Atonement Isn't Enough

...He shows how these arguments lend plausibility to geneticist propositions and rails against those who would conscript them into ideological battles...

...Millions of young Americans have no clear racial or ethnic identity—and, like Tiger Woods, they don't regret it...

...He gives those old codes an honorable twist: Graduating in 1964, on the cusp of the civil-rights and anti-war eras, he became an officer on a Navy destroyer and then joined the New York Times, serving as a foreign correspondent in Saigon, Moscow and Jerusalem...

...Relentlessly he pours scorn on "progressive" journalists and academics, including fellow sociologists: "Social scientists who can only count, who cannot get through a Toni Morrison novel, who cannot tell a Langsten Hughes...

...Yet he points us beyond sloughs of despond where Shipler remains mired in atonement...

...Actually, the park's name was "Funtown," a fact of no importance were it not so easy to check: King later told the story in his "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" (first published in The New Leader of June 24,1964...

...Some of his confrontations yield useful insights...

...Whether or not that sort of rhetoric leaves Patterson any closer to Picasso the reader will have to judge...

...He can be exasperating to read...

...For those who believe its dissolution will be the next century's problem in America, Shipler's seems too packaged a tour...

...Orlando Patterson, who will remain black for as long as there is a color line, is nevertheless a freethinker...

...Many of his perspectives derive from an Anglophile and democratic socialist strain in his native Jamaica and in England itself, where he studied at the London School of Economics before coming to Harvard in the 1960s...

...An example is his meeting with a black-Jewish dialogue group in Teaneck, New Jersey...

...that Shipler's memory satisfied him suggests he is tracking down Evil, not facts...

...No conservative, he combines his assaults on the race industry with provisional support for affirmative action and public enforcement of socially responsible corporate and other private decision-making...

...Far more problematic are the author's frequent changes of venue in his "journey along the color line...

...But if he is aware that any of the people he visits are staging and sometimes recycling themselves a bit for his benefit and their own, he does not make note of it...

...I don't think this would work...

...Prejudice is a shape-shifter...

...Noting that as a junior at Dartmouth he interviewed Martin Luther King Jr...

...Otherwise they (and their readers) can become preoccupied with their own moral rectitude...

...even his well-taken criticisms of social science occasionally remind you of some sociologists' weakness for writing as if they were telling you how to tie your shoe...

...In contrast, Orlando Patterson's The Ordeal of Integration is impatient, when not frankly disgusted, with the view of the world Shipler and the race industry project...

...We are never in any one place for more than two or three of his pages...

...Finally, he had to explain that she could not go because she was not white...

...Whatever the uses of labels, Patterson rightly disdains the "racism forever" and "two nations" dystopia of liberal "determinists...

...Shipler's felicitous but fraught reporting seems likely to keep us A Country of Strangers...

...Portentously, he recites W. ?. ?. Du Bois' claim that the color line is "the problem of the 20th century...

...But often his outbursts are good fun and richly deserved by their targets...

...The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis By Orlando Patterson Civitas/Counterpoint...

...David K. Shipler's A Country of Strangers claims that credibility with repertoriai skill and literary grace...

...Again and again she asked to go, and her father tried and tried to avoid confronting her with the angry truth...

...So it is with interracial comity at this time in our national life: The less we obsess about it, the better we approach it and find ourselves practicing it—and the more angry we are whenever racism rears its head...

...when people work together, "cultural" differences recede...

...Although descendants of American slavery (unlike more recent African and even Caribbean immigrants) arguably constitute a group with a distinctive past, the white populace is too varied to be served by a label that harks back only to racism and doesn't point very much forward...

...A small part of the research for A Country of Strangers was begun with a grant from the Ford Foundation...

...like Satan, it "lurks under the surface...

...Reporters, like historians, usually track down such details...

...24.50...

...Since he is such a prodigious chronicler of experiences, his moralism has to be powerful to drive and at the same time contain his narratives...

...His book Arab and Jew won the Pulitzer Prize, and he has worked for such elite foundations as the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...233 pp...

...Shipler grew up in Chatham, New Jersey—not quite Christine Todd Whitman's "horse country," but close—and attended the old, WASP, all-male Dartmouth of the early 1960s, where undergrade sat at Robert Frost's feet before striding forth to exercise their class prerogatives...

...He is brave, irreverent and not a little sardonic about race, which he believes, as do I, we should delegitimize as a trope in our public discourse...

...While many of the interlocutors do resurface several times, the volume is too sprawling and ambitious to let its characters or narratives cohere...

...One looks in vain, however, for much understanding of the importance of small businesses that have allowed many nonwhite groups to carve out economic niches—beachheads that provide funds and leverage to win greater economic, cultural and political gains...

