Probing the Racial Divide

...Terence says Spike Lee's movies, which white critics often say bounce from vaguely connected scene to scene, reflect the nonlinear African-American sensibility of jazz," Harrington writes...

...Like a car radio crackling between strong signals, it contains a lot of static...

...Crossings is also hampered by a lack of focus, embodying the same tedium that characterizes any long road trip...

...Unfortunately, the author rarely allows them to develop from types into fully rounded people...

...Reviewed by Linda Kulman Free-lance writer It seems that at least once a decade a journalist travels across the United States much like Alexis de Tocqueville did in 1831 to see what may have changed since the Frenchman established various truths about the fledgling democracy...

...it's black people killing black people all across the country...

...But enough, enough...

...is directly correlated with that local community's attitudeon race...

...Although Crossings nods at John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, the 1962 chronicle of a white man darkening his skin to live as a black in the Jim Crow South, Harrington balks at the lessons the earlier book should have taught him...

...To understand more fully what his children were up against, Harrington set out to gather oral histories as a means of gauging the role that skin color has played in determining the outlook and fortunes of people who are black...

...The unusually tense relationship between whites and blacks in Pulaski is left only half examined...

...Richmond's fortunes have turned sour since he helped start that epochal sit-in movement...

...I want the story of my journey to be less like a social scientist's analysis and more like an artist's collage...

...But Harrington's commitment to his wife and his concern for his children in reality carry him across the color line every day...

...his son, Matthew, and his daughter, Kyle, are racially mixed...

...But in the present volume—no doubt because of his intensely personal stake in the story—he is square in the foreground, taking up quite a lot of space...

...Once in the store, he counts 19 white employees to a single black one...

...In Greensboro, for example, he marks time talking with an anonymous elderly black man while waiting to meet David Richmond, one of the three young blacks who sat down at the lunch counter at the local F.W...

...Finally he begins to step back from his subjects, letting their stories unfold organically...

...Everyone around him gets relegated to a bit part...

...Yet Harrington, a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine, was animated by more than intellectual curiosity in embarking on a 25,000-mile trek to measure how far the nation has come in eliminating inequality between the races...

...And even as he talks to this solitary black woman, attempting to make her more than a mere statistic in his head count, he betrays an urge to move on...

...One of his best interviews is with filmmaker Spike Lee...

...Walt Harrington, the latest in the series, takes as his special terrain race relations, originally described by Tocqueville in ominous tones: "If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States: that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality, but to the inequality of the condition...

...It all started, he recalls, with a trip to his dentist...

...Sitting in the chair, unable to speak, he listens to a second dentist tell a racist joke...

...Instead, having observed only a handful of black store clerks as he wanders through town, he decides to test his "little known Wal-Mart Racism Indicator Theory": namely, that "the percentage of black workers at any local Wal-Mart...

...I wonder how many whites would have been so strong for so long in the face of so many faded dreams...

...It's not shocking that so many African-Americans have given up on America," he reflects...

...The author also has a provocative dialogue with jazz musician Terence Blanchard, who comments on how the works of black artists, including Lee, suggest a culturally distinctive way of storytelling...

...The conversational format is not new to Harrington...

...Other destinations were included more for personal reasons—like Crete, Illinois, where the author attended high school, and Houston, Texas, the current home of a black campus radical from his college days who once tagged him a bigot...

...Early on, spurred perhaps by his father-in-law's comment that "somewhere back in nearly every black person's past is a little Southern farm," Harrington seeks out a 70-year-old sharecropper named Joe Green in Oxford, North Carolina...

...For all this book's shortcomings, it does succeed in conveying the author's struggle with his own racial bias, and a sense of self-discovery...

...His wife, Keran, is black...

...Woolworth 33 years ago...

...Other chapters in the book's first section, "Into the South," are similarly flawed...

...Thus it is especially disappointing that his meandering journey and rather self-evident conclusions end up adding so little to this nation's debate on race...

...I mean, whites aren't killing black people...

...Harrington does not get on firm ground until he crosses the Mason-Dixon line...

...This weakness in the book is apparent from the author's very first stop, at the home of his wife's family in Glasgow, Kentucky...

...Oh, these poor people, we like to think as we wallow in our guilt and easy sympathy...

...but since Harrington does not discriminate between the importance of a passerby and that of a historical figure, the story of the civil rights hero gets lost...

...His parents-in-law, two of their sons, the extended family of cousins, aunts, and great-aunts, the hunting companions of the father-in-law?all are limited to cameo appearances, crowded onto a stage against the backdrop of the rural South...

...We gotta stop worrying about what white people think," Lee tells him...

...Harrington, however, is not much interested in exploring that angle...

...I want to be the blind man who touches the whole elephant," he writes...

...They seem to have been chosen more for what they represented than who they were...

...The list of people he talked to could have come out of a social studies primer: a death-row attorney in Alabama, a New York City jazz musician, a social worker outside Washington, D.C., a gang member in South Central Los Angeles...

...We won't be able to turn anything around if we don't address these things...

...Although he has heard countless such quips, the off-color story echoes disturbingly in his own life...

...He laments that some people simply will not answer him directly about how it feels to grow up black...

...And his presence interferes...

...The author lets conversations ramble out of control, interjecting his own interview questions liberally and using direct quotes when he should paraphrase...

...The town is the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of an annual Klan rally...

...His approach was unabashedly impressionistic...

...What's shocking is that so many haven't, that so many still believe they can have their tum and are willing to prove they deserve it...

...The black people I've met aren't gloomy...

...Their colorful quotes and anecdotes pile up on one an-other, revealing little...

...Harrington does not appear to realize how tough it is both to direct successfully and to play the lead...

...Pulaski, Tennessee, is rendered just as toneless...

...Having located him, he chooses to attend Green's family reunion—whereupon the putative subject disappears into a confusing tangle of voices...

...He anguishes over the possibility that the ultimate truth will always elude him because he is white...

...His first book, American Profiles: Somebodies and Nobodies Who Matter (1992), was a collection of interviews in which the reporter remained unobtrusively in the background...

...I fear that I'm feeling the sentiment that has always kept right-minded white people from really understanding African-Americans...

...The route Harrington took comprised several cities and towns that made their mark in the struggle for racial equality, such as Greensboro, North Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama...

...He is loath to leave out anything gathered in his wide net...

...I mention that the flow of conversation in Spike's movies reminds me of those I hear among my father-in-law and his friends—not straight ahead, but circular conversations that have complicated subtexts and reprises, a kind of 'in concert' language...