Race after Liberalism

During my freshman year of high school, in 2014, I submitted a research essay to my English teacher that explored racial tensions between ethnic minority communities in urban America. At the time, Barack Obama was in the middle of his second presidential term. My millennial teacher gave me my essay back with the written remarks that race was not real and that all humans were fundamentally identical regardless of skin color. From today’s vantage point, such a comment was reflective of the more positive attitude shared by liberals of the early Obama era, who perhaps genuinely perceived themselves to be citizens of a postracial, colorblind society.

Yet my teacher must have known that there were growing cracks in this narrative. For that same school I attended, the prestigious admission‑by-test-only Stuyvesant High School in New York City, had been roiled by years of allegations of discrimination against black and Hispanic students, as Asian students made up a supermajority at the school.¹ Stuyvesant would become a national culture war lightning rod over the next few years as Mayor Bill de Blasio advocated for making changes to the admissions system as a means to alter the racial makeup of the school.² Progressive liberals contended that the racial disparities in the standardized test results, despite the test itself appearing colorblind, served as evidence of discrimination.

Indeed, even as a teen, I was already aware of the many perspectives on race available in the so-called marketplace of ideas. The dominant institutional view at the time, or what may be seen as the classical liberal Whiggish view, was that while racism still existed as the product of an unenlightened era, the vast majority of people now held to a consensus that everyone was created equal, so race didn’t matter. Or at the very least, it shouldn’t matter.

Yet I knew that there were those in my school, especially the counselors and the humanities teachers, who held a different view, which may be called the progressive liberal view: that talking about race matters because systemic racism is omnipresent in American society, not as a dying relic but as a central animating force. I learned from one side that the purported educational and financial success of Asian Americans (as evidenced by the fact that Stuyvesant was an Asian-majority school) proved that there was no systemic racism, while the other side claimed either that Asians were “white-adjacent” or that Asians were oppressed people of color who should be joining together with other minorities in the fight against white supremacy.

Besides the two competing liberal views on race, the Brooklyn neighborhood I lived in offered the segregation of the ethnic enclave, where Hasidic Jews and Chinese and Hispanic immigrants lived blocks away from each other and only interacted for the exchange of goods or services.³ Such enclavist behavior seemed to be universally true. At the time, there was much “discourse” surrounding the “world of whiteness” exemplified by Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls, which was set in Brooklyn and featured a mostly white cast of bohemian, bourgeois characters.⁴ Yet despite the statistics showing that Brooklyn is an extremely racially diverse place, the actual reality on the ground—dare I say lived experience?—was one of intense racial segregation, not by “redlining” or any other law, but seemingly by revealed preferences. I did not find Dunham’s show unrealistic because I lived in Brooklyn and never saw non-Hasidic white people in my neighborhood. What the discourse did show me, though, was that there was a major discrepancy between the way liberals, both classical and progressive, talk about race, on the one hand, and the revealed preferences of many ordinary people, on the other. Such preferences may very well explain why right-wing populism is so appealing today, as it is the outlet that gives expression to what is necessarily suppressed by polite society.

Of course, if I ventured online, I could find racial discourses that were unapproved by legacy media and institutions. The rise of the internet eroded the ability of gatekeepers to set the parameters of what can and can’t be said. Sites with simplistic graphic designs claimed that race was a biological axiom, that IQ differences between races determined the futures of societies, and that movements to promote racial diversity were nefarious Jewish plots. Various kinds of racial animus, previously limited by reputational concerns, found casual expression on social media.

In the years that followed, race relations fell to a nadir that Americans my age had never known, fueled by the nascent Black Lives Matter movement and the emerging Trump movement.⁵ The years of the colorblind consensus seem almost quaint now. The high-profile deaths of figures like George Floyd in 2020 and Iryna Zarutska in 2025, while having no apparent racial motivation on the surface, have stirred up a new sense of racial volatility. As both the classical liberal “colorblind” formulation and the progressive liberal emphasis on “systemic racism” have fallen out of favor, what, then, could the future of racial consciousness look like in a postliberal era?

