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A recent poll by the NAACP found that over 40 percent of blacks and 50 percent of whites now accept the doctrine of racially separate but equal. This is not terribly surprising, given that most of the "liberal" institutions in our culture have given their blessing to the idea. Whites have their own segregationist impulses, of course, but the license that the black leadership has given to separatism among the educated classes has had a real impact.

Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of inattention, whites have been willing to go along with what the African-American community wants in these matters, without regard to their own standards of what is appropriate, moral or good.

So, if blacks want to march behind a kook like Farrakhan, fine. If they want racially segregated graduations and racially segregated dormitories and racially specific curricula in our schools, fine. If they want to bring back the segregationist standard of "separate but equal" anywhere in our national life, that must be all right as well.

As we divide along racial lines and increasingly surrender the ability to speak with a communal voice, however, we are losing something far more profound, and that is the fundamental idea of what it means to be American. This is the idea that all men -- regardless of race, color or creed -- are created equal, and are equal before the community's law.

The founders did not say "white" men. The modifiers "black" and "white" do not appear in the Constitution. The founders did not say "all Americans are created equal" or all Christians or all Europeans. They said "all" without qualification.

(The fact that they used the common generic term "men" obviously did not mean just the male gender either. The Constitution not only does not specifically exclude women from its Bill of Rights, it does not use the words "male" or "female" at all.)

Not only is the concept of separatism antithetical to the American idea, it undermines the moral ideal that has helped liberate blacks from their former state of oppression. If the white majority could not feel blacks' pain, they would not have responded as they did to the injustices their ancestors inflicted, which brought many whites inherited material advantages.

It is, of course, not just whites who cannot feel blacks' pain in the sense implied in the statements above. The fact is, if we are going to be epistemologically precise, nobody can feel anybody else's pain but their own. This paradox is a timeless theme of Western philosophy going back to Descartes, who believed that the only reality that is certain is the interior knowledge we have of our own feelings and thoughts.

Cogito ergo sum.

But this solipsistic viewpoint, and the relativist perspective that follows, would -- if taken to its logical extreme -- mean the end of any real possibility that a multiethnic or multicultural society like ours could triumph over the essential anarchy that is the human condition.

How can any morality exist if you have to actually be in another's shoes to feel their pain? How can we know that slavery is wrong, if we have not been slaves? That discrimination is wrong if we have not been discriminated against?

How can we feel compelled to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, if there is no commonality between us? Yet the very idea of that kinship in our common humanity is what motivated Wilberforce and other Christians to end the slave trade that blacks and Arabs had started. How could they (or we) know or feel that an injustice had been done to others if those others are so alien that we cannot identify with them?

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