David K. Shipler's A Country of Strangers
Chase, Edward T.
THE SITUATION of African Americans is so complex that one is tempted to remark that chaos theoreticians are needed to diagnose it. For instance, Professor John J. Dilulio of Princeton, echoing...
...Shipler's extensive treatment of affirmative action is sophisticated...
...The median net worth today for whites is $43,000, for blacks $3,700...
...that is, while he defines its importance, he also faithfully records the sentiment of dissenters...
...Legally sanctioned racial oppression of blacks was common in 1964, and pervasive degradation still sullies the lives of inner-city blacks...
...Shipler is a model of evenhandedness...
...More recently, Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom's America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible: Race in Modern America (which deliberately took dead aim at Hacker even in its title) decried affirmative action as unneeded, even a deterrent to progress...
...Proportionately, African Americans will be "impacted," to use the popular barbarism, on a major scale by these two new developments...
...We can only hope that a new social contract will emerge under the impact of these two factors, radically to affect society's lowest quintile in income and assets...
...We urge color-blind public policies," the Thernstroms write...
...Hacker, while profoundly pessimistic about the future of integration, nonetheless has remained a supporter of affirmative action...
...This conviction prompted me, as his book editor, to pressure Hacker to write Two Nations...
...He offers a more depressing view of the effort to foster interracial tolerance after the strife between blacks and Jews in Brooklyn's Crown Heights...
...Indeed, the annual personal income of U.S...
...As Hacker argues, and as Shipler points out in a more muted tone, affirmative action continues to combat those conditions...
...We have a simple rule of thumb: that which brings the races together is good...
...And although the percentage of black households below the official poverty line is double the percentage of all U.S...
...He is cautious...
...Shipler has interviewed innumerable ordinary Americans, black and white, to dissect the stereotypes that dominate Americans' attitudes about race...
...they carry America backward...
...they remind him of similarly unsuccessful trust-building projects between Jew and Arab while he was a correspondent in Israel...
...In writing one of the earliest pieces on affirmative action, in 1964, I referred to the "doctrine of compensation," which held that America must atttempt to make up for three hundred and fifty years of discrimination...
...Interestingly most big business firms look favorably upon affirmative action as a productive, DISSENT / Summer 1998 125 stabilizing practice, and the very best of our universities are adamant in pursuing diversity of student body and faculty...
...In irritation over the reluctance of university deans to provide a candid acknowledgment of "how colleges and graduate schools increase the number of African Americans in their ranks," Shipler asks: "But why not...
...For instance, Professor John J. Dilulio of Princeton, echoing data from Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom's America in Black and White, deems the plight of the approximately one-quarter of the total black population that subsists in the inner-city slums "morally unbearable," yet points out that in the past six yeah black home-ownership has been increasing at about twice the rate of white homeownership...
...And how unwise can it be, after failing to tap the resources of black America, to reach affirmatively past the sterile test scores into a rich human potential not easily measured...
...I had read the book he wrote in 1964 for the Fund for the Republic, in which he anticipated that technology would render blacks "unneeded, a society of losers...
...How shameful can it be, after generations of imprisonment in inferior educational dys-systems, to score lower on a standardized test...
...David Shipler's beautifully written new book, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, for all its acute sensitivity, its carefully nuanced generalizations, and its conscientious effort to range far and wide in documenting interracial perceptions and interactions, is not much help...
...the reader is surfeited with anecdotes, skillfully told but all too often reflective of commonplaces and "insights" now so familiar to even the thinly read that they add little to one's understanding...
...And in any event today's set-asides for minority employment and generalized outreach efforts do not entail mathematical quotas...
...Early in the going we know of substantial drop-offs from the welfare rolls and some concomitant efforts to provide day care facilities for working mothers and for transportation to suburban jobs...
...In the course of the book, Shipler gives us informative discussions of several experiments in racial understanding...
...In fact, Shipler shows, such an outcome is an extreme rarity...
...Shipler writes that "things are getting better and worse at the same time...
