America in Black and White - One Nation, Indivisible

Zusatztext David W. Reinhard The Oregenian A conversation-stopper in the best sense. The guts of this book will cause those on the left and right to stop and think before issuing the grand pronouncement or withering indictment. Informationen zum Autor Stephan Thernstrom, the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University, is the editor of The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups and the author of several other books. Introduction "An American Dilemma," Gunnar Myrdal called the problem of race in his classic 1944 book. He saw a painful choice between American ideals and American racial practices. But in 1944, ten years before Brown v. Board of Education, most white Americans were not actually in much pain. Indeed, when asked in a survey that same year whether "Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job," the majority of whites said that "white people should have the first chance at any kind of job." Blacks belonged at the back of the employment bus, most whites firmly believed. "Are they relatives of yours?" a white asks the protagonist in Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man. "Sure, we're both black," I said, beginning to laugh. He smiled, his eyes intense upon my face. "Seriously, are they your relatives?" "Sure, we were burned in the same oven," I said. Burned in the same Jim Crow oven, in the heat generated by overwhelming racial hostility. That brutal world is gone, but some of the scars remain. Both points are easy to forget but essential to remember. On both left and right, writers too often distort the picture for political ends, clouding our understanding of the nation's most important domestic issue. On the right, they frequently dismiss the persistence of racial animus, suggesting, indeed, that "those who look carefully for evidence of racism...are likely to come up short." On the left, critics such as Derrick Bell allude to the "bogus freedom checks" that "the Man" will never honor. An enslaved people remains enslaved. There is no racism; there is nothing but racism. The issue of race sends people scurrying in extremist directions. And thus there is almost no overlap between opposing views, and little sympathy and understanding across the lines of political battle. In October 1994 the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down the University of Maryland's blacks-only Banneker Scholarship program. "I can't get over the irony of the rising African American jail population and then taking away a program like this that tries to bring African Americans into the university," the president of the university remarked. The Fourth Circuit had seen the issue quite differently: "Of all the criteria by which men and women can be judged," the court had said, "the most pernicious is that of race." Americans committed to racial justice were not always so divided. In 1963, when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stood at the Lincoln Memorial and spoke of his dreams, blacks and whites marching together pictured the "beautiful symphony of brotherhood" that treating blacks and whites alike would surely create. But that shared vision quickly faded, as many came to believe that race consciousness was the road to racial equality. "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race," Justice Harry Blackmun said in the Bakke case in 1978. In the civil rights community, by the late 1970s, that much-quoted aphorism had come to seem indisputably right. Today we argue without a common language. University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier, a much sought after presence in the media, has repeatedly called for "a national conversation on race." We have not exactly fallen silent on the subject. We talk endlessly, obsessively about the issue, but across linguistic barricades. "Equal opportunity" is a much-used phrase with a much-disputed meaning. In the ba...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom
• Verlag: Simon & Schuster UK
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 01.01.2008
• EAN: 9780684844978
• ISBN: 978-0-684-84497-8
• Seiten: 708
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften, Recht,Wirtschaft > Soziologie > Soziologische Theorien