Of course the movement would rise again once white people felt threatened. It was easy for whites to be generous and egalitarian so long as it wasn’t costing them anything—so long as the American economy kept booming and whites continued to enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s rising power and wealth. But what would happen when Spanish began to overtake English? Or when America’s culture and identity started to fundamentally change? Derek believed the answer was written into the country’s history: America had always defined itself as white, and when pressed, it would do so
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