That’s certainly how the politics and media coverage of the early culture war played out. Dead White Men against Afrocentrists. Each side’s claim seen as a debit from the other’s. But that was a profoundly artificial dichotomy. As scholars like Ranold Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror, the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.