The verdict is in. The work continues. Updated April 21, 2021, 11:41 a.m. Email to a Friend Think back to 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. During that time, Buckleyâs major claim was that Black Americans were making too much of their plight and that the larger society (i.e., white America) was an easy and convenient target, and that furthermore, everyone experiences a measure of injustice. Baldwin fired back and displayed with great mastery the convenient chimera that white America had constructed to shield itself and to obscure both the oppression and hypocrisy responsible for its success and what that success meant for the Black American status quo. The Moynihan Report of that same year was a prime example of that chimera.