The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Many American race riots in the half-century that followed, from Watts in 1965 through Los Angeles in 1992 to Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, would take the form of Harlem’s in 1964. All would have the half-political character best described by the historian Eric Hobsbawm in his work on medieval uprisings and Mediterranean “banditry.” To part of the country the riots were a social movement: a protest against the legitimacy of law enforcement that favored whites over blacks. To the rest of the country, the riots were just crime: a protest against nothing more than the rule of law. In the mid- to late 1960s, that was true especially for whites outside the South. For many, the riots were their introduction to blacks, and brought a change of perspective. It seemed to white people that the country had somehow pressed the wrong button and was now getting the “bad” civil rights movement instead of the “good” one they’d been promised—the burn-down-the-business-district version instead of the shake-hands-on-the-White-House-lawn version.