Racism Dissected

...The parallel with Segal's thesis is quite clear: As class reforms are thwarted, race comes to the fore and separatism—of one sort or another—becomes the only viable alternative...

...For each of his capsule histories builds inexorably to a dual and portentous point which informs the entirety with great polemical force: Racism originates in a culture given to imperial conquest, but once it rears its head and gets rooted in exploitative economics, it takes on a life of its own...

...He vacillates between a view that the very ground of Western progress is its racist expansionism, and a shallower optimism which finds the "policy" of the United States in the Third World to be merely "purblind and clumsy...

...Segal's long-spun recital of the facts is dry and unpretentious, at times to the point of tedium—but only up to the point, not past it...

...the violent and unlovely heritage of distorted development and centralization left by Europe as its parting gift to the nationalist revolutions...

...Reviewed by Todd Gitlin "Don't forget, there are only 200 -L^ million of us in the world of three billion...

...But Segal is also a white South African exile...

...Indeed, if there is hope for an end to race's independent role in history it lies mostly with the victories of independence movements...

...But as a child of the Enlightenment, Segal cannot bring himself to reckon with the West's ir-redeemability...

...D. dissertations: ponderous academic prose...

...He cannot have it both ways...

...PRISCILLA ROBERTSON is a former editor of The Humanist...

...JOHN LUKACS, a professor of history at Chestnut Hill and La Salle colleges in Philadelphia, wrote "A History of the Cold War...

...The thread of Segal's fear lends his book its special urgency...

...the rationalization of slavery with myths of inferior native savagery...

...Racism Dissected The Rage War, by Ronald Segal...

...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic and historian...

...As white racism consolidated and as blacks found it increasingly hard to move outside the ghetto, militant egalitar-ianism ("integrationism") subsided and "Washingtonism" blossomed...

...As a rationalist, he moves to the side of revolution...

...Yet this chronicle of Negro migration and degradation on 40 Chicago's South Side serves as a valuable corroboration of Segal's grim thesis...

...Two irrationalities resulted, at great cost to Negro life and welfare: the Chicago race riot of 1919 ("race war" itself) and a skimping of black THE REVIEWERS TODD GITLIN, one of the original leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, is actively engaged in racial and poverty programs in Chicago...

...They want what we've got and we're not going to give it to them...

...The Race War is a cycle of narratives about Western conquest on three continents...

...It is workmanlike without craftmanship...

...To the world we arrogantly define by its lack of what we have, his meaning is quite plain: what won't be given must be taken...

...The poor must revolt if they are not to grow poorer...

...Segal might also have pointed to Cuba's multi-colored harmony, probably unique in this hemisphere, and to the staunch, even fastidious non-racialism of the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front...

...White rights are secured in countries as militant as Tanzania...

...Allan H. Spear's Black Chicago suffers from the malady of nearly all rewritten Ph...

...Segal locates the responsibility for future rationality squarely in the West...

...He is a native Georgian and formerly was a professor of history at LeMoyne College...

...Yet, ironically, self-help was not viable either...

...7.50...

...If the former, Segal's despair blends into Frantz Fanon's insistence that human salvation lies outside the white empires, and in opposition to them...

...Much of the story is by now, or ought to be, familiar to Western liberals: the wholesale destruction of vital, advanced cultures (the Ghanaian and Arabic in Africa, the Aztec and Inca in the Americas, the Chinese and Vietnamese in Asia...

...It is a useful beginning...

...If the latter, he offers no reasonable expectation of a remedy...

...CLIFTON H. JOHNSON is director of the Amistad research center and race relations department at Fisk University...

...Perhaps these enclaves will persist as more than exceptions that prove the racist rule...

...the rise of empires feeding directly into their falls...

...His book, "Transforming America," was recently published by Random House...

...Racism is either the West's metabolism, or only a curable disease...

...Spear demonstrates that the segregated Black Belt pre-dated the famous World War I Negro migration to the North, and that the ghetto was made by men, not born...

...Making greater headway in economic development than any other poor nation, China's magnetism for the rest of the poor is obvious—and, by Segal's account of her non-interventionist caution and her magnanimous aid policy, her magnetism is not unearned...

...In his analysis of the particular plight of the black bourgeoisie, Spear works with Segal in undermining the Marxist optimism that predicts progress from a clash of classes...

...He is not haunted in the name of Western civilization, for indeed the bulk of his sizable book is devoted to a record of the sorry infliction of that uncivilized hegemony on cultures less military and acquisitive than our own...

...Still, I wish he had gone further in exploring the planning of the ghetto—for example, by plunging into real estate records as Gilbert Osofsky has done in Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto...

...the introduction of slavery and mercantile exploitation as pillars of successive European empires...

...PETER COLLIER teaches comparative literature at the University of California and is a staff writer for Ramparts...

...Yet the longer South Africa parades white minority rule in the face of Pan-African-ist blacks, the more precarious will be Africa's non-racialism...

...The bombast is Lyndon Johnson's...

...RAYMOND W. MACK, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, is currently on research leave at Russell Sage Foundation...

...The question of the sources of racism is a large one, so large that social science avoids it for easier pursuits...

...In Africa, as Segal points out, "The struggle against imperial rule, though it certainly provoked racial awareness, provoked surprisingly little specifically racial hatred...

...ANNE CURTIN is a journalist with a background in book publishing...

...counter-institutions—since the black community itself could not accumulate the resources to match the facilities of the white community...

...As a humanist, Segal cannot stomach the hunger and oppression of the majority of the world's people...

...After Spear's book, a reader should only wonder by what miracle (or what chance) last summer's street violence took so few white lives...

...If the West continues to erect its prosperity on the misery of the poor, the rationality of revolution is likely to succumb to the thrashing desperation of race...

...Yet China's very power as a model bids to sharpen the race war even further...

...Revolution," as Ronald Segal says mildly in his remarkable book, The Race War, "is rational...

...For Segal, China is the semi-sinister model of non-white progress...

...To Segal's credit he has the audacity to nibble, at least, around the question's edges...

...He is a realist, and as a realist he is haunted by the specter of a cataclysm neither humane nor rational: race war...

...His main, well-documented point is that the force and popularity of this accommodationism were in large measure a function of white Chicago's response to the black immigrants...

...He is haunted, rather, in the name of the unrealized values of the Enlightenment, the values of rational change and the worth of individual life...

...If rational revolution depends on the West's generosity, he is entitled to his gloom, for the West shows no sign of making recompense for its conquis-tadorial majesty—quite the opposite, the rich get richer...

...His most recent book is "Ernst Barlach...

...Spear traces the development of the Booker T. Washington "self-help" ideology in some detail as it was adopted and applied by South Side leadership...