Liberalism, Race, and Hierarchy

While it may seem that liberalism breaks down the barriers of racial tribalism—after all, aren’t liberal societies the only ones that allow those of any racial background to become citizens?—a few pundits have claimed that “Race was invented by liberals.”⁶ They argue that while Enlightenment liberals proclaimed the universal equality of human beings, such liberals needed a way to justify slavery, colonization, and income inequality, so liberals invented the concept of race as a way to sequester the supposedly universal rights of humanity into rights only for the white race. (Of course, if one were to define race simply as a way groups differentiate themselves based on clusters of physical attributes, then one can say that race has always existed.) Thus, by designating those that liberals deemed inferior as another race, liberals could withhold their grand notions of universal equality from certain peoples.

The liberal philosophy of Immanuel Kant is given as an example. In the noumenal realm of his moral philosophy, Kant “proved” through “reason” that all humans were intrinsically equal rational agents. Yet in the phenomenal world of his anthropology, he meticulously constructed a “scientific” racial hierarchy with the white race at its apex. This allowed Kant to be both a philosopher of universal love and a master of slaves without running afoul of Christian universalism. He theorized a hierarchy of races: at the bottom were Native Americans, who were savage and had no traits that could produce culture; then “Negroes,” who could be “trained” and could develop a “culture of slaves”; then Asians (Chinese and Indian), who were able to produce a culture of art but were unable to produce science⁷ due to a lack of abstract thinking⁸; and finally, whites, who possessed the necessary drives and affects to create an advanced culture that could actually produce rational and autonomous individuals.⁹

The universal promise of dignity, therefore, applied only to those deemed capable of full rationality, a capacity Kant found conveniently concentrated in his own race. This allowed the liberal project to justify colonial domination and racial subjugation as a paternalistic necessity for “immature” peoples.¹⁰ Indeed, the Kantian formulation is little different from that which another liberal lodestar, John Stuart Mill, later advanced to justify British rule over India.

As Gregory Conti has pointed out in this journal, attitudes similar to Kant’s were common among early liberals, who “committed themselves to civil-legal equality in their own metropoles while insisting that these principles did not apply in ‘less advanced’ settings.”¹¹ Early liberals used the notion of “capacity” as a way to create hierarchies from an egalitarian and universalist base, just as Kant justified his hierarchies by viewing other races as having less capacity for rational thought. This power was only to be granted to those who possessed the “capacity” to wield it responsibly—a quality associated with property ownership and being “enlightened.” While Kant’s universal moral law applied abstractly to all “rational beings,” his anthropology argued that nonwhite races lacked the full capacity for reason.

Early liberalism’s exclusion of nonwhite people can be seen as the result of the abstractions that dominated Enlightenment thinking when the European mind was detached from its religious roots. In order to create a fictional world of interchangeable, “colorblind” individuals, liberalism first had to politically and philosophically erase those whose very existence was a testament to the unchosen and particular realities of human life. The rights were kept for “white people” because “white” functioned as the signifier for the “abstract individual” that the liberal imagination had invented.

One can easily see how such a way of thinking can be found in early American liberal thought. Even though the founding fathers’ theoretical statements were based on the bold declaration that “all men were created equal,” the Naturalization Act of 1790 clearly limited citizenship to “free white persons,” a fact wielded in arguments by both antiracist activists and white nationalists. Scholars such as Harry Jaffa have tried to explain this seeming contradiction by claiming that many of the founding fathers really did believe in universal racial equality, but agreed to this “necessary evil” as a way to placate the slave states as opposed to having no nation at all—and that Abraham Lincoln brought the true founding ideal to fruition decades after the fact. Yet such arguments ignore the fact that the founding fathers were actually in line with the vast majority of Enlightenment liberal philosophers on race, as it would have been anachronistic for them to think that the white race was the same as the “Negro” and “Indian” races.

Perhaps the most surprising phenomenon to arise out of progressive liberalism was the American eugenics movement. Those that considered themselves liberal and progressive in the early twentieth century saw themselves as defenders of a tradition that risked being overtaken by those unfit to be liberal, and they thus supported measures that would sterilize the unfit and limit immigration from countries that had people they considered unfit. The push for eugenics was led by progressive liberals in the same professions that they still inhabit today: Ivy League professors, the highest echelons of the medical and scientific establishments, journalists for the Atlantic and the New York Times, feminist activists, social workers, capital-P Progressive politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Jane Addams.¹²

The same progressives that fought for movements like ending child labor, improving public education, increasing women’s rights, environmental conservation, and using the power of science to solve social issues also threw their full support behind the eugenics movement.¹³ Such professional managerial elites produced the scientific justification for immigration restriction and the sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce.

