Colorbind

...blacks’ SAT scor1:s are almost 200 points below scores of white students...

...Hacker almost always moves beyond the conventional interpretation of data, and he has a special gift for chipping away at those fragments of good news that optimists cling to...

...A white middle-class family is three or four times more likely to contain a husband earning $75,000 in a managerial position, which allows him to support a nonworking wife...

...The belief that everything is the result of racism may not be patently incredible, but it’s certainly wrong...

...Whiteness” was not a biological characteristic, but a set of social attributes defined by the ruling class...

...The gradual absorption of these groups, many of them “non-white,” by the American mainstream shows that skin color is not in itself the issue...

...Many blacks find the theory deeply insulting, though Moynihan made a point of citing such black scholars as W.E.B...

...You wouldn’t have to be crazy to wonder, as Hacker writes, “Can this nation have an unstated strategy for annihilating my people...

...It seems to me that the willingness to place yourself in the position of the disadvantaged party is one thing that separates liberals from conservatives...

...In addition to those forces, the pool of “marriageable” black men has been reduced by jail, drug abuse, chronic unemployment, and even death...

...but the unwillingness to accept the possibility of progress, and the eagerness to accept Sharpton’s siren song, only contribute to the problem of racism...

...Most mothers on AFDC I know don’t view themselves as good models...

...Yesterday’s heresy was today’s research project...

...I don’t know whether other scholars will tweak Hacker for going soft, or whether blacks will ridicule his presumption...

...The real argument is over what sort of policies can break what Clark called “the institutionalized pathology” of the ghetto...

...I also wonder whether if by “some” he means somebody other than David Duke...

...after the Kerner Commission report, the situation of black people in America remains dire...

...So while there is a much larger black middle class, more typically, the husband is likely to be a bus driver earning $32,000, while his wife brings home $28,000 as a teacher or a nurse...

...They behaved like other immigrant groups, and they succeeded more or less as others did...

...It seems more like common sense...

...In a way, Hacker is trying to explain why so many non-poor, non-militant blacks seem drawn to mythologies and conspiracy theories...

...Skin flux The unnamed enemy of Two Nations is the “familybreakdown” or “culture of the underclass” theory...

...White America has always had the power to expand its domain,” writes Hacker...

...The ideology of victimization, as Steele writes, is “the tragedy of black power in America today...

...The Democratic candidates for president appear to have a tacit pact to mention the words “black” and “poor” as infrequently as possible...

...It is not easy to visualize these couples living on the same block, let alone becoming acquainted with one another...

...Some say quite openly,” he writes, “that all too many blacks should not be bearing children...

...The black unemployment rate is almost two and a half times the: white rate, and the gap is growing...

...The official represents a wealthy organization that will be happy to pay you any amount you think appropriate to compensate for this mishap over the James Traub, a contributor to Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthlv...

...It may not be coincidental, Hacker observes, that fur-bearing animals “never grumble or turn resentful or ungrateful...

...For Hacker to countenance such a theory would be to violate the effort of sympathy, or identification, that underlies Two Nutions...

...Hacker finds this somehow reassuring...

...when I mentioned the passage to a black academic, she just snickered...

...Hacker’s deep aversion to the idea causes him to put a distinct spin on family-composition figures...

...Nor is it likely that dolphins will present themselves one day and proclaim that they henceforward wish to assume control over their own struggle...

...Conservative black economist Thomas Sowell has calculated that West Indian average family income is only slightly less than the national norm, while blacks earn only a little over three fifths of that standard...

...The rise of what Hacker neutrally terms “other configurations,” like the multigenerational household, is a sign of how a community copes under stress, but it’s not an answer to the problem, as Hacker claims...

...He notes, for example, that while the proportion of black households earning $50,000 a year or more has risen 46 percent over the last 20 years, very few black men or women earn that much...

...that come with being black put extra burdens on a marriage...

...Though Hacker reiterated his argument that racism, rather than something else, accounts for the difference in black-white achievement, he described a growing de-racialization brought about by the new immigrants...

...But most of Hacker’s readers won’t need to be reminded of the bald facts...

...Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, was practically martyred for trying to base national policy upon it...

...Social victims may be collectively entitled, but they are all too often individually demoralized...

...This takes us a long way beyond the usual reading of these figures, but I find it hard to believe that the stability of the “biracial ratio” LS more telling than the gulf between the races...

...He knows that statistics will take him only so far, and so he ventures into territory unfamiliar to most social scientists...

