Christopher Caldwell Speaks With Forked Tongue

A really bad article recently appeared on Vox. It is titled "Christopher Caldwell’s big idea: The civil rights revolution was a mistake." Christopher Caldwell is better known for writing about the supposed dangers of Moslem immigration to Europe, which shows where he's coming from. The peace is Vox is cast in the form of a debate with Sean Illing, concerns Caldwell's latest book "The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties." Caldwell's point is that because of the civil rights movement White Americans “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Let's take this sentence apart. First, white people did not build America by itself. It was also built by African-Americans, much of the time as slaves. The building of America also required lots of labor from Hispanic and Asian immigrants. Second, in what way are Whites at the "bottom" of any racial hierarchy? The fact that working class whites saw their situation deteriorate after the 1960s was caused by economic changes that had nothing to do with the civil rights movement and the drive for social equality.

Caldwell tries to hide his ethnocentric stance by claiming "This book is in no way a defense of Jim Crow or segregation or anything like that." In reality, we always had a system of racial preferences, for Whites, that dated all the way back to the colonial era. One of the big tricks of racists is to deny the problem of race and to claim that they are the victims of racism. Caldwell's most telling remark comes toward the end of the article
"I do not think the Trump movement or the Republican Party more generally is a racist movement." For Caldwell to make a statement like that suggests he is either obtuse or deceptive.