It didn’t work. That is the howl of grief at the core of Claudia Rankine’s new book, Triage: that all of the optimism and effort in service to the dream of true equality for Black Americans, all of Rankine’s own precise, subtle thinking—it failed. “We have to learn to detach liberation from arrival,” she writes near the end of her lamentation. “‘I might not get there with you,’ to quote the good doctor. And ‘there’ might be nowhere.” This melancholy invocation of Martin Luther King Jr. qualifies as one of the book’s most hopeful moments.Not long ago, the trajectory felt so different. In 2014, Rankine’s landmark work, Citizen, seemed to capture the mood of millions of Americans after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, when protesters demanded the arrest of the officer who’d shot and killed Michael Brown, along with reforms in police precincts and far beyond. The movement they galvanized, “Black Lives Matter,” was both bent on changing our society and confident of the possibility of doing so.Citizen, published two months after Brown’s killing, seemed to channel that righteous fury. Nimbly blending poetry, prose, and photography—“The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism,” Wallace Stevens predicted in 1899—it argued that for Black Americans, every social and professional encounter, violent, trivial, or otherwise, was distorted by race. In her depiction of the exhausting vigilance this reality required, through a second-person voice cannily implicating her reader, Rankine created a new language to identify a problem as old as the United States. The result was that rare thing, a simultaneous literary and cultural triumph. Rankine won a raft of prizes, among them a MacArthur genius grant. For a long time, the book’s iconic cover—a stark image evoking Trayvon Martin’s hoodie against a white backdrop—seemed to be on every other literate person’s nightstand.A dozen years later, it can feel as if Americans live amid the wreckage of that confident moment. Too often, the forceful arguments of Rankine and her peers—and the electric anger of the George Floyd protests—were used by the opportunistic and aggrieved to justify abrupt changes to unprepared institutions. Along with these shifts came purity tests that were easy for well-meaning people to fail. Or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it recently, “Woke 1 was crazy.” Any transgression of new standards of speech and behavior could put someone at risk of social banishment, in the truly despotic shape of cancellation.I write that as someone who believes entirely in the case Citizen made, because the backlash that followed seems to me such a profound tragedy. After the 2024 presidential campaign, in which Donald Trump successfully made a wedge issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, his second administration has pushed far beyond any status-quo restoration. Black and female military officers have been purged or denied promotion. Public monuments condemning slavery have been removed, and Confederate names have been restored to Army bases. Black women have accounted for 33 percent of the DOGE-accelerated federal layoffs despite composing 12 percent of the federal workforce, according to one economist. Grants have been revoked for research projects whose proposals so much as mention concepts including “gender” or “DEI.” Top government officials have blamed airline crashes on minority hiring without any evidence. On and on it goes.[Read: The great resegregation]As Rankine clarifies in Triage, the pain of this moment is not exclusive to Black Americans. (“Camps are being built. No one knows who is meant to fill them,” she writes at one point, with characteristic force.) She is wounded, in this new book, by the carnage in Gaza, as well as by assaults on the rights of immigrants, the LGBTQ community, women, the poor—in effect, anyone who isn’t straight, healthy, and white. And she suggests that the administration has deliberately fueled this culture war, sowing suspicion and confusion, to distract Americans from its unpopular moves toward oligarchy and authoritarianism. As she puts it, “No one can be fully perceived in a nightmare’s low visibility.”Yet for all of the starkness of these conclusions, I came away from Triage with a question that surprised me: Can we be sure that Rankine and her allies have actually lost?The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once proposed a useful concept he called the phase of reversal. When a suppressed group gains power over a previously dominant group, he suggested, the result is not equilibrium; it is a new power imbalance in favor of the former out-group. Only with time and effort (the effort of “reinscription,” he called it) can true equilibrium be achieved.A lot had already changed by the time Rankine published Just Us, her follow-up to Citizen, in 2020. Specifically, the soft power of the movement for equality—its moral authority—was rapidly being converted into hard power. Most obvious, Black candidates for elite jobs, grants, and prizes, who had previously faced many barriers, were benefiting, in various institutions and workplaces, from a new kind of favoritism.Some such rebalancing was long overdue. But alongside serious thinkers such as Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Saidiya Hartman, less rigorous writers and ideas were also elevated. Shoddy books and shaky academic programs were produced under the banner of anti-racism, and many professional critics were wary of questioning them. Colleges put limits on the right of students and teachers to express points of view that departed from this new apparent consensus. Justifiably or not, some white people, in academia and many other professions, felt that they had lost opportunities because of the accelerated hiring of others. Despite this, and no matter their individual circumstances or histories, the former in-group felt that they were expected to express shame over their privilege.It was a catastrophic combination, engineered to breed resentment even among the sympathetic. Along with this came the profound dread that straight white men (like me) felt about saying a single wrong sentence and facing the possibility of permanent exile without forgiveness. In the literary world, I can attest, for several years the safest joke anyone could make was to insult white men. It made sense to me, as a correction in the power dynamics exerted by both women and nonwhite people—a catharsis, almost. Here is some of our permanent discomfort, the joke seemed to say. Try it on. It felt bad.