...He argues that the same forces have pushed the rate up among blacks and whites...

...and it’s a convincing refutation of large portions of Two Nations...

...But it is true that these theories serve as a convenient pretext for political leaders and ordinary citizens to avert their gaze from something they’d rather not contemplate in the first place...

...Residential and school desegregation efforts are largely played out...

...But therein lies a cul-de-sac...

...Many other groups have satisfied this need in the past...

...TouchC...

...Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Kenneth Clark in his report...

...Two notions In fact, the inner city is now teeming with new immigrants, most of them dark-skinned, many of them likely to be granted the honorary white status that Hacker describes...

...But it’s not blaming the victim to say that centuries of hateful and discriminatory treatment, followed by a mass migration of unprecedented speed from a rural to an urban setting, have produced conditions that cannot be banished by a change in attitude on the part of white America...

...But grandma isn’t enough...

...With this ingenious device, Hacker compels white readers to recognize the immensity of the gulf that separates black from white in America...

...Hacker argues that this is exactly what’s happening now, and it’s not a difficult case to make...

...That’s dead-on...

...When I wrote an article about this phenomenon 10 years ago, I was struck by the fact that Jamaican or Trinidadian shopkeepers and undertakers to whom I spoke were well acquainted with racism, but did not consider it an insurmountable obstacle to success...

...While it’s true that the percentage of such households among all black families has grown from 17 percent to 56 percent over the past 40 years, he notes, it’s also true that among whites the figure has irisen from 5 percent to 17 percent...

...I don’t even follow the syntax of that sentence...

...In other words, racism has proved to be transitory with all groups save blacks, upon whom has fallen the role of subordinate caste...

...Whether or not you agree that racism is the exclusive cause of persistent black poverty, it’s becoming increasingly apparent to blacks that many whites couldn’t care less whether or not they succeed...

...Hacker agrees that having a child early in life, out of wedlock, is highly correlated with future poverty, at least among blacks...

...He is tart not only on the subject of Republican race-baiting, but on those white liberals who, through exhaustion or disaffection, have just turned the dial...

...In any case, if one of his students at Queens College made a statement like that, I assume that Professor Hacker would tell him or her to marshal some evidence...

...He becomes fodder for the next A1 Sharpton...

...For many years this was the theory that dared not speak its name...

...The most recent book to prominently advance a form of Moynihan’s argument is Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land...

...Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative...

...How would you feel, he implicitly asks the white reader, if you knew that you couldn’t move into a white neighborhood even if yours were a hard-working, middleclass family...

...The ensuing chapter, “White Responses,” attempts to document the conservative repudiation of race-based demands and liberals’ fretful accommodation...

...How would you react to being treated as if you were the carrier of a contamination, a $50 million taint...

...writes freauentlv about race...

...blacks are three to five times as likely as whites to commit violent crimes-and to be victimized by them...

...Things are getting worse, not better...

...Even within the middle class, says Hacker, “the strain...

...Hacker’s sensitivity to the causes and consequences of racism is both the strength and the failure of this book...

...Once a teenage girl drops out of school or work to have a child and then becomes that child’s principal source of support, it will take real heroism on her part to avoid the clutches of welfare...

...It would be too much to say that Caribbeans, like Asians or Arabs, have been accorded “white” status...

...No matter what happens, they can never become ‘black.’ White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence which, despite all its strains and problems, still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world...

...And yet Hacker argues persuasively that some of the apparent signs of black economic progress are illusory or transitory...

...There remains,” Hacker writes, “an unarticulated suspicion: Might there be something about the black race that suited them for slavery?’ Like most right-thinking Americans, I have been trained to admit to almost any degree of unconscious racism...

...However, in the past and even now, it has shown a particular reluctance to absorb people of African descent...

...a girl with more self-esteem, or a willingness to listen to good advice, might decide otherwise...

...Isn’t it a disaster that the majority of black children are growing up without a father...

...Few men have relished their martyrdom as Moynihan did, and he lived to see himself vindicated...

...You were, in fact, supposed to be black, and at midnight tonight you will become black, in features as well as skin, although “inside you will be the person you always were...

...But he views the choice as being a matter of individual, rather than social, psychology...

...But Hacker is aware that he may be charged with cultural trespassing, and he goes to great (I think excessive) pains to prove that he is a friendly visitor...

...At one time our Anglo-American founders made do with the Irish, and then Southern Europeans, Eastern European Jews, and Asians...

