In the late nineties, my boss sent me to an HR training conference. As I entered the elevator up to the conference room, a middle-aged black man and I acknowledged each other with a nod and a smile. We rode up alone and in silence.

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One of the first hourlong presentations was on race relations, and the man I’d shared the elevator with was the speaker. To my openmouthed astonishment, he began by talking about me. He said he’d ridden the elevator that morning with a white man, and that I hadn’t spoken to him because he was black and I was white. He averred that my silence was a sign of continuing racism in America.

Remember, this was years before our country went race-mad. Back then, I proudly told anyone who’d listen that America was the place where the world was learning to live together. Americans of all stripes were going to school and working together, praying and playing together, and dating and marrying each other. We’d left the dark days of racial division behind and were finally judging people by the content of their character.

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I wanted to say something but just sat there dumbstruck. With mounting distress, I listened to the rest of his presentation on what are now familiar DEI racism tropes: unconscious racial bias, systemic racism, white privilege, and micro-aggressions. These divisive concepts were entirely new to me, and I felt sure they were new to the hundreds of other attendees. I looked for signs of disagreement among them, but everyone just listened impassively.

Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that racism is ignorance because it ascribes characteristics to people based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Why would any well-meaning person want to replace the waning ignorance of racism against blacks with the ignorance of racism against whites?

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As the presentation came to an end, I was surprised to find myself standing. I told everyone I was the person on the elevator who hadn’t spoken to the presenter. I explained that I’d never initiated a conversation on an elevator in my life; it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with shyness. And I asked him why he wanted to stir up racial division at a time when it was finally declining?

As evidence of the decline, I offered the rising interracial marriage rate. I said interracial attraction, as depicted in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, was real. I also said I hoped that in the future, such marriages would render us all the same tea color and racial divisions would disappear. I finished by saying there’s no surer cure for racism than for a grandparent to hold their newborn grandchild of a different color.

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A black woman in the row in front of me stood up and said it would be a disaster if black culture disappeared. She said she worked for an adoption agency, and she refused to place black children in white homes because exposure to black culture was necessary for the healthy rearing of black children.

I asked her if she thought it was better to leave a black child without a home than to place the child with white parents? She said that it was definitely better for the child.

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Flabbergasted, I sat down as everyone filed out for a coffee break.

In the decades since, I watched in horror as the DEI racism I first experienced at that conference captured most major American public and private institutions. Culminating in the astonishing, brutish, and embarrassingly un-American antisemitism flaunted by Ivy League students and administrators since October 7th.

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Because racial differences are permanent and unbridgeable, DEI stoked the most corrosive form of the factionalism our Founders warned was the ultimate threat to America. If “We the People” devolves into “Our Faction,” then Dr. King’s dream dies, and America will soon follow.

Those who wonder at MAGA’s fierce loyalty to Trump and the Left’s psychotic opposition to him need look no further than his heroic efforts to roll back DEI racism. Because both know that left unchecked, it will destroy Lincoln’s last best hope of earth.

Peter Merkl blogs at pmerkl.co.

Image generated by ChatGPT.