The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

It is worth again recalling Alan David Freeman’s distinction between the “perpetrator” perspective on civil rights (which seeks only to eliminate bias, and will leave things alone when bias cannot be proved) and the “victim” perspective (which assumes bias, and seeks to eliminate the inequality associated with it). The perpetrator way is punctilious and slow-moving; the victim way dramatic and disruptive. For half a century the victim perspective had been imposed by courts, backed with the threat of criminal and civil penalties. Eventually people lost the ability to tell the difference between inequality and racial discrimination. In almost all of the media coverage of the COMPAS controversy, the two terms were used as synonyms. Indeed, it was evidence of bad faith to assert that an inequality might ever result from something other than discrimination.