One of the strangest reversals in modern history is that the same voices that spent half a century preaching the evils of racism now urge self-segregation and racial isolation. “Affinity groups,” “safe spaces,” and “black-only graduations” are celebrated as progress. What was once called segregation is now repackaged as “diversity.”

But none of this was ever about skin color. It was — and remains — about culture. I would argue that racial superiority does not exist, but that cultural superiority certainly does.

Every functioning society has a majority culture whose social mores shape the path to mobility and success. In mid-century America, Martin Luther King Jr. sought not to dismantle those norms but to open their benefits to everyone. He believed that character, not color, should define opportunity.

I grew up white and poor in the rural South during the civil rights movement. I remember black families whose lives mirrored the aspirations of the broader American middle class: two-parent homes, reverence for education, respect for elders, self-reliance, and a deep faith in God. Those were the hallmarks of both black and white communities striving toward the same American ideal.

King’s dream was for inclusion in that shared moral and cultural framework. But something changed in the wake of the 1960s. The sexual revolution, radical politics, and a new ideology of victimhood began to erode the very values that had lifted both blacks and whites out of poverty. Character gave way to identity; personal responsibility was replaced by grievance.

Progressive politicians saw opportunity in this fracture. Instead of reinforcing the proven pathways to success — education, family, faith, and work — they subsidized failure. The War on Poverty paid people to remain isolated from the majority culture, convincing the poor that dependency was liberation. Affirmative action institutionalized the same error, insisting that official discrimination could somehow erase historical discrimination.

The results were predictable. As black America was encouraged to define itself in opposition to the broader culture, the social indicators — crime, family dissolution, academic decline — fell disastrously. White communities that adopted the same progressive habits fared no better. Drugs, broken homes, and contempt for education have ravaged large swaths of rural white America. The law of large numbers may buffer the dominant culture from collapse, but deviation from tested norms punishes everyone, regardless of color.

The problem is not race — it is progressivism. The modern progressive movement thrives on what might be called the three D’s: division, discord, and dystopia. Its power depends on perpetual cultural conflict. “Diversity” becomes a euphemism for separation. “Inclusion” becomes a polite way of saying “apart but equal.” The language is Orwellian, the goal political.

None of this implies racial superiority. The so-called “white culture” that progressives love to deride is not inherently white — it is simply a culture built on habits that produce stability: family cohesion, education, self-discipline, respect for law, and faith. These are universal virtues, open to anyone who embraces them. They are not racist ideals; they are civilizational ones, the very basis for Western civilization as a matter of fact.

Dr. King understood that swimming with the current of these values was the fastest route to equality. Today’s activists insist that swimming against it is an act of justice. But the current remains the same, and those who fight it exhaust themselves while falling behind.

Success in America has never depended on race. It depends on behavior, values, and the willingness to join — rather than reject — the cultural mainstream that made the American dream possible in the first place and has been responsible for lifting more people of all races out of poverty than any other.

It is not about race. It never was.