The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Most Americans, liberal as well as conservative, saw the race problem as something distant. It had to do only, or mainly, with the exotic culture of the South, where segregation was legal. The problem was almost one of foreign policy. The sociologist of race Alan David Freeman wrote of how, sitting in an all-white fifth-grade classroom in New York City in 1954, he had found out about the Brown decision: “I can recall distinctly the response of my own naïvely liberal consciousness . . . The Law is now going to make those bad Southerners behave.” As white people in the northern and western states saw it, racial harmony had arrived long ago. In August 1962, with the school year about to begin, 83 percent of Americans told Gallup that the blacks in their community had “the same opportunities as white children to get a good education.” Gallup kept asking this question as the 1960s wore on and white Americans’ views changed little. At the end of the 1967–68 school year, 70 percent told pollsters that blacks in their community were treated “the same as whites” and only 20 percent that they were treated not very well or badly. Outside the South, white people seemed to believe it would be a simple matter to get rid of segregation, as if a system of racial oppression so intricate and ingenious that it had taken three-and-a-half centuries to devise could be dismantled overnight—by sheer open-minded niceness, at no price in rights to anyone. The country could solve a problem of instit...