Racial grievances are ripping the country apart, and no one seems to have any answers. In Coleman Hughes’s new book, The End of Race Politics, the heterodox intellectual delivers an incisive look into American racialist obsessions. Hughes examines the origins of the country’s racial politics and explains how they have subsumed every component of life, from federal contracts to higher education and even Hollywood movies.

Hughes traces how facially benign efforts to address the damage caused by America’s lamentable racial past eventually transformed into an endless racket of handouts and grifts.