What we find among many blacks — no doubt the majority — is a view of race completely at odds with what the civil rights movement was presumably working for: the elimination of race as a relevant category in American life. White racism is commonly alleged to be the great obstacle to harmonious race relations in the United States, but whites are the only group that actually subscribes to the goal of eliminating race consciousness and that actively polices its members for signs of backsliding. The behavior of non-whites not just in the United States but everywhere in the world shows that intense racial consciousness and the impulse to advance one’s own group even at the expense of others is the human norm. Whites are the only people who believe it is virtuous to sacrifice their group interests for the advantage of others. Indeed, for many whites, racial altruism has become the highest of all virtues.

Anyone who looks closely at black racial thinking and behavior cannot but conclude that 50 years after the legislated revolution of the civil rights movement, blacks are as far as ever from adopting the race-blindness that whites assume all Americans must achieve for multi-racialism to work. There is intense, combative racial consciousness in the United States because blacks nourish it, take pride in it, find meaning in it, and despise other blacks who do not. The persistence of black racial consciousness in the face of sincere white efforts to practice race-blindness and even preferential treatment for minorities is the single greatest failure of racial liberalism, and the most certain sign that those who have promoted it do not understand human nature or the world in which we live. Black racial consciousness — together with Hispanic and, to a lesser extent Asian consciousness — is reawakening white racial consciousness.