Culture, Not Color

Race baiting charlatans have forgotten the lesson of the Civil Rights era: equal opportunity requires common norms, not separate systems.

Multiculturalism, unless segregation is imposed or actively encouraged, tends over time toward a broader shared culture through assimilation. That is not a moral judgment; it is simply how societies function. People who live together, work together, and pursue opportunity together gradually converge on common expectations about behavior, trust, education, family life, and cooperation.

Which makes the present moment peculiar. The same voices that spent seventy years condemning segregation and preaching inclusion now advocate voluntary separation — cultural enclaves, racial affinity spaces, religious separation, and standards explicitly adjusted by identity. They claim to pursue diversity, inclusion, and equity through exclusion, differentiation, and discrimination. Contradictions rarely sustain policy, they can exist rhetorically, but once implemented they produce instability and resentment. Beneath the rhetoric, this debate is not about skin color—skin color is only the most visible symbol. The real subject is culture — the patterns of behavior that allow individuals to function within a society.

A majority culture inevitably shapes social expectations because that is what a majority does. It establishes norms, and those norms define the paths to mobility and success. During the Civil Rights era, Martin Luther King Jr. fought for black Americans to be fully included within those dominant social rules, not exempted from them. His argument was moral equality within a shared civic framework, not parallel systems of behavior.

I grew up white and poor in the rural South as the Civil Rights movement culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I saw black families up close, not through academic theories but daily life. Their social expectations were recognizably American: two-parent homes, emphasis on education, respect for elders, formal dress at church and community gatherings, self-reliance, and deep religious faith. They retained cultural heritage, but they understood success required operating within the broader American social order. King’s appeal to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin made sense because character implied shared standards. Inclusion required common expectations.

Somewhere along the way toward King’s goals, something shifted. Radical elements began redefining identity as primary and behavior as secondary. The late-1960s cultural revolution weakened family stability across society, and new academic frameworks rejected assimilation entirely. The emerging ideology argued that differences in outcomes were not connected to conduct or norms but were inherent oppression by the dominant culture. From that premise, integration was no longer liberation — it was surrender, and politics soon followed theory.

Rather than encouraging participation in common social expectations, policy increasingly subsidized separation from them. The War on Poverty and later programs were sold as temporary assistance but often functioned as permanent support structures detached from behavioral incentives. The message, whether intended or not, became that society would adapt to individuals rather than individuals adapting to society. Affirmative action extended this logic; the idea that discrimination could end discrimination gained acceptance, and standards themselves became suspect. Success was redefined as representation rather than achievement within shared rules.

The results did not match the promises. When communities — black or white — drifted away from stable family structures, respect for education, and long-term planning, outcomes deteriorated. Where those norms remained strong, outcomes improved. The pattern crossed racial lines. Poor white communities adopting destructive behaviors suffered the same consequences as any other group. Large populations can mask the pattern statistically because a large majority culture can absorb variation without collapsing, while smaller subcultures feel deviations more sharply, but the underlying principle remains: social norms are adaptive tools, and societies that abandon them pay costs.

In my opinion, culture, not race, predicted stability, and continues to do so.

I am not blaming any racial group; I am criticizing an ideology that treats division as a political resource. Power thrives on grievance, and grievance requires separation. In that framework, diversity becomes segmentation, and inclusion becomes “separate but equal” in modern language — an arrangement the Civil Rights movement explicitly rejected.

Progressivism increasingly rests on permanent conflict: dominant versus marginalized, structure versus identity, assimilation versus authenticity. The dominant culture is assumed guilty simply for being dominant, yet no society functions without shared behavioral expectations. A country cannot operate as parallel civilizations occupying the same geography.

None of this asserts racial superiority because the behaviors historically associated with the American mainstream — stable families, education, delayed gratification, respect for law, and civic participation — are not “white” behaviors but functional ones. Anyone can adopt them without surrendering heritage, just as immigrant groups have done for generations while retaining food, language, and tradition. Success, in other words, is less about who you are than whether you move with the institutional current rather than against it. You can wear any swimsuit you like, but swimming downstream is easier than upstream.

Our goal should be neither cultural erasure nor parallel systems, but equal participation in a shared civic order. We should oppose segregation not merely because it is unjust, but because it prevents common standards from binding Americans together.

This principle remains true: a society built on mutual recognition requires shared norms, and without them policy becomes contradiction — and contradiction binds nothing, it cannot hold a nation together.