THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War by Michael Graham I (Warner, 239 pp., $23.95). The disaffected southerner Michael Graham once set off in search...
...Are Cops Racist...
...A very good essay on the New York Police academy, for example, has real implications only for the handful of cities that have enormous police agencies and similarly divisive racial politics...
...Frustrated by the incessant belittling that southerners endure, Graham makes clear northerners deserve just as much ridicule for their red necks...
...Individually, the essays are models of opinion journalism: Mac Donald is meticulous, even-handed, and absolutely devastating to those who make unfounded charges of racism against the police...
...And why not...
...To hear many on the Left describe it, America's police departments are made up of men ready to kill just about any African American who crosses them...
...For an example, take education, an issue on which northerners have long claimed superiority...
...Aside from a very brief introduction, the essays appear to have been printed exactly as they appeared in City Journal: There's some repetition and a few annoying errors an editor should have caught...
...How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans by Heather Mac Donald (Ivan R. Dee, 177 pp., $22.50...
...Still, Are Cops Racist...
...As good as the individual essays are, however, the book suffers from a lack of editorial oversight...
...Heather Mac Donald tries to answer the chorus of accusations of racism in law enforcement...
...While Mac Donald's writing delivers one of the best ever looks at NYPD, the national implications of some of her conclusions are limited...
...The book consists of nine essays, all but one of which first appeared in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal...
...While NYPD is the largest and most imitated agency in the country, the city's unique character and the agency's size—NYPD's traffic division alone employs more officers than all but five other municipal agencies—make it a problem as a model for other police departments...
...focuses heavily on the New York City Police Department...
...Graham, a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C., also draws less obvious parallels between North and South...
...Hicks rule America from sea to shining sea, he concludes in Redneck Nation...
...Beth Henary Cops Racist...
...Each essay deals with race and law enforcement, although a few— such as an excellent piece on the 2001 Cincinnati riots—go well beyond...
...Graham's similar argument about northern hypocrisy over race still stands, though on a wobblier leg than it did before Trent Lott's gaffe...
...The disaffected southerner Michael Graham once set off in search of the northern United States, that faraway land of competence and sophistication, but he wound up back home in the South...
...While there are certainly enclaves of substantial learning in, say, the Upper East Side, the worst public school systems in the country are in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Washington (a city Graham sloughs off on the North because, as he writes, nobody wants it...
...Redneck Nation does not naively suggest that there are no real differences between North and South, just that everything once perceived as a southern fault—claims to victim status, poor educational standards, trampy women, mindless entertainment—has crept across the map to become our national standard...
...draws a lot of very good journalism together, and it's well worth reading...
...In Are Cops Racist...
...Eli Lehrer...
...The first fighters in the modern multicultural wars were the white Southerners of the 1960s," he insists, whereas citizens of the North who once espoused the melting pot paradigm now trumpet the principles of racial preferences and racial determinism...
...The distinctly northern anti-meat campaign by militant vegetarians is merely "redneck evangelicalism wrapped in radicchio and served on a bed of kelp...
Vol. 8 • January 2003 • No. 17
