It’s Too Early to Declare a Culture-War Winner
This article reviews Claudia Rankine’s new book, Triage, which explores the author's grief regarding the perceived failure of racial progress in America. It reflects on the shift from the optimism surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 to the current, more disillusioned cultural climate.
Why it matters
It highlights the evolving discourse on racial justice and the psychological toll of political stagnation in the United States.
Claudia Rankine’s new book overflows with grief for the backlash to racial progress, but history isn’t finished.
Illustration by Matt Williams August 28, 2026, 7 AM ET Share Save I t 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.
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