In addition to scientific justifications, the eugenics movement was also bolstered by theological justifications, especially by liberal Protestant clergymen involved in the Social Gospel movement. The Social Gospel was adhered to by liberal mainline Protestant and Unitarian ministers (as well as Reform Jewish rabbis) inspired by modern science, liberal theologies that accepted the fallibility of Scripture, and a zeal toward changing social conditions on earth. Its followers seized on eugenics as a means to resolve human imperfection, especially the supposed imperfections of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples, whom they saw as less capable subjects for maintaining the “pure” Christianity of WASPs.

While one may argue, as Thomas Leonard does in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers, that eugenicist progressives were not “real” liberals because they violated individual rights, it is clear from Conti’s genealogy of liberalism that early liberals never believed that such rights were available to all. As historian Christine Rosen summarizes:

The liberals and modernists in their respective faiths—those who challenged their churches to conform to modern circumstances—became the eugenics movement’s most enthusiastic supporters. . . . Eugenic ideas rested comfortably within the mainstream of progressive American reform in the early decades of the twentieth century. It was a movement that the liberals of its day wholeheartedly embraced as an effective form of social engineering, and one that many political leaders viewed as providing justification for a range of state interventions, including immigration restriction and compulsory sterilization.¹⁴

The progressive liberals that supported eugenics were also those that subscribed to Kantian racial hierarchies, backed by various scientific theories that “proved” that only northern Europeans were capable of actually realizing liberal values. Intelligence testing, then in its infancy, was seized upon as an objective tool to “prove” the innate cognitive superiority of northern Europeans.¹⁵ Leading eugenicists presented “proof” of evolved differences between white and black brains.¹⁶ For the progressive social planner, managing society meant managing these inherent biological differences. Such scientific theories of racial hierarchy were used to justify the sterilization of “Negroes,” Jews, Southern and Eastern Europeans, “Orientals,” and “poor white trash.”¹⁷ The 1924 Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration through establishing national origin quotas, was a landmark achievement of the eugenics movement, heavily promoted by progressives.¹⁸ Eugenics was met with little elite opposition in America’s Protestant establishment, while “Catholics were the single most outspoken group in opposition to eugenic sterilization laws, and their influence was often decisive.”¹⁹

For those familiar only with modern American politics, the realities of the American eugenics movement can be shocking. It seems contradictory that progressive liberals—the very groups now championing DEI initiatives, open border immigration policies, and women’s reproductive rights—were, merely a century ago, advocating for doctrines that are diametrically opposed: WASP supremacy, restricted immigration, and compulsory sterilization.

Meanwhile, the spiritual descendants of the Catholics that opposed eugenics on “natural law” grounds, postliberals like Patrick Deneen, are some of the ones now associated with national heritage, closed borders, and state intervention in reproductive matters. And while this new Catholic Right isn’t eugenicist, they sometimes end up bedfellows with people who are concerned with questions of genetics, race, and IQ, such as at pronatalism events—and this alliance of Catholic postliberals and the “tech Right” is seen as the predominant elite force against liberal progressivism. So, what happened?

Liberalism as Fiat Ideology

While the substantive content of progressives’ beliefs regarding race has undergone a complete inversion, this dramatic shift obscures a profound continuity in their fundamental methodology, theory of governance, and ultimate social vision. The connection is a shared commitment to the project of elite, scientific management of society, one that would eventually reach a perfect, “equal” humanity.

Early progressivism wrapped itself in the authority of the science of its day: Darwinian biology, Mendelian genetics, and “race science.” Eugenics was the cutting edge of applied biology. This “scientific” foundation gave their project an unimpeachable claim to objectivity and necessity, allowing them to dismiss all opposition as sentimental and unscientific. The shift in progressive orientations around race occurred when the scientific means of management were widely discredited, and the moral consequences of the state’s coercive use of that science became undeniable.

