Posted on October 30, 2025 in Featured Review
Authors:
Kevin AndersonAmerica’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair, by Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King. Chicago, 2024. 456p ISBN 9780226834023 $115.00, ISBN 9780226834047 $30.00, ISBN 9780226834030 $29.99
The role race (and racism) plays in American history and politics continues to be a vexing political question. Has race declined as a factor in determining the life chances for minorities, or is it an evolving, complex phenomenon that continues to constrain opportunities and frustrate attempts to find common ground on social, economic, and cultural issues? Measuring and analyzing these current debates on the role of race and public policy, Smith (emer., Univ. of Pennsylvania) and King (Univ. of Oxford, UK) have produced a detailed, nuanced, and ultimately fascinating portrait of how race shapes, interacts with, and often frustrates racial consensus in modern American politics.
The authors point out that much of the current discussion of race in American politics is based on superficial understandings of American history and the ideological and political positions that those understandings produce. One side posits an evolving nation of continuous progress in which an established tradition of social, economic, and political ideals is rooted in the formal structures of the American Constitution. This “Protect alliance” works to uphold certain ideas as the bedrock of society:
Most conservatives now believe the government needs to do much more to defend what they see as the traditional virtues and interests of America and of more traditionalist Americans. They define those virtues and interests in ways that reflect long-disputed but very understandable beliefs that the core of American identity lies in its European and Christian heritage and its commitment to private property and market systems, along with republican systems of popular self-governance that include limits on majoritarian democracy.
p. 18
Once the authors define this alliance, they proceed to perform a critical archaeology, explaining who forms this alliance and what they seek to protect. Smith and King examine how Reagan-era groups of this sort focused on free-market ideas and then evolved into structured organizations such as the State Policy Network, in which economic arguments for a smaller federal government (and the lower taxes and enhanced individual liberty therein) formed the core of an explicit policy agenda. Trump-era groups have remained rooted in free market ideas but with a more pronounced emphasis on cultural issues—e.g., the war on “woke ideology”—highlighting a shift in perception that white people are the victims of reverse discrimination and globalization. This fear has given prominence to groups that have historically remained on the fringe of the alliance, groups that advocated violence as a defense mechanism against what they perceived as a new, aggressive cultural and political threat.
The decision to explicate the policies such groups advocate as a means of achieving their goals leads the authors to list eight types of groups (building on previous work by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol, and Jason Sclar) that define and implement the “Protect agenda”: think tanks, policy advocacy groups, constituency mobilization groups, litigation and legal advocacy groups, religious groups, racial and ethnic groups, armed protectionist groups, and funding groups. This breakdown illustrates the alliance’s focus and interconnection as well as the areas in which competing priorities often lead to conflicting visions of how to achieve policy goals. This discussion is robust and detailed, allowing one to understand the multiple factors that form and motivate the actions of academics and activists. This approach helps to explain why race is often the catalyst but not the explicit cause of much policy discussion. The advantage of this approach is to remove the perception that racial disagreements are simply the result of emotional hatred or moral deficiency (although those factors remain problematic). Instead, it points out that self-interest (intellectual, political, and economic) often undergirds the advocacy of this protectionist perspective.
On the other side, the “Repair alliance” sees a valuable foundation in current political ideals but argues that those ideals and their meanings were never perfect; they have been continually perfected by progressive protest and the redefinition of those ideals to include women and minorities. The Repair alliance argues that the history of the nation is instructive in illuminating the continual push to refine core values and expand rights to all citizens. This push leads to a telling point: the fight to overcome racism has led to challenges to other forms of inequality in American society: economic deprivation, sexual and religious discrimination, and other forms of what Smith has previously described in his book Civic Ideas (CH, Mar’98, 35-4180) as “ascriptive hierarchies.”
The use of race to drive a partisan movement in a proxy fight for political power ultimately defines the power of this book. Smith and King argue that this fight obscures the much more complicated foundation for our racial debates. They point out that:
On the left, many liberals and progressives, convinced that America’s history displays huge injustices despite achievements, and embittered by the undeniable racial disparities, growing overall economic inequalities, police violence, and the increasingly militant Right so visible in the nation today, now regard older civil rights demands for integration into existing institutions as at best naïve.
p. 19
The role of race in exacerbating other forms of inequality created unique perspectives on how to attack oppression. What strategies are deemed to be the most effective? Does equity require the state to stop discrimination only? Or should the state take affirmative steps to undo the damage done by law and social custom? These internal debates yield an intra-racial conversation that the larger American polity misses, illustrating a robust policy debate that offers a full spectrum of options for racial redress.
The movement to overcome past discrimination has often led to arguments that racism is a systemic and consistent force that continually hinders minority advancement. The discussion of groups and policies seeking reparations for African Americans is incisive and illustrative of how the Repair alliance seeks change, yet this perspective ignores context and the different ways that racial discrimination occurs in different eras. The authors point out that the historical resistance to discrimination and unequal treatment helped form groups (such as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) that fought on legal and social fronts, but their emphasis on racial discrimination often did not address specific types of inequality, and that missing fight gave rise to contemporary groups trying to understand the role of race in exacerbating modern problems. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and its fight for criminal justice reform is particularly noteworthy in this regard, but the authors also explore fights for housing, education, public health and the environment, immigration, voting rights, and even the transforming of public memorials. How much of a factor is race in these policy areas? Is the fact that race continues to impact all of them a sign of a more significant political and strategic problem? The emphasis on context and specific issue areas allows the authors to carefully explore the multiple structures of the Repair coalition, including which groups fight for what policies, and more importantly, why they choose those issues around which to build a political agenda.
The consequences of understanding the complicated foundations of our racial divide and what it portends for contemporary politics are critical. The authors point out that one side (the Protect alliance) does have some advantages, but they argue that:
We nonetheless believe that the portrait of contemporary American racial politics we have provided can be the basis not for despair but for fresh and constructive thought and action. Though the dangers of severe polarization combined with violent extremism are very real, the emergence of the nation’s new racial policy alliances is also the story of how millions of Americans have felt inspired to imagine new political futures and work actively to bring them about.
p. 301
The implications of a sharp racial divide yield complex, multifaceted solutions to problems that are viewed as essential to the elevation of a community on one hand and the preservation of American political/social traditions on the other. One of the strengths of America’s New Racial Battle Lines is the incisive and contextually rich analysis of the proposals that grow out of the Protect and Repair alliances. The explication of why each group seeks to implement certain policies explains that their goals appear to rest on fundamentally different assumptions regarding what is causing racial animus and thus what prescriptions are necessary to solve these problems. This approach both illuminates the core of both sides and explains why common ground is so elusive. It also sheds light on the incomplete analysis of so much contemporary scholarship on race, which attempts to offer broad explanations of racial dynamics without the nuanced data or careful discussion of conflicting priorities of social class and other political issues. America’s New Racial Battle Lines offers important insights and understandings while building a model for future debates about the role of race in American politics. If we are to continue having sharp racial battles, this book is as clear a map as we are likely to get.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Political Science – U.S. Politics
Kevin Anderson is professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.
 | Kevin Anderson’s review of The Second (2021), “The Right to Bear Arms, but Not for All: Anderson Uncovers the Second Amendment’s Racist Legacy“ |
 | Duncan Jamieson’s review of America on Fire (2021), “Reclaiming Rebellion: A Deep Dive into African American Resistance to State Violence“ |
 | Kevin Anderson’s review of Becoming Abolitionists (2021), “More than a Slogan: Derecka Purnell Champions Meaningful Commitment to Abolition and Social Justice“ |
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