The Sour Now

The divide emerged some time in the early ‘90s, even before Rodney King and O.J. Simpson brought it home for all America to see, and it seems to grow more perplexing with each new racial incident. No one is surprised any more when black and white students take contrary views of the same campus controversy or black and white jurors seem to have attended two different trials. But even when we expect it, the racial perception gap still bewilders most of us, particularly whites. Just how differently does the other group see things? What are the roots of the discrepancy, and what if anything can be done about them?

White journalists Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Coleman felt that the best way to find out was to look locally. Each immersed himself for an extended period--in Kotlowitz’s case, five years; in Coleman’s, seven--in the local racial politics of a Midwestern city or twin cities, charting the distance between what some would call the towns’ different black and white perceptions of reality. Both men’s reports are vivid and deeply troubling. The racial chasm is even wider than most of us suspect. But both books are also dissatisfying--lost somehow in the perceptual confusion they seek to clarify.

Kotlowitz finds his racial microcosm in Michigan: in the twin towns of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. St. Joseph is a picturesque and prosperous agricultural port-turned-resort town with about 9,000 inhabitants, 95% of them white. Benton Harbor, just across the Michigan River, is 92% black, and most of it looks like an inner-city neighborhood, complete with joblessness, physical decay and one of the highest murder rates in the country. Residents of both villages avoid crossing to the other, and their thoughts about “the opposing community” generally come laced with fear or resentment. In May 1991, the body of black teenager Eric McGinnis was found bloated and decomposing in the river that divides these two worlds. Most whites assumed that the boy had died accidentally; virtually all of Benton Harbor was convinced he had been murdered. Once on the scene, Kotlowitz divides his time between exploring these assumptions and trying to solve the mystery.

A diligent and fair-minded reporter, formerly on the staff of the Wall Street Journal, Kotlowitz works every angle. He interviews white teachers and black teenagers. He reads and rereads the police report on the case, then replicates the detective work that went into it. In one gripping and gruesome set piece, he even watches an autopsy. Unlike many who write about race, he seems refreshingly free of preconceptions. He listens sympathetically to all views, and his characters, presented with flawless objectivity, include a decent white policeman and an unsavory black demagogue. “The Other Side of the River” occasionally seems meandering and digressive: Tragic as McGinnis’ death is, we never learn enough about it to make it a truly compelling mystery. Still, Kotlowitz’s portrait of the two towns is telling and evocative; it includes, among other things, a fascinating glimpse of “wiggers,” rebellious white girls who date black teens, and a chilling picture of how gang life terrorizes even small-town black America. And it is hard to complain about urban sociology that comes wrapped in a detective story.

The conventional wisdom in Benton Harbor, virtually unanimous and unquestioned, is that McGinnis was killed by whites because he was black and dating a white girl. There is no hard evidence to support this claim. McGinnis knew some white girls and was occasionally seen dancing with one, but the only testimony consistent with an allegation of murder comes from a convicted burglar, serving time in prison, who offers his uncorroborated story in exchange for leniency. If anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that Eric was a troubled youth hovering on the edge of Benton Harbor’s gang network. We know he was given to petty theft--just hours before his death, he was interrupted breaking into a car--and his comments to friends and relatives indicate that he was going through a potentially volatile personal crisis. Still, in Benton Harbor, racial expectations loom larger than facts, and, before long, the drowning has taken its place in a long local history of mythologized racial incidents. Even if it wasn’t a lynching, townspeople are convinced there was some kind of cover-up. “If it had been a white man,” several maintain, “they would have found out who did it.” “If whites and blacks are involved,” asserts a local minister, “whites want to win.”

Kotlowitz tries his best to guide the reader through this maze of reality and illusion. He is plainly intent on the facts of the case, but also sensitive to the pain and alienation that give rise to black preconceptions--about this incident and the criminal justice system in general. “The Other Side of the River” takes us deep inside black America, flushing out the inherited fears, personal slights and pent-up resentments that shape the color-coded lens through which many people see the world. It is a harrowing ride, and by the end, the black view of McGinnis’ death emerges so sharply that it makes a kind of sense even for skeptical white readers.

