Bill's Comments

Today in WSJ Opinion Journal comes this powerful little essay on the 50th anniversary of the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Fifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed--in a single day--1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas's capital city.

...

On this 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's troop deployment, the significance of the Little Rock crisis--its place in history--is much clearer. I believe it was the beginning of a profoundly different America.

...

But the deeper historical importance of the Little Rock crisis follows from the simple fact that it was televised.

...

So Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative--that they were not racist--in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.

...

But Americans have not been particularly good at integrating this kind of accountability. We are a nation with a powerful investment in the idea of our own fundamental innocence.

...thus, redemption became more and more entrenched as a national mandate.

By the mid-1960s this mandate had already given us a new illiberal liberalism--a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom.

Read the whole thing.

......the cause of the politically correct suppression of difference today.