Why Race-Based Policies Breed Division And Undercut Civil Rights

A light holiday intro gives way to a sharp, evidence‑driven conversation with Dr. Carol Swain about a problem many didn’t want to see coming: how identity politics and race‑based preferences helped create the space for a “new white nationalism.” Not the hooded caricature of the past, but an online‑networked movement animated by grievance and the perception of unequal rules. Carol walks us through the policy arc—from the promise of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the executive‑order birth of affirmative action and the campus rise of DEI—and shows how each step shifted incentives away from equal protection and toward category‑based treatment.

We dig into the university experience many listeners will recognize: admissions schemes that mix a merit tranche with racial sorting, leaving students to infer stigma and fueling distrust across groups. Carol’s remedy is both principled and practical: race‑neutral, means‑tested support that targets real disadvantage without hardening racial lines, and a broader civic reset around character, competence, and a shared American identity. Along the way, we revisit her landmark research on congressional representation—cited by the Supreme Court—demonstrating that party alignment, not the race of the officeholder, better predicts whether constituents’ interests are advanced. That insight reframes redistricting debates and exposes the trade‑offs of racial gerrymandering.

The conversation also examines how the early internet supercharged like‑minded recruitment and why young men, exhausted by constant accusations, became prime targets. If institutions want unity, they must signal fairness: clear standards, consistent merit, and equal treatment under law. Carol’s throughline is simple and urgent—good methods yield good outcomes. If we want cohesion, we should reward excellence, teach history honestly, and defend universal rules that apply to everyone. Listen for data, not dogma, and leave with a roadmap to lower the temperature and rebuild trust.

If this conversation challenged or clarified your thinking, share it with a friend, subscribe for part two with Dr. Swain, and leave a review to help others find the show.

Transcript

Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to The WallBuilders Show. This is the intersection of faith and culture. We look at all the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. I'm Rick Green. I'm here with David Barton and Tim Barton, and you can learn more about all of us at the website, wallbuilders.com and wallbuilder.show,  Dot show for the radio program dot com for all those Christmas needs that you still have. We're down to, what do we got guys? We've got, we're less like a week, a little more than a week before Christmas and David Barton has only mentioned Christmas music. Once, Tim? Once this year so far? Is that it? I mean, this is weird.

Tim Barton [00:00:40] If we include the whole year, there definitely was some this summer, but this winter has not been very often. That's a fact. 

David Barton [00:00:49] I'm trying to see how sensitive you guys are to my feelings in this thing. And clearly there's no sensitivity. Nobody's stood up for me, but nobody's tried to say, hey, let's play some Christmas music for you and it's all about you guys. It's not about me. I get it. 

Tim Barton [00:01:05] I don't know which university you've been attending recently to get your degree in democratic drama, but on the conservative side, we believe you stand up for yourself and you lead and you go forward. So, the Bible says you have not because you ask not. And I don't know that Rick and I have told you no. I think we're just giving you the opportunity. 

Rick Green [00:01:28] Yeah, he almost sounded like he thought WallBuilders radio would somehow be some kind of safe space or something, you know, I don't know. That was weird. It was just weird. Seriously, it is getting close to Christmas, but. I do want to encourage people to go to the website, probably getting down to the wire, get something shipped out at time. But even if it comes after Christmas folks, there's some good stuff there. And I'm thinking about it for the 250th, just all through 2026, wearing shirts and hats and everything else. We need to be advertising patriotism. Let's bring it back this year in the two fiftieth and get people excited about studying the founding documents, about talking about these things and doing all that they can to rebuild liberty in the 250th. So wallbuilders.com is the place you can go to do that. Carol Swain, man, David, we've done, let's see, we did Foundations of Freedom with Carol years ago. You've done events with her for years and she's just been awesome. She ran for, was it mayor of Nashville? I think she ran for a few years ago, she lives in Tennessee and just been a great friend to WallBuilders for a long time. 

