not condone wrapping Jesus in the American flag so that we can wage wars, claim exceptionalism, and justify the expansion of U.S. business interests. America is not the Promised Land. Instead, Jesus calls out over troubled waters in a nation which still has to recognize its great atrocities, and he encourages love for our neighbors as for ourselves.

When faith is used by its most pernicious elements to incite violence, oppress religious diversity, and create economic disparity, we need to reclaim the truth of our moral core: we need to relearn love.

Carol Merritt's new book is Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God after Experiencing a Hurtful Church.

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Credit: Commondreams.org. Some rights reserved. I constantly battle a myth within me. It formed me-as ancient stories do-and its logic crops up unbidden as I go about my life. I notice it as I walk along the shore of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga and the land vibrates with history.

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In the article, it can be argued that America is the promise land in some aspects however it grown to become more like egypt, biblically, the hebrews, or in this case people of color, is trying to run away from racism.

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Social location is vital to understanding how people come to their interpretations, and appropriations, of the Bible and its stories. One of the most popular biblical stories people have historically personalized has been the story of the exodus. America's earliest European settlers understood America as the promised land they were entering after fleeing Egypt. Since, in this telling of the story, they were the new nation of Israel, they were given divine license to commit the genocide of the native peoples, the new Canaanites, that were already living here. The land was theirs for the taking because God had given it to them in advance. Of course, the native peoples already living here, had they had the language of the biblical stories, probably would have identified the European settlers as Babylon or Assyria and themselves as Israel. Social location matters.

African slaves also often appropriated the exodus story as their own. Escaping along the underground railroad from the American South to the North or Canada was akin to crossing through the Red Sea. Harriet Tubman became "Black Moses" and southern plantations the mud pits of Egypt. They understood that God was leading them to safety out of the bondage of slavery just as God had done in the past. Social location matters.

Interestingly, we always assume, because of our social location, that people think of America as the new promised land instead of the new Egypt. We assume that immigrants to this country are coming here because they view it as the promised land full of "milk and honey." Many immigrants just do not see it this way. Let us remember, briefly, the story of the nation of Israel coming to Egypt. They were living in the promised land, but it had become barren and there was no food to eat. Israel sent his sons to Egypt to get food to bring back for the rest of the family. Eventually the famine in the promised land, and around the world, became so bad that they had to move to Egypt to survive because remittances were no longer sufficient. It was not their desire to leave home for Egypt. It was something they had to do to survive. The goal was not to live forever in Egypt, but to survive until the promised land began flowing with its riches and blessings again.

That is the way many immigrants understand their sojourn to America. The promised land, their homeland or village, is experiencing a dry spell. To survive they must go to the nearby superpower where resources are plentiful, but they are sending money home to those struggling. And if it ever gets better, they will go back to their promised land. In this telling of the story America is not the promised land flowing with milk and honey, but Egypt, the only place around with enough food to share with them.

If America is Egypt, who are we? We are the Egyptians. That should cause us to take a step back and examine the way we are treating those who visit our land looking to live. Are we acting the way the Egyptians did? Are we, in our pubic policies, expecting them to make bricks without straw? Are we keeping them in a state of subjection because we are afraid their population will grow to the point they will outnumber us and take us over? Are we treating our immigrants the way the ancient Egyptians treated theirs? If so, will God act the same ways as in the past? Is God on the side of the poor immigrant simply trying to live or the Egyptian exploiting their labor? Social location matters. America can act as both the promised land and as Egypt. Which one are we?

Jimmy McCarty is a student at Claremont School of Theology studying Christian ethics, a minister serving cross-racially at a church in inner-city Los Angeles, and a servant at a homeless shelter five days a week. He blogs at http://jimmymccarty.wordpress.com/.

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Social location is vital to understanding how people come to their interpretations, and appropriations, of the Bible and its stories. One of the most popular biblical stories people have historically personalized has been the story of the exodus. America's earliest European settlers understood America as the promised land they were entering after fleeing Egypt.

