Donald Trump’s return to the White House has cast in stark relief the polarized intensity of American racial politics today. No modern president has so explicitly traded in racialized rhetoric, nor, in office, so thoroughly repudiated existing race-conscious policies. Indeed, Trump’s defeat in 2020 reflected in part public backlash against these stances amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. And yet, in 2024, Trump escalated his attacks on “wokeness,” promised mass deportations of immigrants—and increased his margins with Black and Latino voters to win back the presidency.

How can we understand these fraught, shifting, and sometimes unexpected cleavages? In America’s New Racial Battle Lines, Rogers Smith and Desmond King—two of the discipline’s most incisive scholars of race and American political development—offer a sweeping answer. They argue that the axis of American racial politics has shifted. From a struggle pitting conservative color-blindness against liberal race consciousness, the battle has expanded into a larger argument about how we understand the nation’s history, obligations, and priorities. Smith and King call the two sides the “Protect” and “Repair” policy alliances. As the labels imply, the Protect alliance seeks to preserve existing understandings, institutions, and policies related to race, whereas the Repair alliance seeks to update those understandings and tackle racial inequalities through fundamental reforms.

Smith and King are admirably specific about the advocacy organizations, policy aims, and political elites that define each side. Much research on race and American politics focuses on voter attitudes; Smith and King are instead interested in explaining organized coalitions—a vital analytic goal, since it is organized political actors that are most focused on and capable of changing policy over the long term. Using a multi-method approach that combines elite interviews, in-depth qualitative research, and quantitative descriptive statistics, they provide a rich picture of each alliance that includes revelatory data about the think tanks, advocacy and litigation groups, and funders on each side. While not every aspect of this analysis is convincing, it represents a significant scholarly advance that is sure to be influential in the field.

The core of America’s New Racial Battle Lines is a twinned analysis of the Protect and Repair alliances that seeks to surface not just the strategies but also the self-understandings of actors in each network. Despite Smith and King’s clear sympathy for the Repair alliance, they provide the most complete and nuanced portrait I have seen of how contemporary conservative organizations approach issues of racial identity. The right flank of the Protect alliance is avowedly White nationalist, with a faction committed to using violence to defend, in the words of one prominent right-wing activist, the nation’s “white demographic core” (p. 79). More mainstream groups within the alliance, however, profess color-blindness and focus on perceived threats to Christian values or America’s distinctive cultural traditions. A common theme is the danger of unrestricted immigration. Yet, there is a segment of the Protect alliance that is explicitly committed to multiracial conservatism. What unites these disparate groups is their shared animus toward the American Left and, since 2016, their shared support for Donald Trump.

I was less taken with Smith and King’s analysis of the Repair alliance. My main concern is their treatment of reparations as the ultimate goal of Repair groups. While they identify 315 Protect groups by considering multiple indicators, their list of 640 Repair organizations is based solely on endorsements for H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations for African Americans first introduced by Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, 35 years ago. Smith and King rightly note that reparations only have strong public support among Black Americans, with most White Americans—and even two-thirds of White Democrats—opposed (p. 157). They acknowledge that “many readers encountering for the first time the radical rhetoric, the extraordinarily wide substantive scope, and the proposed price tags of these Repair initiatives may feel that all this goes much too far to ever be more than politically marginal” (p. 219). Nonetheless, Smith and King argue that the broad ideal of reparation is properly seen as the animating vision of the Repair alliance.

I learned a great deal from this perspective—for example, how the Black Lives Matter movement has articulated an ambitious multipart agenda that includes a robust defense of other identity groups (such as LGBTQ people) and major economic reforms. Smith and King are also convincing when they argue that key parts of the Repair alliance, as they define it, have become extremely well-funded, thanks to an outpouring of grants and donations from foundations and the wealthy, particularly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Still, I suspect their emphasis on reparations leads them to overstate the political importance of groups that, on reflection, look relatively marginal. While their 315 Repair groups include familiar names such as the NAACP and BLM (which has faced notable organizational and financial difficulties since 2020), they also include single churches, yoga centers, and groups with finances so paltry that they seem unlikely to wield much influence in national policymaking. Indeed, Smith and King devote a good deal of their analysis of the Repair alliance’s policy impact to state and local policymaking, and they conclude this discussion by noting that “the policy accomplishments of the Repair alliance…remain limited on many fronts” (p. 248).

This assessment strikes me as excessively negative. In part, this is because Smith and King set the bar too high, and thus make less than they might of evidence that supports their fundamental argument. Racial justice groups have indeed gained organizational strength and clout. And while reparations are not popular among Democratic voters, there has been a remarkable increase in racial liberalism among White Democrats since Donald Trump’s first election in 2016 (though one can legitimately question how deep these commitments run). More often than not, however, advocates of greater racial equity have influenced national policy by downplaying the most ambitious policy aims that Smith and King analyze and by working with progressive organized allies, especially labor unions, to achieve racial justice goals within broader economic and social policy initiatives. Two examples of this strategy are President Biden’s efforts to introduce considerations of racial equity into executive grant-making and the huge 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a race-neutral policy that Democrats pursued in part because it disproportionately helped families of color. These were substantial—if, it turned out, temporary—policy achievements. Moreover, national Democratic leaders in 2021–22 fell just a vote or two shy of extending the CTC expansion and pursuing other ambitious policies that would have greatly helped Black and Latino Americans, such as a major upgrading of America’s childcare sector, which would have been both a major benefit to poor families and a boon to the sector’s largely female and minority workforce.

These examples suggest that the achievements of the Repair alliance going forward will likely hinge on how well they can forge coalitions with other parts of the Democratic Party’s organized network. Future work that builds on Smith and King’s pioneering book would thus do well to delve more deeply into the place of both alliances within such extended party networks. Judging from their analysis, Protect groups now stand alongside the Republican Party’s traditional big business backers and new billionaire allies (some of which, like Elon Musk, are Protect enthusiasts to their core) as the animating force within the party. Though less clearly delineated in Smith and King’s account, the place of Repair groups within the Democratic coalition—including their relationship to organized labor, professional groups, and other players in the advocacy universe—looks more contested, and it is likely to become even more contested in the wake of a Democratic loss that many party insiders blame on excessive fealty to the Left. Of course, that has not stopped the Protect alliance from portraying Repair groups as a grave threat to the American project.

Smith and King conclude their eye-opening book with a set of plausible future scenarios. The one they consider most likely—a multicultural conservatism that attracts some Black and Latino voters, softening the sharpest edges of the Protect alliance’s revanchism—seems more plausible after the 2024 election, given Trump’s gains with voters of color. Next most likely, they argue, is a scenario that looks to me a lot like the early Biden presidency: the achievement of some racial justice goals through mostly race-neutral economic policies like the expanded CTC. In short, they see victory for either side as unlikely and continued contestation as inevitable. The question I found myself asking after reading their bracing account is how well American democracy can weather the coming struggle—one in which the side most sure of itself and most closely tied to a major party is also most skeptical of American political institutions and most willing to undermine them to hold power.