...The real argument of Two Nations is that the racial attitude of whites is responsible for the failure of blacks-that blacks fail because whites want them to...

...This theory, first broadcast to the public in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 study, “The Negro Family,” argues that family breakdown and welfare dependency among the urban black poor have become selfperpetuating, so that blacks are largely unable to seize opportunity as other minority groups have in the past...

...Almost 50 years after Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma and almost 25 year...

...Hacker not only recognizes this phenomenon, but wrote a piece that appeared on the cover of The New Republic in March entitled “The Myths of Racial Division...

...Americanborn blacks, answers Hacker, aren’t immigrants and shouldn’t have to behave like them...

...I remember being startled when I got my annual fundraising letter from the NAACP in 1983, and there was Benjamin Hooks talking about a study designed to look at the ongoing problems of the black family...

...He says, for example, that the growth in female-headed households among black families, usually cited as an index of social disintegration, has been misinterpreled...

...If so, then why are West Indians so successful...

...Students to whom this hypothetical is put, says Hacker, tend to request around $50 million, conveying the value white people put on their own skins...

...You are visited by an official who informs you that, owing to an unfortunate mistake, you were born white...

...Thus “the biracial ratio has remained remarkably stable throughout the 40-year period...

...And is it really the case that racism governs all outcomes for black people...

...That must be true, but the lack of a sense of the future is one aspect of a larger problem: self-destructive behavior in the ghetto...

...But he presumes upon liberal guilt a little too far...

...For whites, writes Hacker, blacks constitute a psychic version of Marx’s reserve pool of labor...

...Moynihan was accused of “blaming the victim,” and those who came after him were similarly charged...

...Colorbind In Andrew Hacker’s world, race is eve ythiizg...

...Hacker even lists this trait as one of the hallmarks of the liberal...

...Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal...

...Men’s liberation” has removed the stigma attached to abandoning your family...

...Black writers of various ideological persuasions-Patricia Williams, Shelby Steele, and Lorene Cary-have described the difficulties, the hesitancies, the doubleness, of being black in America...

...Asians and hispanics and others who want to make it on their own have seen the harm that being ‘racial’ can do,” he wrote...

...Scribner 5, $24.95...

...I work with formerly homeless families in Harlem, and two of the most demoralizing aspects of their life stories are how many of them represent secondgeneration female-headed households, and how many daughters and nieces are replicating the pattern...

...In the real one, it’s not so simple by James Traub ndrew Hacker, a political scientist not norA mally given to literary devices, offers the fol- lowing parable in Two Nations...

...50 years remaining to you...

...The sense of dispossession is real, even if the conspiracy theory is a phantom...

...That may be so...

...No matter how degraded their lives,” Hacker writes, “white people are still allowed to believe they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority...

...Nor is it likely that the same black couple will enjoy the same sense of prosperity as the white couple...

...Hacker describes victimization...

...To be black in America, Hacker writes, is “a disconsolate estate...

...Perhaps, he writes, a girl chooses to get pregnant and carry the child to term because she lacks confidence in herself and in her future...

...Clearly, the elimination of black poverty is becoming yesterday’s cause...

...He notes censoriously that “mothers now on AFDC”-the principal welfare program-“are seen as bad models for society as a whole and their children in particular...

...But Hacker’s ultimate purpose is still to substantiate his argument that racism is the cause of black economic failure...

...He notes that a concern for the environment has replaced civil rights as the chief preoccupation of many such folk...

...racial prejudice is clearly too strong for that...

...Not only is it wrong, it’s dangerous as a guide to action...

...the whole model of “two societies” is becoming obsolete...

...But by behaving in the ingratiating manner associated with immigrants-by working much harder, and at less pleasant jobs, than other Americans, by being more disciplined and caring more about schools-they’ve gotten their piece of the American dream...

...Their salvation is often the indomitable grandmother who lives nearby...

...In a chapter titled “Being Black in America,” Hacker tries to shed his “subject position,” as the Marxists say, and put himself inside the mind of a black person...

...It is not current discrimination but the legacy of generations of racism and oppression that ensures the persistence of black poverty...

...the right to reproduce” has removed the stigma from bearing a child out of wedlock, or without the prospect of an involved father...

...How much would you consider appropriate...

...Like other immigrants, they thought of themselves more in national than in racial terms...

...Only blacks were enslaved, and the ideology of genetic inferiority that justified slavery in the face of America’s formal commitment to human equality endures to this day...