On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by policeman Darren Wilson after a confrontation in a housing project in Ferguson, Missouri, a fast-changing but relatively well integrated town in St. Louis County. The incident sparked three waves of riots, the first one lasting two weeks, the second one coming three months later when a grand jury chose not to indict Wilson. There was additional unrest on the first anniversary of the shooting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by policeman Darren Wilson after a confrontation in a housing project in Ferguson, Missouri, a fast-changing but relatively well integrated town in St. Louis County. The incident sparked three waves of riots, the first one lasting two weeks, the second one coming three months later when a grand jury chose not to indict Wilson. There was additional unrest on the first anniversary of the shooting. The controversy was, in hindsight, unwarranted. According to an investigation into Wilson\u2019s conduct by the civil rights division of the Obama administration\u2019s Justice Department, the 289-pound Brown, high on THC and accompanied by his friend Dorian Johnson, had stolen several boxes of cigarillos from an Indian-owned variety store, manhandling the diminutive owner when he protested. The incident was captured on video. When Wilson, making his rounds in a squad car, encountered the pair a few moments later, Brown moved to the driver\u2019s window, blocking Wilson\u2019s exit, punched him in the face, reached into the car, and got a hand on Wilson\u2019s gun. Wilson fired a shot into Brown\u2019s hand. He pursued Brown when he ran and shot Brown only when Brown turned and charged him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The controversy was, in hindsight, unwarranted. According to an investigation into Wilson\u2019s conduct by the civil rights division of the Obama administration\u2019s Justice Department, the 289-pound Brown, high on THC and accompanied by his friend Dorian Johnson, had stolen several boxes of cigarillos from an Indian-owned variety store, manhandling the diminutive owner when he protested. The incident was captured on video. When Wilson, making his rounds in a squad car, encountered the pair a few moments later, Brown moved to the driver\u2019s window, blocking Wilson\u2019s exit, punched him in the face, reached into the car, and got a hand on Wilson\u2019s gun. Wilson fired a shot into Brown\u2019s hand. He pursued Brown when he ran and shot Brown only when Brown turned and charged him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Justice Department\u2019s novel-length report, full of lab work, cell phone records, and dozens of interviews, showed that there was no case for indicting Wilson for any kind of police misconduct. Brown\u2019s DNA was found on Wilson\u2019s collar, shirt, and pants. Gunpowder soot was found on Brown\u2019s hand, and evidence of change in the skin from heat discharge was \u201cconsistent with Brown\u2019s hand being on the barrel of the gun.\u201d On detail after detail, in multiple interrogations, Wilson\u2019s account matched that of the material evidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A mythological account spread nonetheless. Brown, it was said, had been raising his hands to surrender. He had been saying \u201cHands up, don\u2019t shoot!\u201d Most, perhaps all, of these stories had their beginnings in tales that Brown\u2019s accomplice Johnson (known as Witness 101 in the civil rights investigation) had told in the aftermath of the shootings. Johnson claimed that Wilson had shot Brown in the back and then killed him with a volley of shots as he stood with his hands up, pleading that he was unarmed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In November, days after the grand jury\u2019s decision not to indict Wilson and the riots that followed, black players on the St. Louis Rams took the field for a Sunday-night football game with their arms raised in a hands-up-don\u2019t-shoot pose. Ta-Nehisi Coates raged in a short book that would become a number-one bestseller about the difficulty of telling his son why \u201cthe killer of Mike Brown would go unpunished.\u201d The country\u2019s official culture was now squarely on the side of the protests, even if any neutral reading of the evidence showed that Brown\u2019s killer, Wilson, should have gone unpunished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Yale and other outposts of the American credentialocracy now belonged to her and to \u201cactivists\u201d like her. The Christakises canceled their spring courses, and resigned their Silliman positions shortly thereafter. Next Yale, which described itself as \u201can alliance of Yale students of color and our allies,\u201d had demanded the Christakises\u2019 resignation, the installation of a bias-reporting system, the renaming of three of Yale\u2019s colleges after non-whites, more non-white psychologists, the institution of \u201cracial competence and respect training,\u201d and millions for ethnic studies programs. Yale met most of their demands and added $50 million to hire professors \u201cwho would enrich diversity.\u201d Brown University, after a similar uprising, earmarked $100 million to create a \u201cmore just and inclusive campus.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The physicist Max Planck once wrote, \u201cA new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.\u201d Even radical movements that have appeared to fail often go on wreaking institutional change slowly and quietly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Yale may have been an \u201cintellectual space\u201d under the old constitution. Under the new one, how could it be? Once Yale changed its rules to recruit minority students through affirmative action, as the law required it to, upholding purely meritocratic standards (as Kimball urged) would have been a contradiction in terms. Following rules of decorum (in which the Christakises placed so much faith) was only a roundabout route to the same disappointment. An institution could claim to be upholding its old standards\u2014Yale did\u2014but it could not actually uphold them. It had taken on political responsibilities that overrode its educational ones. The protesters were wise to this. Their incredulity at the Christakises\u2019 failure to \u201cunderstand\u201d the real terms of their service at Yale was surely unfeigned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The faster racism and privilege are dismantled, the greater the psychological need to point to racism and privilege.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
On American and British campuses, so-called no-platforming\u2014the move to \u201cdeny fascists, organized racists and other haters the freedom to spread their poison\u201d\u2014was on the rise. Only an eighth of Americans over the age of 70 believed that \u201cgovernment should be able to prevent statements that are offensive to minority groups.\u201d But a quarter of Americans aged 35 to 70 believed it, and fully 40 percent of adults under 35 did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
An idea of Americans as something other than a people had begun to take hold of the political class: Ours was a \u201ccreedal\u201d nation, a country united not by race or by history but by belief in certain ideas. This sounds like open-mindedness, but if not managed carefully, it can turn into the opposite. A country you can join by simply changing your mind is a country you can fall out of by doing the same. On literally dozens of occasions as president, Barack Obama described highly specific political opinions, always those of his own party, as expressing \u201cwho we are\u201d as Americans. Not since the McCarthy era had Americans been told that to disagree with the authorities was to forfeit one\u2019s membership in the American nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, as we have noted, a legislative repeal of the First Amendment\u2019s implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding. Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These highlights are from the Kindle version of The Age […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15162,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\n
"The Age of Entitlement" Book Highlights<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n