I only read of Coleman Hughes’s recent campus talk, which made some curious claims, in the Orient. I read that focusing on race is a divisive departure from the nonviolent and race-blind formula that worked for the Civil Rights Movement. This echoes the sloppy history that frequently poses one sentence from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech as the sum total of his philosophy.

King did not prioritize aspirations for a color-blind society over remedying past injustices. While he dreamt of a race-neutral future, he focused on the present plight of African-descended people in America, who had long been denied the basics of American freedom. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he said in his famous speech, they “failed to guarantee that black men as well as white men” would be given “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I read also that the philosophy that “won the Civil Rights Movement” was “effectively colorblind classical liberalism plus nonviolent activism,” while the Black Lives Matter movement represents the legacy of the ineffective Black Power Movement. Bowdoin offers many courses that would challenge this, articulating the strong continuities between the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and both to Black Lives Matter.

I was also struck by Hughes’ suggestion that modern protests assert that the oppressed are “morally superior to white people.” This partakes of the same curious logic that dismisses as “divisive” any effort by Black people to secure rights always assumed for whites.

It’s hard to imagine anyone today suggesting that people of color confront not a race problem but an economic one. Six years ago, George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman. Today, Black and brown people—some undocumented residents, some in process and others citizens—are being detained and sent to prisons overseas without due process. The president openly stokes the white nationalism and xenophobia of his base.

Race is not, as Hughes contends, a proxy for disadvantage—it is disadvantage. Race and class are not distinct but historically intertwined.  White families are five times wealthier than Black, and have ten times the generational wealth. White workers suffer only half the unemployment Black workers do. On average, Black people die almost five years earlier than white people, and infant mortality for Black babies is over twice as high as for whites. Among equally qualified applicants for jobs and bank loans, white people still benefit over Black.

By ignoring the reality of race-specific outcomes, the pose of racial neutrality may state an aspiration, but it maintains and furthers structural inequalities set in place decades ago.

Patrick Rael is a professor of history.