Two Nations/Race
Wycliff, Don
BOOKS Can we all get along? TWO NATIONS Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal Andrew Hacker Charles Scribner's Sons, $24.95, 257 pp. RACE How Blacks and Whites Think & Feel about the...
...Many African-Americans prefer to live principally among AfricanAmericans—not because they dislike whites, but because they prefer the company and culture of blacks...
...young and old...
...Like it or not, whites have more margin for error and foolish behavior than do blacks...
...Unfortunately, what he captured best was the sense of victimization and insult that can never be absent from an AfricanAmerican's consciousness...
...On the strength of what has happened over the last five days—I write on the Sunday following the Rodney King beating verdicts—Hacker's pessimism seems more justified than Terkel's hope...
...The sociological evidence daily becomes more convincing that they have a rougher go of it in both childhood and adulthood...
...This is not the place," he writes, "to debate whether optimal family life requires the full-time presence of two parents bound by a legal marriage...
...That's very much the way I felt after reading Andrew Hacker's Two Nations...
...RACE How Blacks and Whites Think & Feel about the American Obsession Studs Terkel The New Press, $24.95, 403 pp...
...The last time I saw this fellow was about a year after I graduated from college, two years after he had graduated...
...And what he was into then was being black...
...It would be interesting to know how the events in Los Angeles—the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King and the subsequent riots—have affected his estimate of things...
...He holds out little hope that whites will answer that question in a way that would lead to bridging of what he calls a "huge racial chasm...
...As Shelby Steele pointed out in The Content of Our Character, solutions that grow out of white guilt generally are designed to assuage the guilt, not necessarily to solve blacks' problems...
...This is not the only hard punch that Hacker slips...
...Hacker has been assailed in a number of places for a destructive "ultraliberalism...
...I do so, in part, because it comes from a white writer and not a black one...
...He was still trying out different ways of life...
...What can and should be stressed is that millions of American children have grown up in homes with a single parent, almost always their mother...
...What he seems to miss or not fully appreciate, are those elements of black consciousness that allow most African-Americans to surmount racist circumstances, or at least not surrender to and let themselves be defined by white people's categories...
...It is, he says, a question for white Americans: "Is it right to impose on members of an entire race a lesser start in life, and then to expect from them a degree of resolution that has never been demanded from your race...
...another year he was an antiwar militant...
...He was accompanied by a young black woman whom he was dating at the time...
...On the other hand, Hacker nowhere shows a recognition that black residential "segregation" is not solely the result of whites' choices...
...It's not fair, but it's the fact with which we must deal...
...more kindly voices than hateful ones...
...He deals with a whole range of desperate statistical indicators of black social disarray by comparing black and white rates (of teen-age pregnancy, for example) over time...
...And yet, there was something that didn't quite ring true, something not quite authentic...
...In many respects, he did as fine a job as any white writer I have ever read of getting inside the heads of black people...
...This is risky business...
...His dress, his manner, his speech were all uncannily "black"—more so, in fact, than mine have ever been...
...We met on a street in South Bend...
...For Hacker, this fact poses the central moral question of America's persistent dilemma...
...And Rodney King's poignant question hangs in the air: "Can we all get along...
...No matter what your talents or attainments, you are seen as infecting a neighborhood simply because of your race...
...The conclusion—that the rates for both groups have been rising and that the higher black rates have remained roughly the same as multiples of the white rates—is small comfort when, for example, more than half of all black children are being reared in poverty...
...In all too typical liberal fashion, Hacker is unwilling to acknowledge the havoc wrought in Commonweal 5 June 1992: 21 poor black communities by the epidemic of single-parenthood and male absence...
...black, white, Hispanic, Asian...
...If you are black, these white reactions brand you as a carrier of contaminations...
...This as if blame were the point...
...They could hardly have made him more pessimistic...
...And among blacks, where two-thirds of all births in recent years have been out of wedlock, it's an especially rough go...
...More likely than not, they did for Studs Terkel...
...Hacker is frankly pessimistic about American race relations...
...Like all of us in those days, he was involved both in self-discovery and self-creation, trying out different lifestyles and personae...
...That said, Hacker's "ultraliberalism" does, nevertheless, affect his analysis for the worse...
...Hacker thus begs the question of how well those children have grown up, in comparison with their counterparts in two-parent families...
...It long ago ceased to be productive for blacks to scold whites about racism, in part because it long ago became apparent that there is a large element of hypocrisy in such behavior...
...How hopeful the reader feels after reading them will depend on how fairly one supposes they represent the American generality...
...This indictment apparently stems from his heavy emphasis on white racism as the cause of the plight of blacks...
...The point is responsibility, and American citizenship entails sharing not just in the society's benefits, but also in its debts and liabilities...
...One year he was deep into Christianity and the spiritual life...
...This is the ultimate insult of segregation...
...Terkel's latest volume is not oral history, at which he has become a master, but oral sociology...
...22: 5 June 1992 Commonweal...
...In this connection, I think in particular of the comments of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who declared that immigrants like his father were in no way to blame for evils committed under slavery...
...Nevertheless, I welcome Hacker's emphasis...
...I welcome it also because it is a longneeded counter to some of the patently absurd efforts of recent years to exculpate whites entirely, to declare them not only guiltless, but not responsible...
...liberal and not so liberal—and transcribed what they had to say on the issue of race...
...One wonders whether, paradoxically, they might have provoked some hope...
...He put his tape recorder in front of nearly one hundred mouths— male and female...
...Where it gets in the way is in his discussion of black responsibility or, rather, his lack of such discussion...
...Don Wycliff Among the friends that I made in college in the late 1960s was an Italian-American fellow from a workingclass family in a medium-sized city in the Northeast...
...Old optimist that he is, Terkel has managed to find more hopeful voices than despairing ones...
...more decent voices than mean-spirited ones...
...He was driving by, caught sight of me, and stopped...
...Consider, for example, this shrewd observation of Hacker made in the course of discussing residential segregation: "For a white family to be seen as living in a mixed—or changing—neighborhood can be construed as a symptom of surrender, indeed as evidence that they are on a downward spiral...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