[Read: Claudia Rankine’s quest for racial dialogue]Just Us is a weaker book than Citizen because, despite the brilliance of Rankine’s mind, it reflects these changes; it is a narrative about victimhood written from a position of power.By 2020, Rankine had become one of our nation’s leading writers, a professor at Yale, and, to a significant portion of the educated class, something like an oracle and a jury at once. This seemed to make her a worse writer—certainly a less perceptive one. Most surprising, Just Us is marked by a lack of intellectual rigor that often veers close to bad faith. Does she really believe in anything so sweeping as “the inability of white people to see children other than white children as children”?Whether or not she does, her grievances in the book sit uncomfortably alongside her new status: mild disrespect in first class on an airplane; a woman at a dinner party who earns the author’s contempt for trying to pause a political conversation to comment on brownies; a series of apologies from white friends that she deems insufficient. This disconnect captures part of the difficulty of identity politics as it often seemed to be practiced at the time: It transfers all politics out of class and into identity. King himself understood this when he argued, not long before his death, that the poor and middle class of all races have more in common with each other than with the rich of any race.Triage is a far stronger book. It also reads like a dispatch from a routed army.Both Citizen and Just Us are defined by their diagnostic urgency—as if by naming and elucidating America’s problems, you could easily solve them. This is the illusion that the Rankine of Triage has abandoned. “There might be no solutions,” she writes, in a sentiment she reiterates over and over, “only recognitions.”The scholar Lauren Berlant coined the phrase cruel optimism to describe how hope, including hope placed in a political movement, can stand in the way of a person’s own flourishing. Rankine arrives at the opening of Triage having turned 60, buried her mother, and lost a sustaining belief in the future that she thought she was in the vanguard of creating. In the face of such conditions, she writes, “nothing else functions but one’s grief.” I think this line captures how a lot of Americans feel right now. For many of Trump’s opponents, their trademark feeling of his second term has been powerlessness—a sense that the story has been told. One thing failed; another succeeded.[Read: The ‘resistance’ won]But grief and fatalism must be carefully untangled. What if the story is in fact incomplete? To follow Derrida’s idea, we might consider that the ostensible rise and fall are in fact a thesis and an antithesis, a movement and a retaliation. If so, the right question is what a synthesis would look like.There are already clues. Even as the hard power of DEI is stripped methodically away, many changes that occurred in the era leading up to Trump’s second term remain exceedingly difficult to revoke. According to one study that sampled large companies, among them BlackRock and Google, these corporations increased their number of Black employees by somewhere between 33 and 75 percent from 2020 to 2024. Even if diverse hiring slows radically, that’s unlikely to completely reverse these gains. In 20 years, many of those workers will almost certainly have ascended to positions of power that have historically been dominated by white men.More substantial still may be the long-term changes in how our country’s institutions handle race, which can seem imperceptible until you look closely. Thinking over this article, I asked a friend who’s a doctor what he thought about DEI. It accomplished nothing at all, he said—before correcting himself, after some thought, and allowing that it had completely changed how nephrologists approached race-based equations for calculating kidney function. A few minutes later, he added that it had also permanently altered dermatology, which had long been prone to misdiagnoses based on white skin as the default color.Yet the most significant change of all may lie in something much harder to quantify: the lasting power of representation. Americans are more culturally integrated than they have ever been. The first Black man to be elected president is still the country’s most popular politician. Rankine herself is an example of this enormous change, a lauded poet at the center of literary and academic culture.But the shift is visible everywhere: in the way the right-wing hysteria over the cast of The Odyssey fizzled as the movie became a massive hit; in the diversity that persists within advertising, museums, universities, sports, and even politics. Although there have been only three Black governors in the history of our country, eight Black major-party candidates will be running to lead their states this year. And something has truly changed in the way that younger generations view race and sexuality specifically. For anyone under 30, a return of the white monoculture I grew up in would be not just offensive but nonsensical. You couldn’t make Love Island without a diverse cast. For that matter, I would argue that you couldn’t make Friends with six white people in 2026 either.Rankine might reject this as a description of progress. “Keep on hoping for a savior until your maybes murder you,” she writes. But Triage does have a moment in which an ember of the old cruel optimism flickers. Rankine and her friend study a picture of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s daughter. They see, in her innocent eyes, “finally, the person for whom centuries of survival was for.” Many on the New Right want Americans to believe that the past 10 years settled the debate about race in America for good. Certainly it is in the interest of tech billionaires and MAGA politicians that people buy that narrative. But the real truth is that we don’t really know whom the future is for. It might even be for all of us.