David Barton [00:02:26] She has, and she's been a great voice in academics, particularly a great as she does not fit the profile of what they would expect from someone like her to be a very intellectual, very well-reasoned, very well-spoken black conservative that does not seem necessarily conservative except she has such a sharp mind. I mean, she doesn't have the reactions you would normally pin on a conservative. She's just a brilliant intellectual and she's done so much to help people understand issues that she will talk about and she'll talk bluntly about that other people they were to talk about would get beat up for, you know, alleged racism or whatever. She just goes where the truth is and where the facts are. And she's been absolutely great at that for a number of years. 

Rick Green [00:03:18] And she's got, she's in several books and, actually a couple in the last year that we had her on to talk about as well, but there's one she released years ago that I didn't know about until just a few weeks ago, and the topic has resurfaced with some of these. Oh, what's the nice way to say it? Commentators that are, I don't think just kind of toying with, um this, this, white supremacy stuff or with the antisemitic stuff. I think they're really; they're delving into it. And it's, I've always dismissed that as a danger, saying it's just the left making that up. And man, it's becoming a real thing. So, Carol, of course, an expert on this, and she's gonna tell us about her book from actually several years back, "The New White Nationalism in America, Its Challenge to Integration". Carol Swain, our special guest, stay with us, folks. We'll be right back on The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:05:11] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. Great to have Dr. Carol Swain back with us. I love you, Carol. Thank you for some time today. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:05:18] It's my pleasure. 

Rick Green [00:05:19] We still, by the way, I don't know how many years ago that was we filmed Foundations of Freedom and those episodes you did with David, so powerful. We still air those on the air once in a while. I still assign them to students and man; we just have always loved working with you. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:05:33] My hair was black back then. 

Rick Green [00:05:36] Yeah, me too, and I had more of it That's all right. That's wisdom. That is a sign of wisdom isn't it even more wisdom 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:05:43] Right, I could make my hair black again. It's in a bottle, but I refuse to do that. I want the wisdom. 

Rick Green [00:05:49] Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I did not know about this book that you had written, I think 15 years ago, "The New White Nationalism in America, It's Challenge to Integration". And, and I, hey, I gotta be honest with you, Dr. Swain, I always rejected, especially when it came from the left, cause it was always just anti-white kind of stuff, but I always rejected the labeling of our movement and conservatives as, as right wing and, and being racist and that kind of thing. And that it was the Democrats in the South. And you've taught on all of this. I never thought I would see it in our movement like I'm seeing with this Fuentes guy and a bunch of these others that have just, they're saying the very things that I denied our side would ever be for, and you saw it coming. Am I right? Is that 15 years ago? That might've been 20 years ago. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:06:39] It was 2002. 

Rick Green [00:06:43] Woo, yeah, 24 years ago. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:06:45] I was a Democrat at the time, but I was always a common-sense person. And the book was a warning that multiculturalism and identity politics was creating an opening for extremists and the new white nationalism was, why I called it new, was that it wasn't a KKK. It wasn't the neo-Nazis and those people had pretty much died out The white supremacists that they had died out, because a white supremacist was a person who argued that white people because of that skin color they were superior to other races only a minority of people said that.  But there were lots of people saying that white people were being discriminated against and that white people needed protections, and I saw these issues. The book talks about issues that were coming together. I felt to create a devil's groove for racial unrest and such as liberal immigration policies, black on white crime, globalization, loss of jobs. And I talked about the internet, the rise of the internet had what helped like-minded people to find each other. And my solution was move away from identity politics and multiculturalism towards the American national identity. And I said that white interests and white identity would be the next phase of identity politics if we did not move away. 