...Liberals who embrace Patterson's calls for social justice and affirmative action may have second thoughts, too, when they realize that even his defense of the latter is designed to pry liberalism loose from race...

...and, indeed, it has taproots deep in our national past...

...The pitfalls of that approach are illuminated by a more penetrating account of Teaneck and race that has never been given its due, Color Lines: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony in an American Town...

...poem from a doggerel, and whose strait-jacketed linearity of vision blinds them to the tragic dialects of history and to the interplay of good and evil, should all get out of the business of assessing the progress of Afro-Americans, for they are the equivalent of a house painter with a computergenerated color chart trying to evaluate the progress of a Picasso...

...That New York suburb prided itself on its liberal integrationism until, in 1990, a white policeman shot and killed a black youth, setting off bitter conflicts that revealed deep tensions and long-running hypocrisies...

...The author, Mike Kelly (not the former New Republic editor), has raised his family there and so writes out of deep commitment to a specific place...

...But it winds up reinforcing pessimism and, like Andrew Hacker's Two Nations, demonstrates how misplaced moralism can distort experience...

...Shipler has been chasing those shifting shapes, and while his professionalism makes him give "the Devil" his due whenever he thinks he has him, he is not so much "reporting" as bearing moral witness...

...It is a tactical defense: Patterson woul'd phase out affirmative action for women (he remains a scathing critic of feminism's indulgence of single-parent families) and nonblack minorities rather quickly, and for blacks in about 15 years...

...Not surprisingly, a heroine of A Country of Strangers is a diversity trainer, for whose manipulative omnisciences he should not have fallen...

...Walking at night along the New England country roads of my youth, I learned that in utter darkness one sees best not by gazing intently ahead but by apprehending things out of the comer of one's eye...

...Shipler went there originally to study the shooting's aftermath, but he diffuses Teaneck vignettes throughout the book to substantiate such general themes as racial and religious insecurities, and police-community tensions...

...Since Patterson knows this, The Ordeal of Integration is anything but an ordeal...

...Lacking a similar immersion, Shipler never escapes the presumptions and postures of omniscience that come with a transient's capacity to see without quite being seen...

...Shipler has been traversing America for seven years, conversing about race with Air Force cadets, high school students, police officers, civic activists, and families of every kind while watching them interact in a medley of settings introduced—and re-introduced—throughout the book...

...We need moral witnesses, but steady witnesses who immerse themselves fatefully in emblematic situations before attempting to transcend them...

...He characterizes affirmative action battles as struggles for power in which ascendant nonwhites might well change the institutions they come to lead...

...Reviewed by Jim Sleeper Author, "Liberal Racism," "The Closest of Strangers What are we to make of the near-simultaneous publication of half a dozen books on race in America...

...He counts affirmative action a success mainly because it has enabled blacks, so long excluded from society's subtlest disciplines, to become acculturated to larger corporate and civic realms, not because it has brought these realms more "diversity"—a famous notion to this eminently cosmopolitan man...

...It is harder to be black in America than in Jamaica or even Britain, but Patterson's relative freedom from our 300-year-old black-white embrace seems to have liberated his moral imagination...

...Recognizing that an ethnic identity is unavoidable for most American blacks, he still would drop all talk of "race" and replace "black" and "white" with the labels "Afro-American" and "Euro-American...

...Shipler's restlessness is like an itinerant preacher's, as freefloating as the evil it pursues...

...for the campus radio station, he writes, "I can still hear the maj estic timbre of his voice, the weary outrage as he told of his young daughter seeing an amusement park near Atlanta called Funland or Playland, as I recall...

...It takes someone like Patterson, who is not as marinated as Shipler in guiltridden racial reckonings, to replace the iconography of atonement with grounded optimism...

...With his Old Testament beard and intense gaze, Shipler construes American racism almost as his cultural forebears construed Satan: Last December 3 he told the President's town meeting on race in Akron that if "bigotry isn't blatant now," that is only because it "has gone underground...

...Obviously, the ground is shifting under our feet: New immigration, rising interracial marriage, and cross-racial voting are bringing notions of race more fluid and ecumenical than any the old black-white paradigm acknowledged...

...But those changes might be far less dramatic than some in the race industry hope...

...Patterson rebuts and derides their assumptions in language that is by turns bracing and scathing...

...All this is little thanks to color-coding bureaucrats, corporate diversity trainers, foundation-funded ethnocentric advocates, professors of pigmentation, and others in our vast national "race industry," which tends to deny good news because it feeds off the bad—and off the moral credibility of the civil rights movement that made America acknowledge the bad...