Most Americans see the terrible events in Los Angeles as an unwanted flashback to the 1960s-to the civil-rights movement, the riots of 1965 and 1968 and to what we then saw, accurately, as the inevitable crisis of race in America. Once again, young blacks are taking to the streets to express their outrage at perceived injustice, and once again, whites are fearful that The Fire Next Time will consume them. Looting, arson and mindless mayhem fill our television screens with searing images: we can only wonder whether the nation will ever move beyond what the Kerner Commission described as two societies, separate and unequal, one black, the other white.

The short answer is, we already have-for better or worse. The most important facts about the riots of 1992 are that upwards of 30 million African-Americans did not take to the streets, and that those who did are clearly part of a relatively small urban underclass that is now as distinct from the black middle class as it is from the white middle class. The devastated hopes of L.A.’s Korean-immigrant community, meanwhile, are a powerful reminder that the nation is rapidly moving toward a multiethnic future in which Asians, Hispanics, Caribbean islanders and many other immigrant groups compose a diverse and changing social mosaic that cannot be described by the old vocabulary of race relations in America. The race crisis of the 1960s has been subsumed by the tensions and opportunities of the new melting pot: the terms “black” and “white” no longer depict the American social reality.

It follows that much of the sputtering national debate over race is outdated, too. It is arguable, for example, that the very concept of race itself is a relic of our bitter past-a throwback to the days of slavery and Jim Crow, and a scientifically spurious rationale for keeping African-Americans down. The truth is, there is no such thing as “black.” Why, exactly, should the child of an interracial couple be identified only as “black”? Why not brown or tan–or white? Why do we persist in categorizing people as white, black, Asian and Hispanic? “Hispanic” is a meaningless term that lumps together a bewildering array of nationalities and ethnic groups. “White,” obviously, plays to our national obsession with skin color and refers to people of European descent. But it does not define a race, and the now unfashionable term “Caucasian” (or, more accurately, “Caucasoid”) in fact refers to a far-flung Indo-European ethnic group that includes millions of dark-skinned people. Like it or not, we Americans are a hyphenated, intermarrying and increasingly blended people-and we are likely to become both more diverse, and more nearly like each other, as time goes by.

Or take poverty and crime, two bitterly divisive subjects that many Americans believe to be race-related. Blacks have no monopoly on crime and poverty, and they never did. Why did we allow the debate on these issues to become intertwined with race? Liberals, too fearful of seeming to be racist, have ceded the crime issue to hard-liners and demagogues, a departure from courage and common sense that has allowed some politicians to turn legitimate fears about crime into retrograde anxieties about race (page 37).

The poverty debate, similarly, has in many respects become a coded discussion of race. Some liberals, fixated by the problem of historic discrimination, insist that poverty will not disappear until all barriers to opportunity are removed, a contention that is plainly undercut by the fact that about 40 percent of all African-American families can now be classified as middle class or upwardly mobile working class. Others think poverty is nothing more than the lack of money or jobs, a belief that is instantly refuted by the hard-won success of new immigrants like the Koreans. “I hear black people say Koreans and Vietnamese and other Asians have an easier time getting grants from the government,” says Edward Lee, 34, a Korean-born shop owner in Atlanta. “I know nobody who gets this free money … When my family came here we had nothing. We worked our ass off to get where we are.”

Like Lee, we have no real choice but to try to disentangle this infinitely sensitive, infinitely complicated subject-to separate, as best we can, the residual problems of race and ethnicity from the problems of crime, poverty and despair that so frustrate public policy and public discourse. That racism and race friction still exist is undeniable. But neither can any longer be taken as a legitimizing rationale for violence, crime or the endemic problems of the urban poor. Those problems-all of them-are the result partly of the increasing concentration of poverty in the nation’s cities and partly of an accelerating breakdown in the value structure that made America the least class-ridden and most optimistic society in the world. We all share the blame for this, as citizens, taxpayers and voters who supported and approved the spectacular lack of political leadership of the past two decades. But sharing the blame does not tell us how to proceed.

Finding the right answers will require us to suspend belief in fashionable myths and to think without stereotypes. We tend to believe, for example, that the nation’s cities now house a growing and increasingly violent underclass that is majority-black. We recite alarming statistics about black-on-black crime and the number of black children born out of wedlock. We accept the consensus verdict that low-income black Americans are reluctant to accept easily found (though admittedly low-paying) jobs. But hard facts about the urban underclass are maddeningly elusive. Estimates of its size vary from about 2 million to about 8 million persons; no one knows with precision how many of these people are African-American or whether the number of underclass blacks is rising or falling. What seems clear, if only because so many experts agree on it, is that black poverty and crime are somehow associated with a breakdown in societal norms. As a result, we now believe government must teach the values of work, thrift, marriage and personal responsibility to millions of resisting subjects.

We should look to ourselves first-for most Americans are deeply ambivalent about these homely virtues, and the poor receive a steady diet of mixed messages from society at large. We say, for example, that the rise in single-parent families is a key to hard-core poverty. But divorce and single-parenting are epidemic in American society, and no one wants to restrict the right of middle-class adults to break off failing marriages. We say inner-city kids should avoid the fast money that can be made by selling drugs, but we bombard them with advertising for clothes and shoes and high-priced trinkets. We crack down on street crime, while most of the crooks who looted the nation’s savings-and-loan industry go unpunished. Solving the enigma of urban poverty is an issue that should be high on the national agenda, and the new gospel of family values and personal responsibility is clearly part of the solution. But reviving the power of the American dream would be much easier if we practiced what we preach.