Rick Green [00:08:15] So you were literally, probably 15 years before DEI and CRT was really, well, I mean, it was in the universities and maybe that's why you were ahead of the game because you were seeing it there, but you were way ahead of the national conversation on those things, warning about it and then it came and it did exactly what you warned about. It created these angry, especially young white males that are, they're just fed up with being called racist. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:08:42] They were there as, back then that book has five chapters on affirmative action. And I have some drawings of, with drawings of young white men, teenagers. They were upset about affirmative action and it was around the time of the Michigan, Michigan cases. And so affirmative action is, was a forerunner. It came, you know, before DEI and Critical Race Theory. All of that You know, they all connected. But when the Supreme Court ruled in 2004, 2005, can't remember the exact date of the Michigan cases, that in 25 years, they didn't, Sandra Day O'Connell said in 25 year, she didn't think affirmative action would be needed. The left got busy, creating DEI as something that would be with us forever. It had no connection to race. And so that's how you ended up with the proliferation of groups. And they took something that was good as far as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which I argue opened up doors for people like me. It brought Americans together across political, racial, national lines. It brought people together. Immediately Johnson, the Democrat, he signs an executive order instituting affirmative action. And then affirmative action for a while it was quotas, but the preferential system was the beginning of the break in the relationship between blacks and Jews. 

Rick Green [00:10:21] Man, I didn't realize that. So, a thing that was supposed to be helping to create equality actually drove us further apart. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:10:31] What they did with the Affirmative Action and Johnson's Executive Order, he signed that a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It never really got a chance to be what it was about, to end discrimination based on race, sex, color, national origin, and religion, because he instituted the system of preferential treatment by Executive Order by the early 1970s. There were five groups. And my book The New White Nationalism, which published in 2002 just talks about the history of affirmative action and how it was creating a division and how young people were responding to it. And I felt that it was essential that affirmative action at that time be race neutral, means tested, and that that would take away a source of conflict that a lot of people were, you know, experiencing. 

Rick Green [00:11:29] Yeah. You know, I remember, I went to law school in 90, 91 at the University of Texas and, and that year they were implementing some of this and, and the Hopwood decision came, I think two years later, maybe three years later. Yeah. Right out, right out of UT and they were, and it was, it was exactly what you just described because they would basically, I remember they were taking, they took the first 200 kids. They would just say total merit, just like you're saying all merit based, and then they would literally separate you based on your color of skin. And your acceptance was based on the skin color rather than on your merit. And it created all kinds of bad feelings. It created all kind of actually false impressions about people. So, you'd have, you know, people would be saying, well, they're only here because of the color of skin or I didn't get in because you did or whatever. And it just, it created this division. I remember that was-. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:12:17] Isn't that what Marxists do? Isn't it what they do? 

[00:12:20] That's what, that's it

Dr. Carol Swain [00:12:20] Isn't that what they do? And that's what they did. They pretty much ruined it. But I myself came through at a time that the emphasis was on outreach, non-discrimination and equal opportunity. And in colleges and universities, they let in a lot of people, but you had to stay. You had to meet the standards. And for myself, I never wanted to be an affirmative action baby. In fact, as an undergrad, I wrote my first paper as a senior, a long paper, so like a senior thesis on affirmative action. And I was a Democrat then I was critical of it and I got an A plus on it. I still have a copy. My professor told me that I was a Republican and I was very upset. 

Rick Green [00:13:13] Well, you know. This is not our topic today, I guess it kind of is. What do you think about all the redistricting maps and the fact that, cause I'm trying to remember in the 64 Civil Rights Act, cause I know a lot of the voting rights stuff, they got to the point, instead of saying, you can't discriminate based on race, it became, you have to discriminate based on race. You have to draw lines to guarantee somebody's gonna get elected based on color of skin. And it looks like we might finally see an end of that, but you watched that from the beginning. Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:13:45] I have a book on that. 

Rick Green [00:13:48] You and Bill, I have two friends, you and Bill Federer, that write a book about once a month, it seems like. 

