Excerpt from Book
Preface to the Paperback Edition Much has happened since this book went to press in early 1997. Perhaps most important, President Clinton launched an "initiative" designed to "promote a national dialogue on controversial issues surrounding race," appointing the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin as head of an advisory board. The appointment of Dr. Franklin put the issue of racial change -- the central question in our book -- squarely on the table. "Every time people take a breath," Franklin has said, "it's in terms of color." As he described it, the brutal murder of a black man in Jasper, Texas, in June 1998 was "not all that much of an aberration. We have at least several incidents like that every year." This is a view very different from our own. From the response of citizens in Jasper and across the country, it was clear that this sort of incident now evokes horror among blacks and whites alike. Implicitly or explicitly the question of change runs through every debate on race. John Hope Franklin is not alone, of course, in his pessimism. In July 1998, Bill Cosby's wife, Camille, writing on the murder of their son, described racism as "omnipresent and eternalized in America's institutions, media and myriad entities." It's certainly easy to get discouraged, and Camille Cosby had special reason for bitterness. But such misguided despair, we believe, threatens further progress. If racism is truly ubiquitous and permanent, then racial equality a hopeless project -- an unattainable ideal. Gloom becomes a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, both deep pessimism and complacent optimism seem to us unwarranted. America in Black and White has generated considerable controversy. Unfortunately much of that controversy results from a misrepresentation of what we say. For instance, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis accused us of believing that "America's race problem has been substantially solved." That is not what we believe, nor is it what we said. America remains a very color-conscious society, and true racial equality is a dream. There has been much progress, and there is still much to do. For instance, in 1964 only one in five white Americans had any black neighbors; today the figure is three out of five, a national average that includes whites living in states like Utah and Vermont where black residents are rare. And yet of course one needs only to walk the streets of, say, southeast Washington, D.C., to know that racial isolation is not a thing of the past. In part, despair is the product of misguided expectations. We are passionate advocates of integration, and yet it's unrealistic to expect that African Americans will one day be uniformly distributed across the residential landscape, such that they are 12 percent of every census tract. No other strongly defined group is so scattered. In the Boston area, Jews are concentrated in Brookline, Armenians in Watertown, Portuguese in Fall River, Cambodians in Lowell, Hispanics in Lawrence, and so forth. Again, this is not to say racial hostility plays an insignificant part in where blacks live; but one needs always to ask where we've been, how far we've come, and where we're likely headed. James Q. Wilson has described America in Black and White as a work that supports, with facts, what most people really believe -- namely, there is both good news and bad. The good news, though, has been greeted with a measure of outrage that perhaps we should have expected. "Virtually the entire civil rights leadership," Washington Post columnist William Raspberry has noted, "has been hellbent on proving that both the passing of the era of oppression and the dawning of a new era are myths....It has become a virtual heresy in black America to acknowledge progress....When Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom write...that the black condition, white attitudes and race relations have all improved dramatically, it isReview Quote
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chairman, Department of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the state of race relations.Review Quote
Jim Sleeper The Wall Street Journal May be the most far-ranging, information-rich analysis of our seismic racial shifts....Review Quote
Linda Chavez The Chicago Tribune [America in Black and White] promises to become the standard reference book on contemporary race relations.Review Quote
Roger Lane The Philadelphia Inquirer On their chosen issue [the Thernstroms] have served a high hard one, a statistical missile into the other court. It will take more than rhetoric to answer them.Review Quote
Thomas Sowell Forbes A very through history of contemporary race relations and racial policies in the United States....America in Black and White is a penetrating analysis, as well as a superb history. It should be "must" reading for anyone concerned about race relations in America.
In a book destined to become a classic, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom present important new information about the positive changes that have been achieved and the measurable improvement in the lives of the majority of African-Americans. Supporting their conclusions with statistics on education, earnings, and housing, they argue that the perception of serious racial divisions in this country is outdated -- and dangerous.
This wide-reaching survey of race relations in America over the past 50 years takes a controversial stance: that the perception of serious race divisions in this country is outdated--and dangerous.Review Quote
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.