Illusions of Equality

...Such private discrepancies in wealth, Shapiro says, have led to large public consequences: good, well-funded schools in the suburbs, dysfunctional, impoverished schools in the cities the whites left behind...

...Who required it with the lash and the law book until yesterday...

...It doesn't underachieve, it doesn't give up on the troubled students, it doesn't give in to hopelessness and settle for a life behind a broom, it doesn't favor its boys over its girls...

...True, her subtitle, Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners, sneaks "black" right back into the discussion, but she clearly intends it as a reference to W.E.B...

...This formulation nicely encapsulates the heart of the dilemma...

...The result of all that labor is, in one sense, distinctly underwhelming: His book makes the thoroughly documented case that people with money have an easier path through life than people without money...

...We need to recognize," Shapiro writes, "that inherited wealth can perpetuate inequality...

...Shapiro frequently draws somber inferences from his research as if they were not perfectly obvious: "Graduating college with large student loans versus with parents footing the bill is the difference between starting a family with debts versus lack of debts...

...If black men tyrannize black women, black women tyrannize their children...

...All of the interviewed couples with children at or approaching school age, for instance, expressed their desire for good educational opportunities...

...In fact, the author can't seem to get whites off her mind or out of her argument...

...They fight fire with fire...

...Or: "Families with children make important life decisions in the context of attaching increasing importance to highquality education as a way for their kids to succeed...

...This explains why decent, sensible whites ignore, defend and rationalize slavery, Jim Crow, and their badges and signif iers...

...Gender, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, national origin, religion—these aspects of identity were how whites determined who could do what kind of work and at what pay, who could live where, who could marry whom, who could murder or rape whom...

...Shapiro reiterates in the Preface of his new book: "The average African American family holds 10 cents of wealth for every dollar that whites possess...

...If that advantage persists, as Shapiro suggests it has, and if it is being replicated through generations, because of the financial advantages reaped by the founders of those generations, as he also suggests, then it is time to consider ways to redress the balance of inequality...

...He and a team of researchers interviewed some 180 white, black and Hispanic families, ranging from middle-class to poor, who live in or around Boston, St...

...Louis neighborhood of her childhood through the U.S...

...That passage implies that Dickerson allies herself with such black thinkers as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, whose books urge blacks to stop standing in the way of their own progress...

...We certainly recognize that unearned windfalls create inequalities among individuals, regardless of race...

...how frustrating it must be for black Rightwingers to be used as foils...

...You can't have one with the other...

...The Hidden Cost of Being African American presents Shapiro's analysis of this data, thumbnail sketches of some of the people interviewed and occasional snippets of their conversation...

...Shapiro provides a dizzying array of facts and figures, charts and tables, all demonstrating, however the numbers are diced and sliced, that whites are far more likely to receive money through parental gifts and inheritances than are blacks...

...The de jure segregation was gaveled to death...

...The author claims that blacks—the "backward-looking" ones, that is—choose to see themselves as victims of oppression in order to shed responsibility for their own behavior and lives...

...There is no shortage of white crime, she notes, but black crime is assumed to be diagnostic of the race as a whole: "This is why being mugged by a black justifies fearing all blacks, when being mugged by a white does not lead to a fear of all whites...

...Or: "I spoke to many families, for example, who see no paradox in using inherited wealth to leverage advantages and opportunities unavailable to others...

...But white couples who had parental help with a down payment on a house could afford to move to where those opportunities were to be found...

...The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that "all men are created equal," which is not the same as stating that all men have equal opportunities...

...Not all of the punches Dickerson throws at whites are quite so roundhouse...

...Inhabitants of the real world, on the other hand, possess generalizing tools in abundance, and, particularly when the topic is race, they seem unable to stop wielding them...

...members of the second generation of Rockefellers or Kennedys were considerably more equal, as Orwell put it in Animal Farm, than others...

...DuBois' classic study The Souls of Black Folk (1903...

...Surely such an accusation, however impassioned, needs some grounding in reality...

...Freedom means the liberty to do whatever you legally can to improve your lot in life and in the lives of your heirs...

