Testing the Margins of Hope

...It would be inappropriate to end this review without indicating my own "bias:" As a proverbial "white male" (albeit liberal) scourge of racial groupthink, I may underestimate the value of Cose's conflicted, equivocal reflections as icebreakers for blacks who would reject my own reflections out of hand...

...That may explain why he is similarly unnerved by the Supreme Court's recent invalidations of several electoral districts that were explicitly drawn to give blacks something like proportional racial representation in Congress and state legislatures...

...This time Cose is testing the margins of hope...

...A 20-year veteran of journalism along the color line, he has written a lot about his own and other blacks' experiences with whites they found racially hostile, duplicitous or laughably myopic...

...In chapters about racial identification on Census forms, The Bell Curve controversy, educational strategies for black youth, and affirmative action in colleges and workplaces, he makes a point of quoting people like Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray, the sponsors of the California Civil Rights Initiative against affirmative action, and "conservative" blacks whose views are at odds with his own...

...For them, more than for whites who arrived with ancestral traditions intact, the sole alternative to race loyalty is an almost heroic existentialism that few people of any color can sustain...

...on the other, mainstream American individualism trades heavily on "connections" and employers subtly transmute "merit" into "compatibility," rendering vows of color blindness wishful, if not hypocritical...

...Yet he knows that his defense of "character" against meritocracy cannot wholly be reconciled with policies that code individuals by color...

...with decisive white support and this in the South, whose demons of "racial history" bypassed the elections...

...Cose, a senior writer and columnist at News week, has done his share of seething...

...I would like to think that sustaining it is what America is about, but the prospect is daunting and Cose is not ready to lead blacks toward it...

...That too few do now has made many blacks angrier than ever, and sometimes more attuned than ever to siren songs of a separate racial destiny...

...Of course, in the Jim Crow South the movement often had no choice but to make calculated, morally grounded appeals to whites' integrity, and while exchanging professions of mutual regard some blacks seethed...

...In a Newsweek column entitled "Voting Rights, R. 1. P" his doubts were even stronger than they are in the book...

...Yet the civil rights movement credited whites like Foster with some good faith, even as it exposed their shortcomings...

...Yet all the displaced incumbents won...

...Americans have grown enough in the past few years...

...It took moral visionaries like King to keep alive any hope that white and black children would "walk together like brothers and sisters...

...He is properly skeptical of the consequences of that development, but does not consider that it might be a great social boon...

...Hesitant though his approach to dialogue may seem, it took a measure of integrity and skepticism we can admire...

...He warns that calls for more standardized (and, therefore, color-blind) testing suppress reasonable assessments of a person's "judgment, decisiveness and creativity...

...Reviewed by Jim Sleeper Author, "The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York," and, forthcoming, "Color Blinded: How Liberals Got Race Wrong...

...Yet Cose does not mention Thomas' opinion...

...Affirmative action is a "lesser evil," Cose says, adding insightfully that lesser evils frequently catch more flak than great ones, to which most people are accustomed...

...So there is something tortured and inconclusive about his first chapter's discussion of a new drive to put the designation "multiracial" on Census forms—an option that would undermine the utility of starker racial labels for government programs based on racial determination...

...He rightly raps conservatives for portraying King as a patron saint of absolute color blindness, citing his advocacy of transitional preferences and subsidies for blacks (though often for poor people of all colors...

...At times Cose considers the possibility with apparent equanimity, yet he doesn't let go of the false notion that we would have little of value to say to or give one another if race lost its value in social equations and even disappeared in more interracial marriages and offspring...

...But Xavier's Catholic and Southern civic culture not to mention its blackness, which banishes stigma from the school's daily liferaises questions about the wisdom of busing and other legally prescribed forms of integration...

...Does this shift in exposition and tone indeed reflect new optimism...

...Voters' color blind-ness is, without question, a beautiful dream," but it is believable "only if one assumes that...

...Many whites considered the stories in Cose's The Rage of a Privileged Class highly contestable: In the workaday world, after all, every black's account of bumping against a "glass ceiling" of white condescension and contempt is answered by a white's account of going the extra mile for a black colleague with too many deficiencies and a head full of demons...

...to render our racial history irrelevant...

...In Color-Blind seething has given ground to pointed skepticism and, occasionally, guarded optimism...

...Opponents insisted not that white majorities would surely elect blacks, but that it is wrong to enshrine in law the presumption that they won't...

...How America Can Get It Right" "This just says we've got to be colorblind...

...That doesn't make lesser evils easy to defend, even when one doubts, as Cose does, the integrity of those who condemn them...

...Such pieties have long concealed prejudice and injustice, Ellis Cose reminds us...

...Or is it merely a tactical concession to the fact that race-blaming and white guilt no longer fly...

...As in the voting-rights controversy, he pokes at the civil rights establishment's limits but never crosses them...

...Working under rigorous but supportive mentors, disadvantaged students there advance into good medical and other professional schools, giving the lie both to conservative maunderings about genetics and to shallow liberal "integration" policies that elevate diversity over real achievement...

...Those districts' champions argued that white bloc-voting would prevent their black incumbents from getting elected anywhere else...

...I do not believe I have any prejudicenever had, in my opinion," said Louisiana Governor Mike Foster last year as he signed an order banning affirmative action in state agencies and, at the same time, declared Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a state holiday...

...I am inclined to give Cose the benefit of the doubt, notwithstanding the book's sporadic lapses into race loyalty and evidentiary deck-stacking...

...Cose couldn't be faulted for insisting that more "glass ceiling" stories than "extra mile" stories are true, but, still, he didn't give the latter their due...

...It suggests that Justice Clarence Thomas was right to challenge a Kansas City integration program the Supreme Court has struck down...

...Consequently, Cose is as reluctant to demand more aggressive (and, therefore, formulaic) racial "diversity" policies as he is to demand more aggressive standardizations of "merit...

...But some of us wish that everyone was a beautiful golden brown, or at least that color differences carried no more weight than a preference for brown or green eyes...

...He finds refuge from this dilemma in describing a successful educational "boot camp" at the Catholic, historically black Xavier College in Louisiana...

...But Cose acknowledges his own discomfort with affirmative action: On the one hand, he admits, its penchant for racial typecasting and proportionalism compromises individual effort and merit...

...Perhaps Cose holds back because blackness and whiteness constructed against one another and having no meaning separately offer the only coordinates within which blacks, abducted and stripped of any African culture, have managed to prevail...

...Few of us would choose to be rendered raceless to be suddenly without a tribe," he writes in his Introduction...

...Cose comes closer to crossing racial "party lines" when he assesses affirmative action in workplaces, grade schools and colleges...

...In his account of the debate, written shortly before the displaced black incumbents had to face white majorities in 1996, Cose doubts that "these days [white-majority electorates] have more important things than race to think about when they cast their votes...

...Frustrating as it is to see him trying to have it both ways in the controversies I've cited, we should all do as well as Ellis Cose when next we raise questions about matters so close to home...

...He mischaracterizes most proponents of a "multiracial" category as flag-waving advocates of a "new race," when in truth most mixed-race people simply want freedom from scripted solidarities because they are contentedly distant from a recoverable racial "identity...