Stopping the Silence

Listen to this phrase: “The complexity of harmonics.”

Does it strike a chord?

Or would you say “cacophony of chaos” better fits our multicultural megalopolis?

Ellis Cose coins the first term in his new book, “Color-Blind--Seeing Beyond Race in a Raced-Obsessed World” (HarperCollins). But the Newsweek columnist might not have written the book were it easier to hear strains of that harmony amid the whining, bickering, bloodletting dissonance of 1990s America.

In his 1993 book, “The Rage of a Privileged Class” (HarperCollins), Cose presented what many middle-class African Americans saw as an anthem for their continued frustration with this nation’s racial climate.

“What really hit me was that the reaction from whites and from blacks was so very different,” Cose says over a plate of broiled salmon.

“The reaction from blacks was ‘Thank you for telling our story’. . . . A lot of whites were very angry with me for having written a book focusing on black middle-class people being angry. It was sort of, ‘What in the world do they have to be angry about? They’re doing better than I am!’ ”

As Cose noted in “Rage,” one reason for that chasm is not only are we afraid to talk to one another, “we are disinclined to listen.”

If Cose harbors fear or disinclination, he shows neither. In conversation, his voice modulates to a neutral key. He may or may not think his white interviewer’s questions are stupid, his views offensive. But his reaction doesn’t disrupt the dialogue.

His book is like that, too. Rather than slip into fashionable polemics, Cose lays out both sides of incendiary racial issues, from affirmative action to people with biracial backgrounds trying to create a “multiracial” census designation.

Readers tip-toe through the cross-fire, knowing the extremes: One side defines America as racist, while the other says racism is history; one side shrieks “personal responsibility,” the other, “societal obligation”; one side lectures on “equality of opportunity,” the other demands results.

Given the size of the racial chasm (wasn’t that movie called “Grand Canyon”?) and that Cose has no intention of ceding his perspective as a black man, reaction to “Color-Blind” most likely will split along racial lines. Cose says that’s OK--as long as the book interrupts the nation’s cycle of silence and noisy stalemate.

It does.

Take, for instance, the question of why many blacks and Latinos do poorly in school.

Cose jerks open the lid on Pandora’s box and the painfully hot points and counterpoints fly.

“Color-Blind” cremates the tattered remains of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (Free Press), which attempted to link blacks’ relatively lower test scores to their genes.

But the latter book’s spurious claim remains a major impediment to minority students’ progress, Cose argues.

“Many black and brown children are still being told that academic accomplishment is so much beyond them that there is no real purpose in trying. . . ,” he writes. “The atmosphere, in large parts of America, is polluted with notions of intellectual inferiority.”

Some readers--mainly white, perhaps--will view that suspiciously passive-voice assertion as a subtle dodge. Cose also points out, after all, that too many inner-city blacks and Latinos blow off education, citing, for instance, a study by a UC Berkeley anthropologist who found that most black students in Oakland avoided math and science classes. Too “white,” they said.

So, some readers will bristle: Maybe teachers’ attitudes are tied not so much to an ignorant acceptance of intelligence fallacies, but rather to a sad truth about how some minority students limit themselves?

Cose says both issues cloud teachers’--and society’s--view, and recalls a talk he had in Detroit:

“A fellow asked, ‘Don’t you think our expectations are too high? We’re pushing them to succeed in this white man’s world. Don’t you think that’s wrong? Shouldn’t we make them feel good about what they’re already doing?’

“I said, ‘No, I don’t think our expectations are too high. In many instances, I think they’re way too low. . . .’ ”

*

In the book and in person, Cose maintains that devoted teachers have a responsibility not only to disabuse themselves of their biases, but to pull minority students from the rut of self-defeating resistance.

That, however, leads to another popular point of contention.

Cose describes his own education in inner-city Chicago, chastising those teachers who “surrendered” their classrooms to unruly students.

But old Chicago educators and idealistic young teachers just arrived in Los Angeles’ schools may ask Cose if they can really be blamed for burning out. Human energy, after all, is finite.

“Absolutely right,” Cose says. “But you do need to invest time, energy and effort. At least if we can acknowledge that it will work if we do that, I think we’re ahead. That’s better than blaming [schools’ failings] on some mythic intelligence gap or saying ‘things are just so awful and so pathological that there’s nothing that can be done.’ ”

Indeed, “Color-Blind” reports, the faculty at Xavier University in New Orleans has boosted thousands of African American students to academic excellence by embracing the philosophy that “intelligence can be taught.” The school’s rigorous crash-course approach to fundamentals, followed by equally rigorous academic expectations and passionate encouragement has made it the largest contributor of African American medical school enrollees.

And at Georgia Tech, Cose reports, a five-week summer immersion program in calculus and chemistry for black and Latino engineering students serves to springboard them into the top ranks of their classes.

Still, Cose says, only the naive would expect such efforts to miraculously solve America’s educational problems.

*

Woven into “Color-Blind” are historical tidbits that will likely make readers sigh.

He reports, for instance, that before becoming a Supreme Court justice, the late Thurgood Marshall predicted that segregation would be eliminated by 1963, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Thirty-four years later, one Harvard professor estimates that two-thirds of minority children still attend predominantly minority schools.

Cose, who traveled extensively in South Africa and South America in an effort to put America’s racial problems in perspective, doubts that any nation will ever be color-blind.

Color neutrality, however, may be a slightly less-impossible goal, he says. And he offers 12 steps toward achieving such. Among them: truly leveling the playing field, abandoning the notion that time alone will heal racial wounds, ending “the blame game.”

“It hardly matters who is responsible for things being screwed up,” he writes. “The only relevant question is, how do we make them better.” That pragmatism leads Cose to encourage people on every flank of the racial battle ground to take a breath, hold their indignation in abeyance and try to push the envelope on understanding.

“I don’t think you lose anything by trying to see something through another person’s perspective,” he says. “I don’t think you even lose anything by trying to see through the perspective of some ranting, raving bigot. Obviously you’re not going to end up agreeing with them. But it may tell you something about how to deal with them, if you at least understand why they’re screaming.”

Cose expects only a few people--he calls them “the empathetic elite”--to rise to the challenge: “That’s not most people. It’s not most people who are black. It’s not most people who are white.”

Will the numbers be sufficient, though?

In “Color-Blind’s” final chapter, Cose defers to the late novelist James Baldwin:

“If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks . . . do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”