This chapter argues that the center of gravity is shifting because of an intricate interplay between America's color line and its nativity line. It uses the color line concept to ask whether America has the right policy tools to fully erase the line that separated whites and racial minorities throughout America's history. If they merge—if immigrants are racialized—the future sadly repeats America's past. If, instead, America's population becomes so diverse and multiracial that the color line disappears, an altogether different future is in store, perhaps the promised postracial society. However, it is not certain whether this social process will strengthen or weaken a color line inherited from the eighteenth century, strengthened across the next century and a half, and then challenged but not fully erased by the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.
