The color of our character

Two books about race in America ask how we can make good on the promise of equality for all

by Scott Stossel

AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE: ONE NATION INDIVISIBLE, by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom. Simon & Schuster, 639 pages, $30.

THE COLOR OF POLITICS: RACE, CLASS, AND THE MAINSPRINGS OF AMERICAN POLITICS, by Michael Goldfield. New Press, 400 pages, $19.95.

In his famous book The American Dilemma, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal observed that race was the quintessential American challenge. As he traveled around the country in the early 1940s, Myrdal was struck by how little the ideals of democracy and equality, so woven into most areas of American political and social life, were extended to African-Americans. Like de Tocqueville before him, Myrdal foresaw that for the American idea to truly be vindicated, the country would have to integrate its significant black population into mainstream political and social life. And, again like de Tocqueville, he was not terribly optimistic that this would happen.

Now, more than 50 years after Myrdal -- and more than 150 years after de Tocqueville -- two books take stock of how much racial progress we've made. Michael Goldfield's The Color of Politics: Race, Class, and the Mainsprings of American Politics argues that the central feature of American political history in this century has been the ongoing -- and largely unsuccessful -- attempt to work out the unresolved contradictions of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible points out that how we meet, or fail to meet, America's racial challenges will communicate a lot to the rest of the world about the meaning of democracy.

The Color of Politics is honorably motivated, unapologetically left-wing -- and a terrible muddle. Haphazard, repetitive, and at times clumsily written, the book is too densely theoretical to appeal to many nonacademics but too cursory to be of much use to academics. Goldfield, who is a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University, draws too many oversimplified parallels between the pre-Civil War era and today (likening black youth unemployment to slavery, for example, and the Rodney King beating to lynchings). And many of the explanations for white racism that Goldfield surveys are either over-familiar or unconvincing.

Yet there is some wheat amid the chaff. One of Goldfield's main arguments is that white racism has prevented the emergence of an enduring labor movement in the United States. As far back as the years before the Civil War, a potentially fruitful alliance between northern whites oppressed by early capitalism, on the one hand, and slaves and abolitionists, on the other, was derailed by strong anti-black animus among the white workers. Because they have too rarely reached out to African-Americans, unions have never attained the critical mass necessary to win significant victories for workers or to attain the political presence that European trade unions have enjoyed. Though this is not a new argument, Goldfield makes a convincing case for why labor movements have not been more successful in this country: in the United States, race always trumps class.

America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible is a monumental study by a husband-and-wife team (Stephan Thernstrom is a sometimes-controversial history professor at Harvard, Abigail is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute) with a specific political mission: discrediting affirmative action. Indeed, the sheer weight of evidence they amass makes this highly readable book the new lead battleship in the war on racial preferences. Marshaling an impressive array of well-footnoted facts, poll data, and census statistics (they even have encouraging figures about how often blacks and whites dine together in each other's houses), the Thernstroms demonstrate that blacks made considerably more economic and political progress before affirmative action became wide-spread, in the late '60s and early '70s, than they've made since.

The Thernstroms' main point is that race-based preferences are "at odds with" the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the major legislative achievement that made disparate treatment based on race illegal. Why, the Thernstroms ask, if it is illegal to give whites special treatment on the basis of race, is it not also wrong to give blacks special treatment on the same basis?

Moreover, the authors argue, such treatment assumes that blacks need extra help. This is a condescending attitude that many middle-class blacks naturally resent, and that tends to increase rather than diminish race-consciousness. When race becomes a major criterion in hiring and admissions decisions, its importance in society is magnified. The Thernstroms, unlike the authors and enthusiasts of The Bell Curve (which the Thernstroms explicitly disavow), draw courage from their conviction that blacks are not fundamentally inferior to whites, and can succeed without special treatment.

The authors correctly credit Southern blacks and white liberals in the Democratic Party for many of the achievements of the civil-rights movement. But in the late '60s, the Thernstroms believe, liberalism went awry. In the eyes of blue-collar workers, it had been hijacked by militant blacks and wealthy whites (as exemplified by "radical chic," Tom Wolfe's characterization of Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue party where Black Panther leader Huey Newton was feted by Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and other literary lights).

The Thernstroms blame these out-of-touch white elites, as well as the violence inspired by black radicals like Newton and Malcolm X, for the decline of liberalism and for the break-up of the "liberal-labor-Negro" coalition that had formed the post-New Deal foundation of the Democratic Party. Some on the far left will call this bourgeois racist cant, and from that perspective the charge may have merit. But there is little question that when black violence alienated white laborers, the electorate shifted and racial liberalism was reduced to a minority cause that no longer galvanized the party as a whole. Even Goldfield concedes the inherent fragility of the post-New Deal democratic coalition: by the 1950s, it rested on a tenuous racial alliance between the lynchers (the often-racist States' Rights Democrats of the former confederacy) and the lynchees (the blacks who had defected from the party of Lincoln with the advent of FDR's New Deal).

This book has some problems. The Thernstroms have a lot to say about what hasn't worked and what not to do, but they are dismayingly vague about what we should do. Their view seems to be that simply removing the bad things -- affirmative action and race-based preferences -- will lead to racial harmony and equality. Perhaps the authors are correct that if affirmative action were eradicated, racial divisions would stop deepening. But eliminating affirmative action without taking steps to address such problems as black poverty, family breakdown, and low educational achievement will do little to solve the nation's most intractable problems. This book is long on homily and data, but short on constructive domestic-policy specifics.

Think of some of our thorniest challenges: crime, poverty, immigration, education. All of these issues, at some level, are really about race. Or are they? For two such disparate books, American in Black and White and The Color of Politics agree on one important point: looking at these problems in explicitly racial terms is not the best way to approach them. As the Thernstroms put it, "poverty more than race is the problem." Maybe the key is to do as the Thernstroms advise -- stop focusing on race and start concentrating on those people who most need help (the poor, the infirm, the elderly, the poorly educated), but without reference to whether these people are white, black, yellow, or brown.

In his famous dissent in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race." The problem is that that's precisely what racism is: the acute taking account of race. Until we stop doing this, we won't be able to solve the American Dilemma.

Scott Stossel is managing editor of the American Prospect.