What increasingly becomes clear in both the rhetoric and conceptual framing of recent activism around race is that the goal is to revoke and replace the race neutrality written into the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Christopher Caldwell called for the revocation of that act in his new book Age of Entitlement and the truth is he has partners on the other side with whom he can parley -- the latter want of course to be free to practice state sanctioned "positive discrimination"

based on "anti-subordination" jurisprudence, but just as the CRA was a political detente between those who wanted to go further and those who wanted to do less, the move to restore freedom of association will also be a political detente

between those who want to impose favored outcomes by government fiat and those who want to be left alone

What seems clear though is that the racial liberalism within the wider framework of meritocratic capitalism supplemented by affirmative action and a welfare state that was the post-CRA settlement has been hollowed out from within by successor ideologies