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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.

This chapter examines how white working-class men cope with their inability to sustain the masculine legacy of provision, protection, and courage that they inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. Some white men struggling to provide for their families put dignity, fairness, and economic justice for workers at the center of their politics, criticizing politicians who have failed to fight for workers’ rights. These men feel frustrated by the lack of social recognition for their persistent struggle, personal integrity, and generosity toward others. To compensate, they exclude racial minorities, immigrants, refugees, and nonworkers from their vision of collective bounty. Among other working-class men, particularly those who have never known a social contract between labor and business, hard work and self-sacrifice remain at the center of their identities. Glorifying their own suffering, their harshest scorn is reserved for those who succumb to dependence. A few men detach masculinity from wage-earning, stoicism, and aggressiveness, searching for new foundations on which to anchor the masculine self.