...The author points to the past history of racial injustice in the U. S. Whites not only earned more than blacks, as a rule, but they were also able to buy houses in whatever neighborhood they could afford, while blacks' choices were restricted to areas where other blacks lived...

...They simply cannot live with the truth of how they came to be who they are, so they choose not to know...

...That seems eminently fair...

...Since it seemed unfair, though, to set higher hurdles for some of the "equals" than for others, the idea of equality of opportunities crept into the discourse, where it collided, head-on, with the concept of freedom...

...All whites do not live in constant fear of bestial blacks, nor do all black men tyrannize black women, nor do all black women tyrannize their children...

...Debra J. Dickerson, a journalist who has worked and written for a number of national publications, is an example...

...If a magic wand were to end white racism tomorrow at noon, the black community would not be very much changed at 12:01...

...She has some tart and telling comments about the high-minded distaste some whites express when blacks and other minorities practice what is now called "identity politics" and unite along racial or ethnic lines to vote or otherwise to attempt to influence government policies: "But who invented identity politics...

...When is the last time anyone heard a decent, sensible white defend slavery...

...That would hold true for everything they saw, including other people, which means they would have no notion of "race...

...WINTER BOOKS Illusions of Equality By Paul Gray Imagine a world where the language renders generalizations impossible: no plurals, no collective nouns, no modifiers of anything but single entities...

...The favorable response to Black Wealth/White Wealth, Shapiro now writes, prompted him "to think more deeply about advancing the analysis to include a more sophisticated account of the role of private family money in passing racial inequality from generation to generation...

...Jim Crow laws in the South, with all their attendant violence and deprivations and degradations, were toppled during the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s...

...Optimism about the narrowing income gap between whites and African Americans, the authors maintained, overlooked a deeper and more intractable issue: Income is only one factor, and sometimes a relatively minor one, in the accumulation of wealth...

...The list is no less lamentable for being familiar...

...they could only deal with them tree by tree...

...Inequality was the favored few's leg-up on life...

...To state the opposite, as Dickerson does, is not to confront racism but to fall victim to it, once again...

...Why then do many blacks still feel like strangers in the land of their birth...

...For all of its weaknesses—repetitious and sociological prose, breathless announcements of discoveries that seem less than breathtaking, the use of the word "racist" to describe whites who are simply trying to do the best they can for their children—Shapiro's book deserves attention for its focus on an enduring fissure in Americans' ideas about themselves...

...But Shapiro thinks we should be worried when inheritances not only bless the fortunate few but create a social stratification between white haves and black have-nots with—thanks to the power of money to generate more money—increasing stratification through succeeding generations...

...did anyone seriously expect to find an example to the contrary, a family whose lack of assets conferred privileges...

...They amassed 400 hours of audiotapes and 7,000 pages of transcripts...

...Brilliantly but taxingly, whites circumvent all this neurosis by establishing themselves as the measure, not the measured...

...Those who talk or write books and articles about race seldom seem to notice that doing so entangles them in an unavoidable paradox...

...it doesn't have unprotected sex or drop out of high school...

...Seeking white approval, she argues, is a debilitating enterprise, not because whites will never grant it but because the quest cedes the determination of self-worth to the judgment of others: "More than anything else—more than physiognomy, more than cultural traits, more than class structure, more than residential segregation, more than the most virulent racism—it is the low self-esteem and backward-looking focus of these please-love-me blacks that retards their progress...

...is the day blacks may claim from-this-moment-on equality...

...An inconsistency emerges: If, as Dickerson urges, it is high time for blacks to stop paying attention to the opinion of whites, then why should it matter what whites think about "Right-leaning blacks...

...They would not only miss the forest for the trees, they would miss the trees too...

...A significant portion of The End of Blackness rehearses the historic miseries whites have inflicted on blacks: slavery, sharecropping, rapes, lynching, discrimination, the denial of an education and the right to vote, to name only the most horrific...

...Those denied opportunities for so long because of their race should not be criticized, now that conditions have changed, for using their race to try to secure opportunities...

...When whites give or leave money, including the equity in their homes, to their children they are, in effect, passing along an unfair and unearned advantage that laws or customs or prejudices gave them over blacks...

