In 1966, Vermont's Senator George Aiken proposed that the U.S. disentangle itself from Vietnam by declaring victory and withdrawing. America should think < about a variation on the Aiken scenario in order to begin leaving behind its fatal domestic quagmire of race. The nation should decide that, in order to rescue everyone's honor -- above all, that of African Americans -- it is time to withdraw from an untenable dynamic, from the racial equivalent of what the French generals in Indochina called "bad country."
The legal and rhetorical overemphasis on race in the past generation (busing, affirmative action, quotas, punitive political...