The dramatic reversal on the question of biological race was not a repudiation of the core progressive liberal project, however, but a necessary tactical adaptation to preserve it. The aftermath of the Second World War led to a crisis of legitimacy in the American liberal order. “White ethnic,” African American, and Asian American troops had all fought valiantly in that conflict, making it seem unpatriotic to justify withholding equal rights to those who had all fought and died for American liberty. The Nazi extermination of millions in the Holocaust was blamed on the eugenic theories that percolated from American liberals. The Soviet Union used horror stories about the scope of American racism to win over newly decolonized countries, forcing American liberals to propose antiracist theories to stem the appeal of communism.²⁰

After the Holocaust made biological determinism lose its scientific and moral legitimacy, liberals simply adopted a new science. It jettisoned the discredited science of racial biology for the newly ascendant social sciences, bolstered by Boasian anthropology, which taught that human behavior was not genetic (and thus could not be shaped by eugenics) but rather determined by culture.²¹ This allowed the core liberal project, elite management of society, to continue under a new and morally unimpeachable banner. Whereas liberals once derived their legitimacy from their “scientific” and “moral” imperative to uphold the racial hierarchy, they now derived legitimacy from their “scientific” and “moral” claim that there should be no racial hierarchy.

After early Cold War liberal antiracist efforts—such as forced integration—failed to actually produce the racially harmonious society that liberals promised, the main currents of liberal thought pivoted to promoting colorblindness and multiculturalism.²² It is worth noting that those ideologies are fundamentally unverifiable: if someone truly were colorblind, then there would be no way of telling if racial equality was achieved or not. All one can do is have faith in the “invisible hand” of liberalism that the supposed moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice.

This constant ratchet of unverifiable claims is what Adrian Vermeule refers to as the “fideist” nature of liberalism:

Liberalism’s standing gap between promise and performance is filled by a radiant faith, but that faith has already disavowed the premises that would support it. The result is not a rational faith, but a groundless fideism and indeed fanaticism that insists, with ever-increasing fervor, on more of the same. . . . The result is a regime in which liberalism’s accounts generate ever less allegiance from the populace, while elites insist upon their truth all the more fervently—a condition which, as theorists persuasively documented, we indeed observe.²³

I saw the failings of this liberal tendency at Stuyvesant. While my liberal teacher talked about race as a nonexistent entity, people could not help but notice that the racial makeup of my high school was vastly different from New York City as a whole. One can see how the “colorblind” classical liberal view on race leads to the new progressive liberal view. Despite being colorblind by the letter of law, liberalism kept producing racial inequalities, and revealed preferences kept showing that people did in fact care about race. The only explanations that remained were that race had a biological reality and that some abilities were distributed differently between the races, that racial awareness existed because of “culture,” or that racial discrimination was the cause of racial disparities. The legacy of eugenics rendered the first explanation taboo. The second explanation is circular because it does not explain why different races have those specific cultures or continue to hold on to them over generations—and besides, isn’t a liberal society supposed to be multicultural?

Thus, the only explanation left is the progressive liberal one. It could not be that Asians were overrepresented in elite public high schools because Asians biologically had higher IQs or a culture that valued education, which would imply that other races did not value education as much. Colorblind liberalism thus had to give way to the new “everything is structural racism” progressivism, which saw discrimination behind all racial disparities. The constant invention of new rights, new identity categories, and new forms of oppression (e.g., microaggressions, unconscious bias) are ways that liberalism maintains its belief in itself. Having realized that the old colorblind model was shown through revealed preferences to have failed, liberals simply took the constant salience of race to postulate that racism was an invisible force that lurked everywhere: the existence of structural racism can always be asserted but never definitively proven or disproven. This inexhaustible problem also conveniently allows for a managerial state to justify its existence.

Modern liberal progressivism is defined by its faith in the same class of experts—from academia, public health, and a vast network of NGOs and foundations—to manage society. Whether the problem is defined as “feeblemindedness” and “race suicide” in the 1920s, or “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” in the 2020s, the proposed solution is the same: a top-down, administrative regime that implements “scien­tific” policies devised by an “enlightened” elite.

Conti argues that today’s liberalism is entering a “post-democratic” phase that echoes its nineteenth-century origins. The contemporary liberal anxiety about populism and “misinformation” are all modern manifestations of the old liberal fear of the feebleminded masses. Contemporary institutional liberalism views a racially diverse and equitable society as a social imperative, yet the old tools of colorblindness and multiculturalism have failed to produce equal outcomes between races. They believe that the masses would self-segregate, say things deemed as racist, and fail to appreciate racial diversity. They lack the “capacity” to create this enlightened society organically. The populace must, therefore, be managed by an enlightened class of academics, HR professionals, diversity consultants, and media figures. This requires the top-down implementation of diversity through social and institutional engineering, such as DEI initiatives in corporations and universities. If such efforts were to fail, it would only be because there were not enough DEI efforts.