...A hundred years have passed since DuBois wrote...

...Such assertions simply fail the burden of proof...

...These speakers would notice that an individual has darker or lighter skin than they do, or different facial or physical or behavioral characteristics, and they might feel interest, delight, puzzlement, unease, discomfort, fear, revulsion, etc...

...At such moments, The End of Blackness offers valuable insights into the dangers of stereotypes, of seeing a tree and then presuming a forest...

...Her first book, An American Story (2000), recorded her journey from the tough St...

...Houses in good neighborhoods tend to appreciate in value...

...But now that it no longer works for them, now that they have a four-century head start, whites want it scraped from the American psyche—as if they don't still practice it—like gum from a table leg...

...It doesn't refuse to breastfeed, it doesn't infect 50 per cent of its young with herpes, it doesn't believe wacky conspiracy theories or that AIDS is a hoax...

...The day they stop demanding redress from the powerful white majority...

...Louis and Los Angeles...

...Too often Dickerson slings stereotypes with abandon, and she is an equal opportunity offender: "Whites live in constant fear of bestial blacks," she says...

...It is also the difference between needing to pay off this debt monthly versus saving money...

...They couldn't make the leap from the particular to the general...

...whites who take comfort from Sowell and Steele, she says, call them "independents" when they areactually "conservative, Rightwing, or Republican...

...From our perspective, native speakers of this strange tongue would be inductively challenged...

...Dickerson would respond that the list is hardly familiar, at least to whites, who she claims have suppressed the knowledge of their past treatment of blacks: "Today whites deny the continuing effects of their past racism as well as the privilege they yet retain, simply because they are too stiff-necked, too embarrassed, and too sickened to follow these truths to their logical and moral conclusions...

...What they could not do, though, is extrapolate their feelings into a theory about all similarly different-looking people...

...She adds: "One reads the white's fawning head-rubs for Right-leaning blacks (special courage, special voice, special sauce) and hears black teeth gnashing...

...Shapiro, a sociologist at Brandeis University, is the co-author with Melvin Oliver of Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995), a work that attracted a good deal of attention at the time of its publication...

...No matter how benign or high-minded their intentions, no matter how strenuously they argue or reason against the evils of racism, they use the same collective terms—whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians—that have long made racist thinking and rhetoric possible...

...Black and white professionals in the same occupation earning the same salary typically move through life with significantly unequal housing, residential, and educational prospects, which means that their children are not really on the same playing field...

...Those who enjoyed success largely did so abetted by the sweated labor of those whom they owned or hired, not to mention their wives, who kept their homes clean and bore their children...

...black couples who were still paying off college loans and who had little hope of scraping together a down payment, were stuck where they were and at the mercy of whatever school happened to be available to their children...

...houses in poorer neighborhoods don't...

...But her sole reference to these two ends dismissively...

...White racism doesn't mug a neighbor at the bus stop...

...And even when blacks receive such benefits, whites get, on average, far more substantial amounts...

...Dickerson's answer is that they spend entirely too much time worrying about what white people are thinking about them...

...when they meet such a person...

...Equality means that such improvements are forbidden...

...Unfortunately, these moments are rare...

...The author NOTES that "Americans highly value two cherished but contradictory notions: equal opportunity and a family's ability to pass along advantages to their children...

...The title of her new work, The End of Blackness (Pantheon, 320 pp., $24.00), suggests that she is making an argument against stereotypes, a plea for the primacy of the individual over the general...

...There were and are considerably fewer self-made men in the New World than the current mythology enumerates...

...Air Force to Harvard Law School...

...Dickerson's assertion that past racial injustices have given whites a "400-year head start" does not receive much elaboration in The End of Blackness, but it certainly does in another new book, Thomas M. Shapiro's The Hidden Cost of Being African American (Oxford, 253 pp., $30.00...

...The author also says some interesting things about the assumption many whites in the U. S. make that they are the golden mean and minorities the deviation: "America never speaks of its Caucasian Problem...

...It's difficult to understand why so many interviews were deemed necessary...