Read many of America’s greatest writers about race and legal equality, and you’ll find a similar theme: policies that divide Americans by race, or increase their perception of racial differences, spawn tribalism, separation, and hatred.
Frederick Douglass warned that policies fostering racial identity, rather than shared American values, sow “dangerous seeds of discontent and hatred.” Justice Thomas Cooley wrote that distinctions based on race would “assail the very foundations of [our] government.” Justice John Marshall Harlan said that nothing could “more certainly arouse race hate” and “a feeling of distrust between these races” than segregationist polices. And Justice Antonin Scalia, quoting Professor Alexander Bickel, called racially discriminatory policies “destructive of a democratic society.”
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