For nearly two decades, Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King have charted the shifting racial policy alliances that have shaped American politics across different eras. In America's New Racial Battle Lines, they show that US racial policy debates are undergoing dramatic changes on both the right and the left. Disputes over color-blind versus race-conscious policies have given way to new, more inflammatory conflicts. Today's conservatives promise to protect traditionalist, predominantly white, Christian Americans against what they call the radical left. Meanwhile, today's progressives seek not just to integrate American institutions but to fundamentally transform them in order to repair what they see as those institutions' pervasive systemic racism. Drawing on interviews with activists, surveys, social network analyses, and comprehensive reviews of federal, state, and local policies and advocacy groups, Smith and King map the memberships and goals of two rival racial policy alliances and delineate the contrasting stories each side tells. They also show that these increasingly polarized racial policy alliances are substantially funded on both the left and right.

Placing today's conflicts in theoretical and historical perspectives while analyzing debates over identity politics, racial capitalism, and intersectionality, Smith and King project where these intensifying clashes may take the nation in the years ahead. They highlight the alarming potential for mounting violence, as well as the remaining possibilities for finding common ground.