By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: For decades, the United States has operated under a comforting myth: that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice and that the civil-rights victories of the 1960s marked the final word on American race relations. But that belief was never fully true.

Beneath the surface of “post-racial” discourse, the original sin of racial hierarchy was not exorcised — it was merely medicated. As that medication wears off, the patient is convulsing.

America has failed to construct a durable framework for managing domestic race relations, and that failure now poses a profound social and developmental threat: a risk of persistent dysfunction, fragmentation, and mutual resentment.

The failure is not merely one of policy but of philosophy. For generations, the United States treated racial reconciliation as a zero-sum game. Instead of building a coherent national identity rooted in shared civic values, justice was outsourced to episodic, explosive protests.

Without stable, institutional mechanisms for addressing grievances, America is left with reactive movements and reactive counter-movements — not systemic peace.

Today, many racial groups see the system as fundamentally unfair: some white Americans feel stigmatized and attacked; many Black Americans feel over-policed and undervalued; Hispanic communities worry their contributions are ignored. This fragmentation is not a recipe for progress — it is a recipe for deep social strain.

Consider the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Born out of genuine anguish over police violence against Black Americans, BLM forced a national conversation on brutality and systemic inequity. At its peak, a majority of Americans supported BLM’s goals.

Yet five years after the murder of George Floyd, studies show belief in BLM’s lasting impact on racial justice has declined significantly, with many Americans saying the movement did not lead to meaningful improvements in Black lives.

Because the United States lacks widely trusted, legitimate forums for arbiting racial grievance, the rise of BLM was met not with consensus or structural reform, but with polarization. What began as moral outrage became a cultural battleground — not healing, but intensification.

In this vacuum, other movements — often less interested in equitable justice than in power — have grown.

On one flank, a range of Hispanic advocacy efforts operates within a broad spectrum. Mainstream organizations such as UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza) work through policy advocacy, legal reform, and civic engagement aimed at immigration reform, citizenship pathways, and anti-discrimination protections.

However, alongside constructive advocacy, more militant rhetoric exists in segments of the broader Hispanic political ecosystem that frame demographic change as political leverage.

While not monolithic, these voices sometimes assert that growing populations confer political power, and that demographic shifts will inevitably reconfigure local school boards, labor markets, and legislative representation. These arguments, when framed as zero-sum, eschew integration in favor of power-based calculation.

On the other flank — and arguably more alarming — is the resurgence of white supremacist and neo-Confederate movements. Groups such as the Proud Boys, classified by civil-rights organizations as extremist and hate-oriented, explicitly promote “Western chauvinism” and conspiracy narratives about threats to Western culture.

Once relegated to the fringe, such groups now command broader attention, sometimes under the guise of “patriotism.”

Connected to this is the proliferation of the Great Replacement theory — a conspiracy that claims demographic change is not organic but engineered to replace white populations.

Far-right commentators and some political figures have amplified variations of this idea, which mainstream scholars describe as a racist and unfounded narrative that has nonetheless influenced public discourse and extremist violence.

When political leaders fail to condemn such ideas unequivocally — and when rhetoric shifts toward tribal framing instead of inclusive governance — the task of managing race relations devolves further into conflict. A political environment in which public officials echo or tolerate divisive narratives only feeds polarization.

We are now witnessing a dangerous feedback loop of grievance: Black Americans mobilize for safety and equal justice; white nationalists mobilize to defend perceived status and identity; some Hispanic activists speak of demographic leverage.

Each group views its actions as defensive and the others’ as offensive. There is no shared future — only a persistent arena for conflict.

The consequences extend beyond symbolic battles over statues or school curricula. When political energy is consumed by culture wars over history rather than concrete policy cooperation, the capacity for collective action weakens.

Debates about infrastructure investment, economic competitiveness, climate resilience, and global strategic competition become secondary to tribal conflict. When public health decisions, disaster responses, or funding priorities are filtered through lenses of racial resentment, the state’s ability to function equitably diminishes.

The final stage of this unraveling may not be an outright civil war in the classical sense — with armies and secession — but something potentially worse: a slow decay into a low-trust, high-resentment society.

A society in which citizens no longer believe the rules apply equally, where police are trusted by none, where neighborhoods drift toward enclaves and politics devolves into tribal vengeance.

America can still choose a different path, but it requires honesty. It requires admitting that colorblind liberalism — the notion that ignoring race automatically produces justice — failed. It requires rebuilding a social contract focused not on competing group rights, but on mutual obligation and a shared, demanding civic identity that transcends race.

Without these commitments, the strands that are supposed to bind the nation may fray, snap, and leave the United States not as a unified country, but as a collection of warring tribes under a broken flag.