poverty and ethnic prejudice. "These bilingual signs drive me crazy," said a resident of Canarsie. "The old Jews and Italians didn't have their language on signs." Even those who supported the civil rights movement rejected the double standard of racial justice summed up by McGeorge Bundy, head of the Ford Foundation, in 1977: "To get past racism, we must ... take account of race." Nor were they impressed with Justice Thurgood Marshall's argument in the Bakke case, two years later, to the effect that American racism had been "so pervasive" that nobody, "regardless of wealth or position," had escaped its impact. This statement implied that everyone would have to share the burden of its eradication, but the burden fell in fact on those who could least afford to bear it. The case for "race-conscious programs," as Justice William Brennan approvingly called them, might have carried moral weight if the chief proponents of compensatory programs had not so easily escaped their consequences. If the effects of racial discrimination pervaded American society, the effects of reverse discrimination turned out to be highly selective.

Liberals' claim to stand on high moral ground, in the bitter controversies over busing and affirmative action that exploded in the late sixties and early seventies, was suspect from the start. It was not just a question of principle, however, that divided liberals from their former supporters. Workers experienced liberal policies as an invasion of their neighborhoods. In Brooklyn, Jews had retreated from Brownsville, East New York, and Flatbush in the face of successive waves of black migration, only to find themselves confronted in 1972 with a court order designed to achieve racial balance in the Canarsie schools. High mortgage costs and loyalty to Canarsie precluded a further retreat to the suburbs. "The white middle class in Canarsie is up against the ... wall," one man said: "there's no place to retreat." "They've ruined Brownsville," said another, "but I won't let them ruin Canarsie.... The liberals and the press look down on hardhats like me, but we've invested everything we have in this house and neighborhood." The president of the Jewish Community Council, defending a boycott of schools integrated under court order, cried, "We have built the swamps of Canarsie into a beautiful community, and no one is going to take it away from us."

In Charlestown, Massachusetts, the conflict over busing was preceded by protracted conflicts over urban renewal. Here the immediate threat

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