The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

This was not the glorious role white Americans had envisioned for themselves when they came bearing what they saw as the gift of civil rights in 1964. And to look at the evidence from the Bakke opinion, the case that they were systematically denying opportunities to black people seemed weak. A white man rejected with scores in the 97th percentile while minorities got admitted with scores in the 18th! The range of things that had to be explained away was broadening considerably. It would have been futile to admit blacks to college, and to prestigious jobs, on easier terms than whites if people were free to say that, for instance, the degree of a black woman admitted to Princeton in the Bakke era did not measure the same things as the degrees of her white classmates, impressive though that woman might be on her own terms. Or if people were free to ask why it was that immigrants who had spent their early-childhood years hunted by the Khmer Rouge were outperforming American blacks in schools.