David Brooks’ arrestingly headlined New York Times column — “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” — contains a sentence that stopped me cold, possibly for a reason that both Brooks and I had forgotten. He warns that “There will be some on the left who will say Donald Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism, and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again."

I said precisely that to Brooks and others in a small audience at Washington, DC’s Politics & Prose Bookstore on September 9, 1997, during a talk on my book Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream. I insisted then that if liberals keep fixating on racism and ethno-racial identity politics, “we’ll keep on losing and losing and losing.”

Brooks and I had a drink after my Politics & Prose talk. For all of our differences, which are deep and long-lasting, he agreed with my argument in Liberal Racism’s first chapter, “Life After Diversity,” that diversity can’t be preached or programmed in bureaucratic, cookie-cutter protocols to benefit “people of color.” It's basically the same argument I made three years ago in "Scrapping the Color Code," in Commonweal.

Real diversity should be a consequence of premises and practices that aren’t “of color” at all. Institutions must take account of race, for sure, but without valorizing it to an extent that ends up compounding racist stereotyping itself. Liberal institutional diversity, I argued in my book, had become politically and morally........

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