The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

A judicious analyst would have borne in mind that the country now had over 300 million people, and, firearms being legal, more than a third of them had guns in their homes. Diversity, whatever its other effects, pushed together people of diverse folkways. Tens of millions of people living in the United States were new to the country’s laws. Under the circumstances, the country was policed well, and with an impressive fairness. It had become hard to say that publicly, though. A disproportionate number of the most serious offenses continued to be committed by blacks. In 2009, blacks, who made up 13 percent of the population, accounted for almost half the arrests (49.2 percent) for murder and more than half (55.5 percent) for robberies. The traditional explanation was that blacks commit about half of those crimes. But, applied to racial disparities, traditional explanations were coming into disrepute. Alan David Freeman’s “victims’ perspective” had triumphed here, too, and with it the idea that any disparity was the sign of an injustice. Like water poured into the corner of a tilted ice-cube tray, this idea had gradually tumbled into one compartment of American life after another, starting with public facilities and moving on through hiring to education.