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The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.

Cultural subordination is defined here as the suppression of important black values or folk ways—questions and concerns of keen importance to blacks—in the American mainstream culture. Like juridical subordination, cultural subordination is animated by post-Jim Crow norms that perform important rhetorical and regulatory functions in civil rights discourse—racial omission (traditionalism), racial integration (reformism), racial solidarity (limited separation), and social transformation (critical race theory). After defending the belief that blacks do have a distinct set of values that transcend class stratification, and after discussing the legitimacy of cultural diversity in American society, this chapter crafts four models of cultural diversity defined by these post-Jim Crow norms—cultural assimilation (traditionalism), biculturalism (reformism), cultural pluralism (limited separation), and transculturalism (critical race theory). It then proceeds to explain how most of these visions of cultural diversity subordinate legitimate black values. Deploying these models to purposefully enhance our racial democracy, which lies at the root of cultural diversity, can reduce (but not entirely eliminate) racial subordination in the American mainstream culture.

Following World War II, the age of first marriage dipped to an all-century low. Numbers of teen brides and grooms soared through the early 1960s, and then quickly dissipated. While early marriage fit right into a United States bent on fighting the Cold War with domestic stability at home, experts, journalists, and academics also bemoaned the large numbers of high school students who married in these decades. This chapter argues that the uptick in early marriage, especially among white urban and suburban dwellers, was caused by conflicting messages about sex, which resulted in premarital pregnancies and shotgun weddings; a nationwide emphasis on domesticity; and by cravings by teenagers for adulthood, symbolized through marriage. While rates of early marriage for rural and nonwhite residents remained steady, the real change here was a white middle-class early marriage surge, which is what resulted in all the expert hand-wringing.