The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Truth was among the first casualties of the affirmative action regime. At the simplest level the term “affirmative action” meant discarding prevailing notions of neutrality in order to redistribute educational and employment chances on the basis of race. The idea that it could be a permanent solution to the problem of racial prejudice required doublethink. “Affirmative action requires the use of race as a socially significant category of perception and representation,” as Kimberlé Crenshaw and her colleagues put it, “but the deepest elements of mainstream civil rights ideology had come to identify such race-consciousness as racism itself.” Just half a decade into the civil rights revolution, America had something it had never had at the federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved: an explicit system of racial preference.