Dr. Carol Swain [00:13:55] Well, my first book, the one that the Harvard University president was so fond of, "Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African-Americans in Congress". And so, me, I was always thinking out of the box. And in the late 80s, the arguments were being made that only Blacks could represent Blacks. And so, and that as soon as Peter Rodino, New Jersey, and Lindy Box, Louisiana, soon as their districts were taken by black, there would be no more Black representation. And so, I was a student, graduate student looking for a PhD topic and I'm scratching my head. Is it really true? Is it true that only Blacks can represent Blacks? And so, I designed my study of Congress to answer that question. And what I did, I looked at White and Black members of Congress from around the country and I selected them based on the racial composition of that district. I had White representatives of majority Black districts. Black representatives in majority white districts, districts that were diverse. The districts had to be 40% black or more. And I concluded that political party was more important than the race of the representative. And as long as blacks held the views they did, they would be best represented by Democrats. And how I came up with that, I had to have an indicator of what is black interest. And I took the positions of black interest groups, the condition of black people. And then the civil rights organizations. And so that's how I came up with the indicator. It had, and then I had a $11,000. This was back in 89. That was a lot of money for a graduate student. I traveled around to the districts and I saw where they placed their district offices, whether they had a mobile office, the racial composition of their staff. And I noticed that white representatives of majority black districts always had a black administrative assistant at the very top. If the district was very racially diverse, they had people that could speak all the different languages. Black representatives of white districts had a white administrative assistant. So that was a part of the representation. But my book concluded that it came out against drawing majority black district. And I argued that drawing them would actually create less black representation. That was a tradeoff between black faces and a black substantive representation. And so that's how I got labeled as a conservative. And that's when some people love my book and I had an opportunity to be on Good Morning America and I turned it down because I used to be painfully shy. But that book was cited three times by the US Supreme Court. And it was published in 1993. And in the concluding chapter, I talked about what would happen if Republicans took over the Congress. Because then you had Ron Dellums, you had a lot of black people and they were chairing committees, they had a lotta power that they would lose all their assignments and it would be bad. That had not happened in 40 years, but I painted the picture of what it would look like. It happened a year after the book. And the majority of black districts were drawn in 1993, 1994, Republicans take over and then the Supreme Court struck down all the majority black districts. The reaction from the world was, and Elaine Jones of the NAACP said that after that, the number of black members of Congress would fit in the back of a taxi cab. I wrote an article for the Congressional Quarterly where I said, that the black members of Congress would be re-elected because of the incumbency advantage. And every single one that ran for re-election was re- elected. Cleo Fields from Louisiana decided not to run. And at the time I collected my data, 40% of the blacks in Congress were already being elected in districts that were not majority black on election day. Because when you factor the end registration levels and turn out those districts were majority white. And so, um, that was, so my position against those districts and the Supreme Court is always allowed partisan jerrymanders. Have always said, why do you want to draw black districts? Just draw Democrat districts. Democrats don't have a problem. You know, they'll elect anybody. Right. Um, and so I, so the Supreme Court's position upholding the Texas district and the ones they have upheld. It hasn't changed. You can have the political party that controls the district team because they have a majority in the legislature and maybe the governorship, they've always been able to draw whatever kind of districts they want it. So to make it seem like Trump, the Republicans are doing something they shouldn't be doing, that is just crazy. It's totally disconnected from history. 

Rick Green [00:19:08] Yeah, I had no idea that you had that book and that you have that much history on that subject. I just was thinking about it as a byproduct of this. I wish I had known. I'm glad I didn't know actually. That was great. All right, folks. Hey, we're going to have to interrupt the interview with Carol. We're not going to enough time for the whole thing. So, she'll be back with us again tomorrow, but we're going to take a break and get some more commentary from David and Tim Barton when we return right here on The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:20:38] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. That was Carol Swain. We could, didn't have time to get the whole interview in so, we're going to have her back again tomorrow guys. But again, I didn't know about the book for, you know, 20 years ago, and I certainly didn't, no, she played such a pivotal role in the argument against racial redistricting. Of course we've said on WallBuilders forever, you just shouldn't be factoring race into this and, and the crazy that she through the data came to the conclusion parties, the indicator not race. It's okay to draw lines based on party. It is not okay to draw lines based on color of skin. 

