Racial Issues: Where There’s Dialogue, There’s Also Hope

One-million dollars a year for life. That’s what white college students supposedly say they should be given as compensation in the hypothetical event that their skin suddenly becomes black.

Such figures are the stuff of “Two Nations,” a new book by Queens College professor Andrew Hacker that explores inequities between black and white Americans.

Excerpted in last week’s New Republic, “Two Nations” has appeared in part in recent articles in The New York Review of Books and is discussed in the current Newsweek in an article, “Apartheid, American Style.”

Newsweek’s David Gates says Hacker is “known for doing with statistics what Fred Astaire did with hats, canes and chairs.”

When he steps away from hard stats, though, Hacker can get fuzzy-headed. The current issue of Reconstruction--a smartly contentious African-American-oriented free-for-all on politics, culture and society--features a heated letters column of responses to an article by Hacker in the previous issue.

In “Jewish Racism, Black Anti-Semitism,” Hacker, who is white, attempted to explore the complex reasons for growing antagonism between Jews and African-Americans. But the essay is undermined by Hacker’s nasty tone and his blanket assumption that liberals in general and liberal Jews in particular are driven by dishonorable motives.

One letter writer suggested the piece should have been called “Why I, Andrew Hacker, Don’t Like Jews.” Another accused him of bolstering the black demagogues who “are deliberately alienating their other natural allies. . . .”

But the statement that sheds the most light on Hacker’s pessimistic view of racial issues is this:

“Whether they admit it or not,” he wrote in Reconstruction, “virtually all white people believe that, in terms of both genetic and evolutionary development, theirs is the highest racial stratum among the human species.”

If one can forgive Hacker’s use of such pseudo-statistical rubbish, there is an unpleasant truth found in more reliable figures that he uses in other articles: White Americans clearly have advantages over blacks, and they know it.

Hacker has no solutions to the problems he identifies: “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he told Newsweek.

April’s The Atlantic also points out the continued stigmatization of African-Americans. But then it steps forward with a bold remedy.

Claude M. Steele, a social psychologist at Stanford and the brother of controversial author Shelby Steele, weaves a detailed explanation of how blacks are “devalued” in this culture and why that often leads young blacks to “disidentify” with school--to reject the institution that offers the best path out of the racial quagmire.

Steele, who is African-American, has a more charitable view than Hacker of non-blacks who support change. His complex and important case boils down to a four-part solution, which might be oversimplified like this:

* Teachers must demonstrate that they truly value black students as people and for their potential.

* Remedial teaching programs defeat black students’ natural ambition; challenge strengthens it. “Frustration will be less crippling than alienation.”

* “Segregation, whatever its purpose, draws out group differences and makes people feel more vulnerable when they inevitably cross group lines to compete in the larger society.”

* “The particulars of black life and culture--art, literature, political and social perspective, music--must be presented in the mainstream curriculum of American schooling, not consigned to special days, weeks or even months of the year. . . . “Such channeling carries the disturbing message that the material is not of general value. And this does two terrible things: It wastes the power of this material to alter our images of the American mainstream--continuing to frustrate black identification with it--and it excuses in whites and others a huge ignorance of their own society.”

Before stating his case, Steele laments: “I sense a certain caving in of hope in America that problems of race can be solved.”

Is that perception accurate?

Not if continued dialogue evidences a refusal to give up.

Discussions of race have dominated magazinedom for at least the last year. And although the talk is usually more divisive and grim than Steele’s message, at least it goes on.

REQUIRED READING

* The seven greatest rock bands of all time are (drum roll) . . .

The Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones, Public Enemy, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. At least that’s what the April Spin concludes after a poll that seems to have included everyone who ever shouted “yeah! whooo!” at a concert. Why argue?

* According to respected former newspaper editor Bill Kovach, “Most of what we call investigative journalism these days is really reporting on investigations.”

The cover story in the March issue of The Washington Monthly reports that of 800 articles by investigative reporters at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post since 1989, 85% were follow-ups or advances of leaked or published government reports.

Television, writes Christopher Georges, is even less aggressive in its watchdog role. For example, “ABC’s ‘20/20’ did more in-depth segments in 1990 on domestic pets than any other topic . . . .”

NEWSSTAND NEWS

Remember the Utne Reader’s idea of readers getting together and forming salons? This week’s Newsweek says they’re up and happening, a semi-bona fide trend.

“People need an opportunity to talk about the things they care about,” publisher Eric Utne tells Newsweek. “You don’t know what you think until you get involved in a discussion.”

A UCLA psychiatrist has another answer to why he joined an Utne-inspired salon: “I’m here because Los Angeles is a sick cesspool of a city.”

SHREDDER FODDER

“We help make the country’s perceptions happen,” Time magazine’s associate publisher said in the magazine last week.

This week Time shapes the country’s perceptions with a debate between Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas about how to fix the economy.

The debate itself is fine. It demonstrates the superiority of magazines over television in addressing complex issues that may require backtracking and cross-referencing.

But Time’s embrace of journalistic conventional wisdom is glaring.

According to polls published with the debate, Jerry Brown is fewer than 10 points behind Tsongas among voters.

But Time left Governor Moonbeam out of the debate with a dismissive wave, saying:

“Brown has made no pretense of matching the highly detailed economic plans that Clinton and Tsongas debated last week.”

More likely reasons for the snub?

Conventional wisdom aside, a two-candidate square-off is more dramatic than a three-way scuffle.

And, as Margaret Carlson’s story in the same issue points out, when Brown refused to play by the rules, miffing Tom Brokaw in the first televised debate, it was “assured that Brown would be thrown into a media black hole.”