Andre M. Perry is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution.
Every day the headlines deliver fresh cause for outrage. Executive orders reversing decades of civil rights progress, DEI programs erased with the stroke of a pen, and language from the White House that echoes the unapologetic racism we wrongly assumed the country had left behind a generation ago. For those on the left, the temptation is to treat every provocation as confirmation that America is in moral free fall. But that is a major strategic error, mistaking a backlash against progress for evidence of regression.
The truth is, we are far more amenable to diversity and pluralism than the rhetoric out of the White House — and the debates online and in the popular press — would suggest. I’m a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. And a recent Brookings-Gallup survey reveals that most Americans are living profoundly integrated lives. We found that 57 percent of Americans have close interracial friendships. Twenty-six percent of those with romantic partners are partnered with someone of a different race. Twenty-three percent of those who live with children live with children of a different race.
These are not the statistics of a nation at war with diversity; they are the quiet daily evidence of a people who have already chosen pluralism.
If this is our reality, then progressives — as the champions of a multiracial democracy — should be operating from a position of strength. But for too long, they have been on the back foot, cataloging every act of regression. Rather than celebrating the integration of American society and building on it, they’ve been stuck organizing around racial disparities.
It is time for a shift in tone — a move away from grievance politics and toward a politics defined by unity. Only then, when Democrats are speaking to Americans’ lived reality, can the party be heard on the material agenda they’ve long tried to advance: affordable housing and education and universal health care. An agenda that provides benefits for all.
That Americans are ready for a multiracial coalition is as clear as day — whatever the social media feeds and headlines say.
The Brookings-Gallup survey finds that among US workers, 83 percent have clients from a different race and 80 percent have at least one coworker of a different race.
And apparently they like it that way. Support for DEI has eroded some in recent years. But according to the latest Bentley University-Gallup Business in Society survey, a sizable majority of US adults — 69 percent — still say it is extremely or somewhat important for businesses to promote DEI.
Interracial families are one of the most profound forms of racial cooperation in American society — daily exercises in shared experience and mutual understanding.
In 1980, just 3 percent of married couples were interracial. By 2015, that share had grown to 10 percent.
Today, 26 percent of Americans are in interracial romantic partnerships. Asian Americans lead at 32 percent, followed by Hispanic Americans at 23 percent, Black Americans at 21 percent, and white Americans at 16 percent.
But here’s the most telling statistic: 23 percent of Americans live with children of a different racial or ethnic background — more than twice the share who have a parent of a different race (11 percent). Interracial family formation isn’t growing slowly. The rate has more than doubled in the space of a single generation.
You can dismantle DEI programs, but you can’t unblend families. The multiracial future isn’t coming — it’s already in millions of American homes.
There is political power here, if Democrats can find a way to tap it.
The politics I’m suggesting need not be timid. Indeed, they can be quite bold.
When, in recent months, immigrants were snatched from families, schools, workplaces, and communities, we saw how an integrated America responded. Neighbors got out in the streets. They resisted. Because they understood that this was not only about immigrants. When the government comes for any member of our communities, it signals what it thinks of all of us. We share a fate.
And if we build a diverse coalition that demands fair housing, well-funded schools, jobs that meet the cost of living, and accessible health care, we’ll be building the kind of rainbow coalition that Jesse Jackson Jr., Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. long imagined.
Such a coalition, for so many years the stuff of dreams, is within our grasp. We will not have to bridge the profound gaps that King tried to bridge. We’ll be starting with a truly integrated society. We’ll be aiming to codify, through legislation and policy, the values that most Americans are already living.
While modern-day racists and segregationists row furiously in the wrong direction, the majority of Americans, who know we are in this together, are already pulling toward something better. The progressive must aim to be the coxswain, the one who sets the pace and calls the direction. Stop screaming at the boats heading the wrong way. Instead, direct the crew toward legislation that makes a real difference in people’s lives. This is where most Americans want to go. And the data show they want to get there together.