the assassination, beginning with the first challenges to the Warren Report— Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (1966); Richard H. Popkin, The Second Oswald (1966); Edward Jay Epstein, Inquest (1966)— and continuing through Jean Davison, Oswald's Game (1983), the most reliable, I think, is Michael L. Kurtz, Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian's Perspective (1982).

Steven Roberts argued that the "deepest issue" in the so-called white backlash was "racial"; his report (New York Times, 2 March 1980) is quoted in Robert A. Dentler and Marvin B. Scott, Schools on Trial: An Inside Account of the Boston Desegregation Case (1981). The idea that "racism" explains all that anyone needs to know about the rise of the new right is so pervasive that it would be pointless to accumulate citations to this effect. It is more important to understand how loose talk of racism blunts our sensibility and deforms our understanding. As Mark Crispin Miller notes, "The word 'racism' ought to be as complex as the tangled thing which it denotes," instead of which it is increasingly "used as a blunt instrument, cutting conversations short and making people circumspect." Thus an NBC documentary, produced in 1981, "America: Black and White," left the impression, in Miller's words, that "if it weren't for 'racism,'... our way of life could contain all differences, by painlessly erasing them." NBC rendered white resistance to open housing and affirmative action incomprehensible by depicting blacks exclusively as upper-middle-class, soft-spoken people well launched on the path of upward mobility and thwarted only by irrational white prejudice. Its report paid no attention (except as manifestations of "racism") to the fear of drugs, crime, and violence evoked by the relentless spread of the ghetto. It left the impression that black people are "incapable of the sort of resentment that can turn violent." According to Miller, this stereotype of black innocence and victimization is almost as dehumanizing as the racist stereotypes it tries to correct. His perceptive examination of these matters originally appeared in the New Republic, 28 Oct. 1981, 27-31, and is reprinted in his Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988). For evidence that blacks are themselves divided on busing and affirmative action, see Louis Henri Bolce III and Susan H. Gray, "Blacks, Whites, and 'Race Politics,' " Public Interest 54 (winter 1979): 61-75.

Michael Miles attributed the white backlash not only to racism but to fear of the "cultural revolution" in The Radical Probe (1971). For other interpretations of this kind, see Loren Baritz, The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class (1989); Peter Clecak, America's Search for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the Sixties and Seventies (1983); and Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The "New Right" and the Politics of Resentment (1980).

The impression of a growing middle class is called into question by Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974); Andrew Levison, The Working-Class Majority (1974); Richard Parker, The Myth of the Middle Class (1972); Henry M. Levin

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