So far, America has beaten the odds and remained multiracial rather than multicultural, thereby becoming the most powerful nation in the world. We sh… - Victor Davis Hanson

The reason liberals despise Clarence Thomas or caricature a Ben Carson, more so than they do white conservative justices or public figures, is the threat that they pose to the entire engine of liberal condescension — and Democratic politics. When successful blacks prove that they easily compete in the marketplace of talent and ideas without liberal racial policies and their political henchmen, then the entire architecture of liberal racial politics collapses. The disdain shown a Thomas or Carson suggests that liberal racial politics serve as private medieval penance in the abstract, and at little personal cost for assuaging guilt over liberal apartheid.

[T]he Confederacy was so entwined with the idea of preserving slavery that the flag, even today, can evoke racial polarization...

America was born as an immigrant nation. It went through many periods of nearly unlimited immigration, coupled with xenophobic backlashes when particular groups — Germans, Jews, Irish, Mexicans, or Poles — came in such numbers and so abruptly that the traditional powers of assimilation were for a time overwhelmed. But the eras of ethnic ghettoes and tribal separatism were usually brief, given the inclusive popular culture and official government efforts to overwhelm identification with the home country.