Shifting the Blame: Racial Ideology and Politics in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Abstract

In the post-civil rights era, critics on the right have indicted liberal social policies for exacerbating the very problems of racism and poverty they purport to alleviate. In vastly distinct ways, the far right and neoconservatism have attempted to reshape popular conceptions and scholarly wisdom about race and racial equality. They have targeted the liberal state of the 1960s and 1970s as the cause of a new racially unjust order and fueled the resentment of many white Americans to liberal social policy. Despite the ascendancy of the far right and neoconservatism in the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush years have not witnessed the consolidation of a new "common sense" with respect to race and racial policy. In the wake of the riots in Los Angeles and other cities, an opening for a renewed debate is apparent.