...If there is a bottom line to his long book, it is in his title, from the comment: "Everywhere I have looked, I have seen a country where blacks and whites are strangers to each other...
...Shipler is a careful reporter, but he breaks little new ground...
...In the end managing prejudice becomes a very personal task...
...My article, written for Commonweal, was reprinted by the National Urban League and given wide circulation—yet the New York Times denounced the compensation doctrine as "unAmerican...
...EDWARD T. CHASE, a contributor to Dissent in the 1960s, is the former editor-in-chief of New York Times Books and of The New American Library...
...The breaking sea change today, bound profoundly to affect our "country of strangers" but not mentioned in Shipler's book, is the revolution in welfare policy and in the health care system...
...As the Thernstroms' vast statistical research divulges, American society is never inert...
...It is only fair here that I should declare my unchanging conviction, the Thernstroms to the contrary, that Hacker and Shipler are correct on the evidence and arguments...
...For his liberal stance is manifest enough—he shows that a nation of two alienated societies is unacceptable...
...Besides being a haven for biracial couples, Oak Park has managed to enact effective antidiscrimination laws and to convince the real estate people that integration would best serve their long-term interest...
...Only at a few points does Shipler break loose from his soberly calibrated style...
...And on the health care front, while forty-one million people are still uninsured at any given time, the rising disenchantment with HMOs (or RHOs—"Rationed Health Organizations") may seed the ground for the ultimate establishment of a universal federal single-payer system like Medicare, the famously successful model...
...He here terms affirmative action "a badge of honor...
...Back in 1992, political scientist Andrew Hacker demonstrated the apartheid caste-system character of America's racially divided society in his best- selling Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal...
...A bit further on, he adds: "Affirmative action has surely smoothed the path of upwardly mobile blacks into the middle class . . . but it has also left behind a massive, impoverished class of African Americans trapped in urban neighborhoods of crime and decay" Despite its many virtues, the book finally becomes wearisome...
...The term "quota" still carries a stigma, evoking the notion of a process whereby unqualified minorities are shoehorned into jobs denied better qualified whites...
...Because American society is still so deeply marked by racial inequality, affirmative action dominates our agenda of domestic issues...
...that which divides us is bad...
...For example, he pro124 DISSENT / Summer 1998 vides a heartening analysis of Oak Park, the deliberately integrated, oasislike Illinois town that is bordered on two sides by Chicago's black slums...
...But any note of optimism that might be drawn from this last statistic should be qualified by the distinction, made by David Shipler in his new book, that the crucial economic disparity between the races is not the gap in income but in the gap in family net worth—"the savings and property that represent a cumulative history spanning generations...
...Affirmative action, "preferential hiring," outreach for diversity, and set-asides cannot rescue Hacker's bottomcaste "losers," but some form of guaranteed make-work a la the old WPA, devices to provide what William Julius Wilson deems the sine qua non, work, will eventuate to replace the old welfare systems and to rescue those still ineligible for Medicaid...
...The book is well worth reading, but it is finally undermined by its own caution...
...126 DISSENT / Summer 1998...
...His book is admirably concrete, with the explicitness that good reportage provides...
...How unfair can it be, after three hundred years of white advantage, to spend thirty years redressing the imbalance...
...Race-conscious policies make for more race-consciousness...
...The very conditions affecting race that Shipler so subtly and sensitively describes contain the dynamics of social change...
...He describes these efforts as failures...
...Practically every step forward is accompanied by a subtle erosion of the ground beneath...
...This will come as no surprise to readers of his earlier books on Vietnam, Russia, and Israel...
...pERHAPS THE absence of remedial policies was Shipler's deliberate strategy...
...Yet it can be facilitated by institutional mechanisms," he writes...
...But even so, the author's absence of prescriptions for change leaves an unwelcome hollow feeling...
...households, the 28.4 percent figure is nevertheless the lowest since statistics were first kept, in 1955...
...Racially America is torn by the crosscurrents of progress and decay...
...blacks has increased steadily since 1980...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
