Starting with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, whites were “racialized” in a way they never fully understood. They were the people whom American politics was not about. They were excluded—at least as claimants—under civil rights law. As civil rights spread to cover groups other than blacks, the term “people of color” marked whites off as the only people so excluded, and legitimized that exclusion. In this sense the United States had re-created the problem that it had passed the Civil Rights Act to resolve: It had two classes of citizens.
