African Americans were once united and to some extent even defined by the experiences of slavery, Jim Crow and the quotidian humiliations dealt out by an overtly and habitually racist society. But today overt racism is almost universally condemned, and Americans grow more racially tolerant with each generation. African Americans now occupy some of the nation’s most coveted and prestigious positions. Black culture, once treated with contempt, now produces much of the nation’s most celebrated popular music and many of its most emulated celebrities. Although racism is an enduring feature of American society, for a growing cadre of successful and well-positioned blacks it is more an annoyance than a serious threat to personal well-being. By contrast, today’s poor blacks endure social conditions that are arguably worse than those of the era of Jim Crow-style racism. For members of the black underclass, broken families, malnutrition, joblessness, crime and entanglement with the criminal justice system are endemic and devastating problems; opportunities for upward social mobility are arguably more limited today than at any time since Reconstruction. But is this because of racism, or other institutional deficiencies?

This divergence in experiences and life chances now divides the black community as sharply as the color line once divided Americans. The fracturing of the black community is a challenge to conventional ways of thinking about race, identity and social justice, even as it opens some new possibilities for human flourishing and for a more just society. Although we still typically think in terms of a single black experience, a unified black community and a common black identity, these assumptions ever more starkly spite the facts of daily life. Our failure to come to grips with the new realities of race in America has distorted our analysis of social problems and undermined our efforts to find viable solutions. Increasingly desperate attempts to cling to outdated ideas of racial identity and solidarity have bred a fundamentally dishonest racial conversation that warps individual psychological development and confounds cross-racial understanding. 

Police in New York City stopped more than 680,000 people last year; 84 percent were black or Latino. The overwhelming majority (88 percent) of the stops did not result in an arrest.¹ For young men in New York’s tougher neighborhoods, police stops are a regular occurrence. One young man told a New York Times reporter he was stopped more than sixty times before he turned 18 years old.² And although some officers are courteous in their questioning and respectful in searches, all too often the stops include insults, threats and physically rough treatment. For instance, when two Latino teenagers stopped by police in Queens...