Michael H. Hart is by training an astrophysicist (he received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1972), but in recent years he has turned his interests to issues relating to race and nationality. An associate of Jared Taylor's American Renaissance group, Hart delivered a much-discussed paper at a 1996 American Renaissance conference that proposed the geographic partition of the United States along racial lines. In the following interview, Hart argues that the idea of partitioning the United States to accommodate the national aspirations of its differing racial groups is not as radical a proposal as it might at first appear. Blacks, whites, and Hispanics, Hart contends, constitute distinct nations in America, and despite all the rhetoric about integration and assimilation, members of each of these groups, he says, live essentially separate lives. The history of multiracial, multinational states is not encouraging, Hart contends, as one or more of the constituent groups inevitably feels stifled, either culturally or politically. Whether one looks to the example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of nineteenth-century Sweden, of colonial India, of Cyprus, of Yugoslavia, of Czechoslovakia, or of the former Soviet Union, the tendency for people living in multinational states, Hart insists, is eventually to seek an independent political existence. Members of diverse racial, linguistic, and religious groups rarely get along well in the same state, Hart observes, and in the case of blacks and Hispanics in the United States, the problem, he says, is greatly exacerbated because each group harbors a deeply ingrained and fully understandable sense of historical grievance.