The Art of the Possible
No issue in American life is harder to compromise on than race, because the stakes involve not just policy but identity, moral responsibility, and historical truth. The five voices above cannot all be right – but each contains insights that the others lack, and any durable settlement must reckon with that uncomfortable fact. The history is not in serious dispute. The disagreement is about what it demands of us now. What follows is not a perfect framework. It is an attempt to map the territory where imperfect progress might actually be made.
An honest national accounting of racial history. Not indoctrination, not guilt – ensuring that American education tells the full story of the nation’s racial past accurately and without flinching. Teaching history is not assigning blame. A federally supported but locally administered effort to develop rigorous, evidence-based curricula on racial history – neither sanitized nor polemical – would serve all Americans. Ignorance of history makes informed citizenship impossible.
Targeted investment in disadvantaged communities, designed in a race-conscious but not race-exclusive manner. The communities most damaged by slavery and Jim Crow are identifiable – specific neighborhoods, specific rural areas, specific populations with documented histories of exclusion. Policies could target these communities based on measurable indicators of disadvantage (poverty rates, school performance, health outcomes, housing values) rather than explicitly racial criteria, sidestepping legal and political obstacles while directing resources where they are most needed: infrastructure, school funding equalization, community health centers, small business support, affordable housing.
Criminal justice reform. Left-right convergence has already begun here. Conservatives concerned about government overreach have found common ground with progressives concerned about disparities and mass incarceration. Ending mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses, reforming cash bail, investing in re-entry programs, improving police accountability, addressing the school-to-prison pipeline – these reforms command significant bipartisan support when framed in terms of justice, fiscal responsibility, and public safety rather than exclusively racial terms.
A serious, nonpartisan study of reparations – not a predetermined commitment, but a genuine inquiry into what was taken, what redress might cost, and what forms might be both just and feasible. The conversation about reparations is currently poisoned by the fact that most people are arguing about a policy that has never been defined. A commission could move the debate from abstractions to specifics, either building support for a workable program or revealing that alternative approaches would be more effective. The study itself would force a public reckoning with the material dimensions of racial injustice – not just the moral dimensions everyone acknowledges in the abstract, but the specific, quantifiable economic losses inflicted by specific, documented government policies.
A cultural compact. This is the hardest piece, because it cannot be legislated. It would ask white Americans to listen seriously to Black experiences without defensiveness, to accept that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow has material consequences that persist, and to support reasonable measures to address them. It would ask Black Americans and their allies to distinguish between systemic critique and personal accusation, to acknowledge genuine progress without treating acknowledgment as betrayal, and to engage with good-faith disagreement without reflexively attributing it to racism. It would ask all Americans to resist reducing complex individuals to their racial identities and to recognize that people of the same race hold wildly different views and deserve to be treated as individuals.
This compromise will satisfy no one completely. It is insufficiently radical for those who believe the system requires demolition, insufficiently conservative for those who believe colorblind law is sufficient. It asks everyone to accept something uncomfortable. But it has the virtue of being achievable, of building on existing agreement, and of treating all parties as potential partners rather than enemies.