The gap between white Democrats and white Republicans had been slowly widening since the 1990s, but starting around 2012 it grew much more rapidly. One possible explanation for this timing: The killing of Trayvon Martin that year and the arrival the next year of the Black Lives Matter movement. The series of events that followed—a drumbeat of videos of black people being shot or strangled by police, militarized law enforcement clashing with protesters plastered nonstop on cable news, the demonization of kneeling athletes, and so on—showcased for white Democrats the structural nature of the challenges their black fellow partisans had long described.

It became clearer to them that a Puritan work ethic cannot escape a chokehold . . . that there’s no amount of trying harder that would have saved the nine black parishioners killed at Wednesday night Bible study by a self-avowed white supremacist. The small conversions on the right we saw following George Floyd’s murder—think Mitt Romney marching with Christian evangelicals while selfie-tweeting “Black Lives Matter”—had occurred nearly a decade earlier among white Americans on the left and with much larger effect.

Given all this, the present moment becomes a bit clearer. The manufactured political outrage over critical race theory, the 1619 Project, Biden’s Supreme Court pick, and trumped-up tales of voter fraud occurring in communities of color intentionally exacerbates a sense of racial division in the public in the name of political expedience. It feeds media narratives and electoral strategies that capitalize on the white grievance on the right and the demands for inclusion on the left. On the left, the partisan racial resentment disparity signals how race-centric appeals can mobilize a multiracial electorate; it’s not an accident that “Jim Crow 2.0” was used by some to characterize the need for voting rights legislation. And on the right, the racial resentment divide shows how white ethnonationalist appeals can be veiled by a colorblind conservatism—an evolution of the dog-whistling rhetoric that accompanied the Southern Strategy.