But then Kotlowitz goes one step further, suggesting, then taking it back, then suggesting again, that maybe the facts of the case don’t really matter. “There are different kinds of historical truth,” he quotes sympathetically from a book he is reading, and maybe, he echoes, “the lore [is] more powerful, more lasting than the truth.” For the blacks of Benton Harbor, evidently it is, but it’s hard to see why Kotlowitz would want to encourage the idea that racial mythology is as “true” as hard evidence. Whom does it help that McGinnis’ friends and relatives are so blinded by anger and paranoia that they will not cooperate with detectives? Who benefits when townspeople resent the local police more than the gangs destroying their neighborhoods? And wouldn’t it be better if more blacks grasped that the main problem now is white indifference--not some deliberate, calculating determination to keep them “in their place”? Kotlowitz has written an engaging, impressive book, and it is not his job to unburden people of their myths. But he is doing them no favor when he fuels their illusions or encourages us all to fudge the line between problems we can face together and fantasies that divide us.

*

Coleman’s report from black America, “Long Way to Go,” is a bigger, more ambitious book and, when it fails, a more disappointing one. A former book editor and journalist with CBS News, Coleman goes to the declining rust-belt city of Milwaukee, armed with a long list of big questions about race. What exactly have we accomplished since the civil rights era? Why are black and white still so divided, and why can’t we do more to alleviate black poverty?

Milwaukee is not a bad place to look for answers. Known for years as “the heartland of the Heartland,” it is now one of the most segregated cities in the nation, home to a solid black working class as well as a desperate ghetto that’s as bad as any. Coleman visits classrooms and housing projects; he interviews parents, befriends black elected officials and attends rallies in the city and suburbs. But unlike Kotlowitz, he has no narrative around which to structure his book, and much of it reads like a haphazard diary of his interviews. He shows little journalistic interest in the dramas that unfold in Wisconsin during his stay: a groundbreaking battle over school choice, an interesting experiment in black business ownership. His conversations with a range of blacks and whites are sometimes revealing, but they have a circular, repetitive quality, and the reality of life in Milwaukee is often obscured by the haze of his chatty musings.

What Coleman does capture is the depth of black alienation in the city, and it spills out, raw and angry, from the disorganized pages of his book. Every black he speaks with has a story of thoughtless insults or worse by whites. Every one feels like a permanent second-class citizen, and most are convinced that whites are trying to destroy them: to kill black youths with drugs and prison sentences, to suppress black children with Eurocentric schooling, to undermine the few blacks who are making it by cheating and lying to them on the job.

Coleman is a well-intentioned man with an earnest abhorrence of racism, and he is deeply troubled by the suffering and despair he unearths. He wrangles painfully with his own conscience and appeals eloquently--usefully--for a change in white attitudes. The trouble is that, like Kotlowitz, Coleman eventually gets lost in this world of black pain and resentment. He can’t hear when his own informants tell him that the problems of the ghetto are not all the fault of whites. He makes no effort to distinguish real complaints--charges white society might face and make amends for--from paranoid fantasies that only isolate blacks and undermine their efforts. The more vivid and horrifying his encounters with ghetto violence--with arrogant gang leaders and frightened kids and working-poor families watching helplessly as their children are murdered--the more he makes excuses and blames white racism and encourages blacks to do the same. His is a mistake born of sympathy, but it will do no good for black Milwaukee, and to the degree it fans people’s illusions, it is as dangerous as bigotry.

Of course, in one sense, both Coleman and Kotlowitz are right: When it comes to race, feelings can be as important as facts. Social scientists and historians make an ever more convincing case that racism is abating, and blacks as a group are making progress on all kinds of fronts. But many blacks, perhaps most, do not believe this, and no amount of change seems to ease their collective sense of hurt and rage. Irrational as it may sometimes be, this alienation is a fact of life, and no race initiative that ignores it will get very far.

What do we as a nation do about it? I don’t think anyone knows or even thinks very seriously about it, and people like Coleman and Kotlowitz do us a service when they remind us that we must, that we can’t just wish these emotions away or dismiss them as factually inaccurate. But both “Long Way to Go” and “The Other Side of the River” would be much better books had they been able to take some critical distance from the sense of grievance that still defines life in black America. Instead, both writers are blinded by their well-meaning empathy and, rather than pointing the way out of the maze, they only lead us deeper into it.