At the other end you have the fears of those white Trump voters who feel like the new liberalism offers affirmative action for everyone but them, allowing immigrants and minorities to “cut the line” (to borrow an image from Arlie Russell Hochschild’s recent study of working-class Republicans) and claim an American dream that they themselves can no longer reach.

These views are worlds apart, but it is actually possible to accept elements of both. It can be simultaneously true that slavery and Jim Crow robbed black Americans on a scale that still requires redress, and that offering redress through a haphazard system of minority preferences in hiring, contracting and higher education creates a new set of reasonable white grievances in its turn.

After all, what are white Americans supposed to make of a system that offers Hispanic or Asian business owners an advantage never enjoyed by their own Irish or Polish or Scots-Irish forefathers, or boosts upper-class African and Caribbean college applicants whose ancestors never lived in slavery? What are they supposed to think of a system that was established 50 years ago as a temporary experiment, but keeps gaining new half-lives and further beneficiaries — moving “swiftly and imperceptibly,” as Chris Caldwell once put it, “from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong”?

At the same time, how much do Americans for whom the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is still a heavy anchor — the black underclass of inner cities and the cotton-belt South — gain from a system whose hiring nudges and contracting dollars and college acceptances mostly benefit minorities in the middle class? And how does it memorialize the distinctive crime of chattel slavery to conflate the native-black experience with immigrant struggles — which are real enough, but not remotely the same thing?

Instead of reparations as an addition to our current affirmative-action regime, then, maybe they should be considered as an alternative — one that directly addresses a unique government-sanctioned crime against part of the American people, without requiring a preference regime that makes lower-class white Americans feel like victims of a multicultural version of The Man.