We speak of America in terms of dreams and ideals—a tapestry woven from countless threads, each representing a different story, heritage, and hope. It is a powerful narrative, one of striving and unity. Yet, for generations, we have also been a nation fixated on a single, pervasive lens: the lens of race. This fixation, born from our original sin of slavery and compounded by every subsequent failure of justice, has become more than a history to confront; it has morphed into a prism through which every issue, every personal interaction, and every national challenge is now refracted. And it is my growing conviction that unless we find a way to move beyond mere obsession—toward a deeper, more transformative resolution—this very focus will become the engine of our long-term downfall.
The irony is profound. The urgent need to address racial inequality, to honestly confront systemic bias and the scars of history, is a moral and practical imperative. A nation cannot heal wounds it insists on hiding. But there is a chasm between addressing race and being consumed by it. Our current discourse often pushes us into the latter. We are encouraged to see each other first and foremost as representatives of a racial category, to sort every thought and policy into boxes of identity, and to view the complex tapestry of individual experience as monolithic group narrative. This hardening of categories doesn’t bridge divides; it institutionalizes them. It takes the crucial work of justice and reduces it, in the public square, to a theater of performative accusation and defensive posturing, where nuance goes to die and common ground is treated as a betrayal.
This obsession is paralyzing us. It stifles the honest, difficult conversations we desperately need. When every word is policed for ideological purity, when the fear of causing offense or being labeled silences genuine dialogue, we lose the capacity to understand one another. We stop seeing the person across from us—with their unique struggles, dreams, and contradictions—and see only an avatar of a group. This erosion of human connection is toxic to a society whose very experiment relies on e pluribus unum: out of many, one. If the “many” are perpetually at war, the “one” becomes an impossibility. Our politics, already fractured, are further polarized by this lens, making coalition-building for common national projects—from infrastructure to education to public health—seemingly insurmountable.
Economically and socially, this constant division is a weight dragging us down. Talent is overlooked or pigeonholed. Merit becomes a suspect concept, viewed not as an ideal to strive for but as a tool of oppression. Innovation and collaboration, the lifeblood of a dynamic society, suffer when teams are fractured by implicit suspicion and the pressure to view every disagreement through a racial frame. We spend immense energy diagnosing inequity in ever-finer detail—which is necessary work—but we are losing the shared will to build the solutions that lift everyone. A nation perpetually divided into aggrieved camps cannot marshal its collective strength to compete on a global stage or solve the monumental challenges of the future.
Most dangerously, this fixation provides a ready-made weapon for those who seek to dismantle the American idea entirely, from both extreme flanks. For some, it is used to justify a retreat into corrosive ethno-nationalism, a rejection of the pluralistic ideal altogether. For others, it is wielded to delegitimize the foundational structures of the nation as inherently and irredeemably corrupt, leaving no positive vision in its wake. Both paths, fed by our obsession, lead to the same destination: a fragmented land of distrusting enclaves, where the promise of America is resigned to the history books.
This is not a call to ignore race or to proclaim a hollow “colorblindness” that merely excuses injustice. The opposite is true. It is a plea to do the harder thing: to confront our history and its present-day consequences with courage and honesty, and then to consciously build a common identity that can hold that truth without being defined by it forever. We must be able to hold two thoughts at once: that racial injustice has shaped every institution in America, and that we are also more than our racial categories. We must forge a patriotism not of blind pride, but of shared commitment—a commitment to ensuring that the rights, freedoms, and opportunities promised are finally made real for everyone, while also remembering what we are building together.
If we cannot master this balance, if we remain trapped in a cycle of obsessive categorization and recrimination, we will not perish from external threats, but from internal entropy. The center will not hold. The dream will dissolve into a cacophony of competing grievances. The long-term downfall of America will not come from a foreign power, but from the slow, steady corrosion of the ties that bind us. The fix is not to stop seeing color or history, but to start seeing, once again, the shared future we must build, or we will surely fail together.