In addition, since liberalism’s view on race appealed to preliberal social capital, i.e., the Christian belief that all people are created equal, it is only natural that, with the decline of Christianity, nonliberal views on race would arise. Just as Paul told the church in Galatia that there was no Jew or Gentile, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told all Americans that it was not the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character that mattered. As Christianity no longer holds the same status it used to, liberals must rely even more on top-down control to maintain their beliefs. As liberals constantly fail to deliver on their racial visions, the general populace loses faith, the result of which is what manifests politically as populism. This creates the dynamic seen all over the West today: an elitist progressive liberal cadre facing off against a populist backlash, especially over questions of race and identity.

Race in the Time of Populism

So, if liberalism has lost legitimacy due to its consistent failure to adequately address issues of race, then what is race going to look like in a postliberal world?

Even as the postliberal Deneen, in his manifesto Regime Change (2023), criticizes how antagonistic liberals are to those who cling to what are seen as the wrong views on race, he uses this critique not to approve of racism (which he describes as “a scourge in Western nations and particularly the United States”), but to say that the managerial class uses race as a wedge to eliminate working-class racial solidarity. Deneen pushes for a “gradual development of a multiracial, multiethnic working class that has potential to become a powerful counterforce to the gentry liberals who govern it from their new medieval citadels.”²⁴ Even as he attacks DEI programs, he has to note that “I don’t want to be misunderstood as denying the justified and necessary commitment to racial equality and respect owed toward people who have been historically marginalized and excluded.”²⁵ Such an argument—that race is simply a distraction from class issues—is an argument made by many postliberal intellectuals.

And why wouldn’t those postliberal intellectuals make such an argument? For decades, adherence to the notion that all racial groups have equal rights has been mandatory for any aspiring elite in a liberal country. Elite institutions are often characterized by their multiracial makeup. Even elite black intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi or Nikole Hannah-Jones, who constantly call white people racist, don’t actually want a black nationalist society, while the groups who do push such a vision, like the Nation of Islam, are marginal.

Yet what is unsaid in class reductionist arguments is whether race ultimately shouldn’t matter at all. If so, then Deneen replicates liberal logic: because thinking about race isn’t “rational”—that, perhaps, we’re just all the same on the inside—then it doesn’t matter. Yet any promoter of postliberal ideology must acknowledge the fact that race is a preliberal social identity that is forged in the thick bonds of community. African Americans—black people descended from American slaves—have maintained parallel institutions and have built a unique culture that cannot just be boiled down to class. Even if African Americans were to one day achieve socioeconomic parity with whites and others, many would still consider their racial identity extremely important. In fact, college-educated and middle-class African Americans are more likely than non-college-educated and working-class African Americans to say that race is extremely important to their sense of identity. This identity exists independently of market forces or platitudes to the sameness of all humans.

One academic paper on why many in European nations believe in the “Great Replacement” theory—in which white Europeans go into demographic decline percentagewise as the population of Muslims of Middle Eastern and African origin in Europe rises—explains succinctly: “Clearly, one prerequisite for the wide acceptance of the theory is that so many people do, for whatever reason, think in categories of ethnicity and race, and of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation constructed in terms of ethnic homogeneity.”²⁶ Indeed, the fact that “so many people” believe that there is an unbreakable bond between race and national identity, while many of the elites of that country have a more flexible definition, is a key driver of the surge in populism all across the West. For many Europeans of non-migrant background, their sense of national pride is innately linked to their ethnic pride, regardless of what Brussels bureaucrats or ECHR-adhering judges might think.

This is not to say that racial definitions are Platonic forms that cannot ever be altered, merged, or split. Certainly, in America, definitions of terms like “white” or “Asian” have shifted over time, and those same categories would have different meanings in Brazil. So yes, progressive liberals are correct to say that, like languages or borders, race is a social construct, but they mistake descriptive power with prescriptive power. A progressive liberal can say that there is no such thing as a fixed ethnic English identity because even ethnonationalists admit that their constructed ethnic identity is actually the result of disparate waves of Pict, Celt, Roman, Angle, Saxon, Jute, Norman, Viking, and Huguenot migration. And yet the progressive liberal fails to get the ethnonationalist to define Englishness differently. Ethnonationalists arguably do view race as a social construct in actuality, because ethnonationalists construct their views on race through their lived social experiences, not on knowing what a Jute or Huguenot is. Meanwhile, the progressive liberal views racial categorization as a top-down social engineering process, something that only they have the “capacity” to decide.