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America is suffering from the Jim Crow period and because however it is debatable amongst politicians in which is America still racist. We can still see a large gap between the economic class between white and black people.

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott shocked many people when, in response to President Joe Biden's congressional address, he stated that " America is not a racist country ." He admitted that he himself had experienced " the pain of discrimination, " and noted, " I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping. " When asked o n ABC's Good Morning America the following day , Vice President Kamala Harris s eemed to agree with Scott when she s aid , "I don't think America is a racist country." Yet immediately following this sentence she quickly pointed out , "But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today."

As Soledad O'Brien said, "It sounds like a racist country to me," in to Scott-but it seemingly applies to comments by Harris as well. President Biden, who seemed to not pull any punches during his speech, stated, "W e have a real chance to root out systemic racism that America ." However, Biden appeared to his remarks on The Today Show to align more with Harris and Scott (to a certain degree) by noting that slavery and Jim Crow laws had a cost.

It is almost as if simply saying America is not racist, but then turning the other cheek and saying it is racist in subtler terms and that racist things have been done to you makes it ok. It is confusing to Americans and the international community. To supporters, these comments are disappointing . To others, they were shocking. For me , the cognitive dissonance of some of our elected leaders is real and explainable . The re is an oversimplification of racism in America, because as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes, there can be systemic racism without racists.

W hen a person critique s America for the racism that i s deeply embedded in our social institutions, some feel they are being personally attacked. This is because deep down they realize that they benefit from unearned assets associated with whiteness. Scott, Harris, and Biden recognize this and try to balance these varying perspectives as they worry about voters nationally and in a state like South Carolina.

Recently, a at a city council meeting had a meltdown when trying to explain why she does not want critical race theory taught in her children's school. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that s ystemic racism as a concept is " a bunch of horse manure ." So, not only has Florida made it legal to harm people protesting, but he banned teaching critical race theory in schools. For a deeper dive on critical race theory , people should read the work of sociologists Victor and Ted , who lay out why DeSantis' perspective is problematic .

I conducted with Matt Hunt on what predicts who believes they are middle class. For education, income, and occupational prestige, Black people are less likely to identify as middle class compared to whites with comparable levels of these socioeconomic outcomes. Why? It is because social class is not just about what a person looks like on paper , but how people experience social class in everyday life and t he deference that one receives for their socioeconomic status. Black people are less likely to get that deference, while white people are often afforded more. It is so commonplace for white people that some cannot fathom living without it. This is because many white people, particularly white people with lower levels of education and income, realize that comes with a premium that extends beyond economics to include cultural and social capital. As Pr esident Lyndon Johnson said, " If you can the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and h e'll empty his pockets for you."

Harris and Scotts' comments are puzzling at a broader level as well considering how much of a collective memory their experiences with racism are- Harris reliving her systemic experiences with bussing and Scott recounting the nearly 20 times he has been pulled over by police, where being an elected official potentially made the interaction worse.

These stories acknowledge that life is different if you are Black, and unfortunately systemic racism seems to ripple through our social institutions and into our daily social interactions, whether in Congress or at a coffee shop down the street from the Capitol. These type s of experiences-racialized cuts and hurdles- have a cumulative effect on . Sociologist s Pam Jackson and Jason Cummings' research documents that middle-class Blacks have worse health profiles than working-class whites. They attribute this difference to the daily racialized trauma experienced in predominately white environments like work and neighborhood settings.

Systemically, we know that Black people compared to whites are more likely to attend schools with less funding per student, less likely to obtain a job because of our "Black-sounding" name or even when attending an Ivy League university , less likely to obtain a (even when having the same credit score ), have their homes appraised for equitable value, more likely to experience pregnancy complications and maternal mortality , and more likely to have contact with police and the criminal justice system .

