1973 SPECIAL REPORT: "COLOR AND CULTURE"

Описание: The lines of race and class and culture ruptured American life throughout the 1970s. Americans grew disenchanted with the pace of social change: it was insufficient, some said; it was excessive, said others. The idealism of the 1960s died. Alienation took its place.

As the monolith of American culture shattered—a monolith pilloried in the fifties and sixties as exclusively white, male-dominated, conservative, and stifling—the culture seemed to fracture and Americans retreated into tribal subcultures. Mass culture became segmented. Marketers targeted particular products to ever smaller pieces of the population, including previously neglected groups such as African Americans, who, despite continuing inequality, acquired more disposable income. Subcultures often revolved around certain musical styles, whether pop, disco, hard rock, punk rock, country, or hip-hop. Styles of dress and physical appearance likewise aligned with cultures of choice.


If the popular rock acts of the sixties appealed to a new counterculture, the seventies witnessed the resurgence of cultural forms that appealed to a white working class confronting the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. Country hits such as Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” evoked simpler times and places where people “still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse” and they “don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy like the hippies out in San Francisco.” A popular television sitcom, All in the Family, became an unexpected hit among “middle America” The main character Archie Bunker was designed to mock reactionary middle-aged white men. “Isn’t anyone interested in upholding standards?” he lamented in an episode dealing with housing integration. “Our world is coming crumbling down. The coons are coming!”