Indeed, a major driver of populism is that there are opinions on race that are held by many people but are verboten (at least explicitly) among the elite. What’s more, even many elites don’t really hold those views either: a common conservative talking point is to lambaste white liberals who speak of the benefits of racial diversity while also choosing not to live in racially diverse areas; even enlightened integrationists were known to oppose school busing programs in the 1970s just as patterns of white flight continue today.²⁷ This fact cannot simply be broken down to class: when Asian Americans move into upper-middle-class white neighborhoods, even when those Asians come from similar economic backgrounds, some white residents still move out, citing cultural incompatibility as a reason.²⁸

Thus, in order to resolve racial polarization, one must address the culture issue—and perhaps provide a blueprint rooted in cultural rather than civic nationalism. Recall how the WASP supremacist eugenic liberal regime crumbled partly because of the multiracial American effort to win World War II; this development gave WASPs reasons to treat other groups as equals, and it placed other groups in a moral position to assert their rights to racial equality. Even though General Dwight D. Eisenhower was ethnically German, there was no doubt about where he stood in the fight against a Nazi Reich that defined itself as a racial Volksgemeinschaft. African American soldiers faced discrimination in civilian life and were originally relegated to support roles in the military, yet many still fought valiantly for the Stars and Stripes. And the 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up almost entirely of Japanese Americans, proved so fearless in fighting for freedom that they became the most decorated military regiment in American history—even while their families were incarcerated in internment camps over suspicions of being secretly loyal to Japan.

So even while American troops fought in racially segregated regiments for most of the war, they all fought under the same flag, for the same nation. To this day, the U.S. military is regarded as one of the most successful examples of desegregation in America. This was accomplished not because people pretended that they didn’t care about race, but because the nation gave Americans something to unite around that superseded racial tribalism. Even while nationalism is often blamed for sparking racial conflict, the opposite can be true—giving a nation’s citizens a strong national identity helps break down racial enmities.

For nations such as Hungary or Japan, nationalism may increase the salience of race because such countries are much more concerned about matters of blood. But for the United States, a reinvigorated cultural nationalism just might be what it takes to decrease racial conflict. This does not mean that America is simply an abstract “idea,” but such a paradigm can acknowledge that American history and culture have always been multiracial.

Even if only “free white persons” could be citizens at the founding, it is impossible to narrate the course of American history without discussing the Native Americans that were forcibly relocated, the enslavement and emancipation of African slaves, the mass waves of Irish and Italian migration from Europe (at a time when they weren’t seen as being “fully white”²⁹), the Tejanos that fought alongside Anglo-Americans for Texan independence, and the Chinese immigrants who built the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad. The histories of various racial groups in America should not be seen as “multicultural­ism,” but rather as threads of a single American story. Such a cultural nationalism thus does not posit America as merely a series of axioms about universal liberty and freedom, nor does it frame America in a racially exclusive way; it would reject both civic and ethnic nationalisms in favor of an understanding that is at once more organic and refined.

This kind of cultural nationalism isn’t just an idea but is already a reality. The racial diversity of ICE and CBP in the contemporary context shows that nativist nationalist sentiment does not have to have anything to do with race. A few weeks ago, I read an article in the left-leaning magazine n+1 by a pseudonymous journalist who went to an ICE job fair; “Yanis Varoufuckice” noted how ICE recruits formed a veritable melting pot:

Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America [emphasis added].³⁰

Perhaps only in America can it be guaranteed that no matter where in the world an illegal immigrant is from, there is a deportation agent with the same ethnic background. Indeed, in immigration court lobbies and blue-collar workplaces across the country, one can see American exceptionalism at work: illegal immigrants from all over the world being arrested by ICE agents that look just like them. When mayoral candidate Brad Lander was briefly detained by ICE agents in a New York City immigration court lobby for trying to protect someone from deportation, he noted that “I got to say about who two of the agents were, because this was kind of remarkable in itself. The arresting officer is a Pakistani Muslim who lives in Brighton Beach, and the second officer is an Indo-Guyanese immigrant who lives in South Ozone Park in Queens. Both immigrants.” It seems that nonwhite immigrants really are taking American jobs, and the fact that ICE agent is literally one of them shows that nativist nationalism is, dare I say, truly colorblind.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 226–40.

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Notes