The underclass, disproportionately black, is plagued by social pathologies so profound that many Americans have simply given up on it. After the failure of myriad reform schemes, white Americans are tempted to view the existence of the underclass as a condition to be endured rather than a problem to be solved. An America made up of white oppressors and black victims is for them a matter of history, not current reality. Middle-class blacks, meanwhile, for all the economic and political improvements they have made, appear no less resentful and suspicious of whites than they were before the civil rights revolution began. A great many of them continue to view America as a fundamentally racist society and they are skeptical, to put it mildly, of white protestations of good intentions.
Race is still, in other words, the great American dilemma.
That dilemma has radically changed shape in the past half century and many things have changed for the better. But the dream of a new order of racial concord that those of us, black and white, who participated in the original March on Washington dared to entertain seems, in retrospect, naive and utopian. We didn't need the Simpson trial to remind us of that. The bitter controversies over Charles Murray and Mark Herrnstein's The Bell Curve and, more recently, Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism have seemed not so much the beginning, however awkward, of a necessary dialogue as the end of any civil conversation at all. In the mid- 1980s the Post began a vigorous program of affirmative action.