Systemic racism inhibits (rather than prohibits like in the past) people's ability to actualize all aspects of the American Dream. This occurs  even for highly-educated Black people with high incomes and no criminal record. In fact, research documents that white people with a criminal record are more likely to get called back for a job than Black people without one.

Research documents that hard work (or lack thereof ), intellect, or criminality do not explain these outcomes. Instead, it is the embedded deeply within our social institutions' , rules, regulations, and laws that segment people's experiences along racial lines. It is the same for gender. Women can achieve but have a much harder time doing so. If not, America would have had a woman vice president and speaker of the House sitting behind the p resident long before 2021.

What people do not seem to realize is that being upwardly mobile does not negate encountering racist hurdles on the pathway to success. Our current system is set up for some people to have to jump over hurdles to succeed, while others get to simply run to the finish line without those sa me racial hurdles. Rather , it is about whether the pathways to success are equitable . This is what America says it is: an equitable democracy. People are pushing for America to reach its true ideal s and the only way this can properly occur is acknowledging the systemic barriers that prevent us from getting there. Moreover, it is not that racial progress has not been made. It is that the United States has yet to make enough progress. In this regard, comment s of our top elected officials are disappointing, yet predictable.

Black people who succeed often walk on pins and needles because they realize that their success, and more so maintaining it, is precarious.   As a result, some Black people aim to make white pe ople feel comfortable. Many of us are mostly socialized to do so. I t is often a survival strategy for our lives during police encounters or economic survival in boardrooms. Some of us who succeed may experience "survivor's remorse" because we are some of the few to "make it." We actually embody the American Dream and become the in-person example to people who do not want to admit that systemic racism exists. We may even convince ourselves that racism is more prominent on the individual level than the institutional level. We simultaneously represent racial progress but are also most likely to be subjugated to racial discrimination because of the predominately white spaces we are embedded within. We experience a chronic form of double-consciousness   and admitting as such can often lead us to being conscious of the slow death we often experience through the cumulative racist cuts and hurdles we encounter.   The American Dream being achievable for a few does not absolve the system and an imperfect union, even when some of those successful people try to rationalize systemic racism away.

In most instances: When Black parents worry about their straight-A student's traffic encounters with the police more than they do a potential accident, this is because of experiences with racism. When a Black couple is about to have a baby and has to think consciously about what hospital to deliver in so they can obtain equitable care, this is racism. When a Black parent worries about their child attending a prestigious university outside of an urban area, this is often because of the racism they worry about them encountering driving to the school and even once physically on the campus of the school. And even more urban universities are not absolved from .

Systemic racism is not simply a thing of the past. It is up close and personal in the present.

R acism may be no more transparent in an institution with the least representative racial progress like the Senate. There have only been 11 Black senators in roughly 232 years. Clearly, the Senate is the exact space we need people with the courage to say the blunt, honest truth about our nation's past and present. Only then can we actualize a future where systemic racism does not exist. It is imperative for a , reconciliation, and reparative process to commence. This starts with atoning for the enslavement of of Africans whose descendants contin uously fall systemically behind , whether they end up being the lone Black Republican senator or a Black police officer who might have the power to pull him over.   We must have the courage to speak truth to power and one of the places it starts is in Congress.   "If not now, then when?"

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott shocked many people when, in response to President Joe Biden's congressional address, he stated that " America is not a racist country ." He admitted that he himself had experienced " the pain of discrimination, " and noted, " I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping.

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In the article american communities continue to install "structural racism" making the quality of life harder for people of color.

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At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

Throughout this country's history, the hallmarks of American democracy - opportunity, freedom, and prosperity - have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.

At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

For decades, our researchers have called attention to the role of race and racism in our public and private institutions and offered evidence-based solutions for how to address these inequities. Our scholars will play a crucial role as we continue to elevate the public discourse around race and racism in America.

Urban Next50 What would it take to overcome the damaging effects of structural racism and ensure a more equitable future?

Interim Project Director, Housing Crisis Research Collaborative

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At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.