When I first learned about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in grade school it seemed to me to be eminently just. School segregation had been manifestly wrong, an affront to human dignity. Underlying the “separate but equal” paradigm that held sway in the pre-Brown years was a judgment of inferiority directed at Blacks. Truth be told, public amenities were “separate” because Whites did not accept Blacks as their equals. But the Supreme Court struck down this poisonous hypocrisy, and for a long time I thought the end of “separate but equal” had marked the end of the whole hateful epoch of racism in America.

The past few years have made me question the Court’s ability to effect that kind of social change. Separating people along racial lines remains as unjust as ever. What I now have doubts about, though, are the promises that replaced the pre-Brown regime of legal injustice and daily insult perpetrated on fellow human beings. Following Brown came impassioned talk of political and civic equality, reaching a crescendo in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. All Americans, regardless of their ethnic or religious group, were to be treated as equals before the law and have equal access to the civic goods of the nation. It might take a bit of procedural inequality (such as affirmative action schemes) to get everything to even up to the state’s satisfaction but, we were told, the result would be the proliferation of equal rights and racial harmony; all would work out well in the end.

Really? Anyone who has seen the news recently will have cause to question the anthropology that the Brown court proffered and the Civil Rights movement and a bevy of court and administrative decisions since 1954 have reaffirmed and expounded upon. The anti-doctrine to separate but equal—call it desegregated and equal, I guess—is practically defunct. People around the country are re-cliquing along racial and religious lines. Antisemitism is all the rage on college campuses where American students pretending to be Palestinians are calling for the wholesale murder of Jews. Pundits and politicians insist that Blacks are perennial victims to justify forming a separate class of Americans incompatible with the oppressor races among us. Whites and Asians are being openly discriminated against in college admissions programs. A small fraction of Whites still insists on the superiority of their own genetic makeup. And so on, ad nauseam. Sure, all Americans have equal rights. But even so, many are embracing race, or some other categorical identity, as a substitute for the conceptual political framework of our putative national belonging. Seventy years after Brown, not only are we all equal. We are also all separate again.

The disharmony plaguing our country may in many ways be a testimony to the mistake we made in believing an array of political rights could be enough to satisfy our hearts and souls. If today I look at you and see black, or at her and see yellow, or at myself and see white, and if all I have to bridge those differences with are platitudes about political equality, then it may mean that I need some thicker medium than rights to communicate with my fellow human beings.

Consider, in this regard, how we treat our fellow Americans in the womb. Courts do not recognize their rights, and so, despite their obvious humanity, we write them off as expendable, as categorically Other. The unborn are separate from us and grossly discriminated against, indicating that Brown did not go nearly far enough toward overcoming the forces that drive human beings into opposing camps.

“Separate but equal” was clearly wrong because “equal” was a euphemism for disdain. And that is why strengthening the rights component of equality could never solve the original problem. It wasn’t that Whites didn’t want to give Blacks equal rights. It was that Whites didn’t want to recognize Blacks’ humanity. By refusing to see and address this much deeper problem, papering over it instead with talk about rights and political equality, we created a space beneath the polite discourse we use in our shared civic life where we could exclude whole groups of people thought to be somehow less human than ourselves. The Brown decision therefore represents, in retrospect, a rotten compromise in our national life. We all learned to speak the language of shared civic and political standing, but only because many of us, of all races, did not want to learn the much harder language of shared humanity, of fundamental, soul-level brotherhood across accidents of birth and genetics.

We need to go back to the day in May of 1954 before Brown was decided. We need to stand at that crossroads again and choose to walk up the narrower and steeper road. “Separate but equal”—focusing on that in a political sense was where we went wrong. Understanding “separate” to mean merely physically segregated and “equal” to connote merely an ideal of civic and political equality comprised the original lie that has plagued us to this day. We were never separate. We are not separate now. We can never be separate. And that is precisely because we are all equal—not in civil rights, but in dignity as human beings. Civil equality flows from pre-political equality, but never the other way around. We ought to have responded to racial hatred, not with a court decision, but with repentance, with asking our brothers and sisters for forgiveness, and with resolving to sin no more against anyone created in the image and likeness of God.

Brown was a watershed in American jurisprudence. But looking back seven decades later, I find it to have been imperfectly framed. Without something richer and more satisfying than just political equality to bind us together, we will continue to give in to the temptation to divide up along racial and other lines.