Tim Barton [00:21:10] Yeah, it's interesting guys. It reminds me of the professor from Harvard who did the study on, police and their involvement with the black community. And what he discovered was that police weren't targeting black individuals. That they, they weren't going and having shooting all these unarmed black individuals and that was a Roland Friar. Was that his name? I have to look it up to remember. I think his first name was Roland or professor. We might could salvage. And say, yeah, he's a professor at Harvard. That's, that's what we know about him. But it's interesting that, that Carol's kind of entrance into this was very similar in the sense that she was not conservative or Christian at the time. She was just, I mean, so great hearing her say, I was just looking for a topic for my doctoral thesis, trying to find something I could write about among other things and started doing some research and just to see how her journey has gone. From saying, I just want to study the data and let's just strategically and critically think through what would be the consequence of this. It's what Thomas Sowell would call not having just stage one thinking, but like stage two, stage three, thinking down the road, not just what's the instant gratification of the moment, but what are going to be the consequences of these decisions and actions. And I think she brilliantly assessed some of what was going on. That people today are still as they're experimenting with all kinds of ideologies. They've not been strategic or critical thinkers enough, like Carol was decades ago at this point, but super interesting that before being a conservative or a Christian, she just had an intellectual curiosity and she was honest enough to say, here's what I'm finding and here's what I think makes the most sense and probably what would happen. And in fact, that is largely what happened. 

David Barton [00:23:01] Yeah. And Tim, I looked it up. It was Dr. Roland Friar out of Harvard was, was the, and it was like Carol. He, he reached a conclusion by following the evidence that he didn't think he was going to reach and he didn't think it was necessarily where it pointed and the same with Carol too, but they followed truth and as a result has been really good. And you know, it's interesting that when you don't do what's right, it doesn't get the right results. When you do it right, you often get the right results. And this, attempt to try to help eliminate and discrimination by focusing on race rather than being colorblind has backfired and that's what she points out so well and so you don't get good results by violating principles to get it. I mean it just doesn't work that way and Rick you mentioned the Hopwood decision where you know the skin it's not on ability or competency it's on the skin and yet the scripture says a man's gift will make room for him. If you're competent in something that's, what opens the door not incompetence with the right color skin or anything else. And so, it's just like, you know, as she pointed out, it's gone from that kind of mentality back then 30 years ago now into affirmative action, DEI, et cetera, and you always get the wrong results because you're using the wrong methods and it's not based on truth, it's based on something else. And I just love the fact that she keeps pointing to, you do what's right and you get the right results and now statistics continually affirm that. And what she found in her book even back in 2002 when she did that book is now even further affirmed today 23, 24 years later. 

[00:24:35] Well, and she pointed out too, that different political entities, right, Republican, Democrat, they have ideologies. And I thought it was really funny. She's like, look, Democrats elect anybody. They don't care. And I instantly thought of, you know, like mayors of New York or, you know, New York City, we can kind of go to Minnesota. Like some of the drama happening. Yeah, Democrats have elected all kinds of people, but they have promoted an ideology. And as Carol pointed out, when you're moving away from maybe what MLK said, that you judge the content of the character. And she said, you know, pointing out, this is more of like a DEI kind of thought that these are the ideas that are being promoted. It's very interesting that what the objective was, is not going to have the outcome desired. And largely, I mean, maybe it will, because it seems that a lot of this is rooted in Marxism and Marxism the whole goal is to destroy and tear the system down. But it certainly didn't have the advertised effect of bringing more equality and largely again, I think it goes back to it should be, people should be promoted that it should be that the credibility of the idea, not the color of the skin, that should be discussed. And so, we are promoting principles, not just personalities, or again, a DEI thought, the color the skin. And man, Carol has done such a good job unfolding some of that. And guys, honestly, I'm excited to talk to her a little bit more and maybe dig a little deeper because I know we kind of ran out of time with some of the conversation today, but certainly a lot more to talk with her about tomorrow. 

Rick Green [00:26:11] Yeah, we'll get Doctor Swain back tomorrow more to cover as well. But of course, this book, you can get it online. "The New White Nationalism in America. It's Challenge to Integration". That's actually I got over at Amazon. I know I don't like advertising for Amazon, but it was easy. So, I found it there. I know that's terrible guys. It's like when I once in a while and I know David you're not a coffee drinker, but as a coffee drinker I have to admit I can't I don't have Patriot Brew with me everywhere I go and I'm going to confess my sin on the air right now. I drank a Starbucks the other day. Shh. Don't tell anybody. Okay, that's it. All right, everybody, have a great night tomorrow. Carol Swain back with us. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show.