The interests of white and black Americans do not always align, any more than the interests of Ohioans and Californians, or senior citizens and younger Americans, or the college educated and the working class. But there is vastly more room to work through major problems together than there was in the Alabama and Mississippi of 1963.

How so? Well, start with that most reliably controversial of race-related issues: criminal justice, where America’s drug laws and incarceration rates are often cited by civil rights activists as an example of how structural racism threatens to create a “new Jim Crow.”

Except that while the actual Jim Crow invariably pitted white, Southern, conservative politicians against civil rights activists, today criminal justice is a place where many conservative politicians have embraced activists’ priorities instead. Eric Holder’s recent proposals for sentencing reform, for instance, followed a path blazed by Rick Perry in Texas a decade ago. In the Senate, the conservative Republican with the closest ties to the states-rights ideology that once justified segregation, Rand Paul, is also the loudest voice in support of reconsidering the War on Drugs.

Likewise in education policy, another longstanding racial flash point. There the older battles over integration and busing have mostly given way to a debate about competition and teacher standards in which conservative states are often laboratories for reform.