For decades America’s credentialed liberal elite thought of itself as uniquely immune to the appeal of racial bigotry. The rest of the country—the right-leaning suburbs, the rural places, the Archie Bunkers—were constantly prone, in the minds of America’s intellectuals and enlightened academics, to indulge in racial grievances. But not the university-educated, well-heeled elite. Not the exponents of mainstream-press conventional wisdom. Not the readers of the New Yorker and the Washington Post.
