Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America. - book reviews

National Review, June 26, 1995 by John J. DiIulio, Jr.

Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America, by Alan L. Keyes (Morrow, 414 pp., $23)

One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, by Glenn C. Loury (Free Press, 324 pp., $24.95)

Mr. DiIulio is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, and director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Management.

IN AMERICA, traditional family life and religious attachments plus economic hustle and civil rights equal material well-being and social progress. Black Americans are no exception to the rule. Today most blacks inhabit neither the Other America of relentless rural poverty nor the underclass America of inner-city ills. Look at almost any statistical portrait you wish and the positive results of the ongoing middle-classification of black America will look back at you.

Before the Second World War, about 5 per cent of blacks had a middle-class income. Today it's 60 per cent. Three-fourths of the 24.5 million blacks who live in metropolitan areas do not live in census tracts where 40 per cent or more of the resident population is below the poverty line.

Or take scholastic achievement. Over the last few decades, black illiteracy has nearly vanished. Black public-school students have made modest but steady progress as measured by average scores on several national standardized tests and by high-school completion rates. Between 1982 and 1992, the fraction of black high-school students enrolled in chemistry courses more than doubled, to 46 per cent; the fraction that took physics nearly tripled, to 18 per cent; and the fraction that studied calculus almost quintupled, to 7 per cent. Across the board, a somewhat higher fraction of whites than blacks took the toughest courses; but in each case the percentage of blacks who took them in 1992 was higher than the percentage of whites who did so in 1982.

Still, there remain deep problems within the black community. Glenn Loury and Alan Keyes are well-known, Harvard-educated black intellectuals. Loury, formerly a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, is a top-flight academic economist at Boston University. Keyes, a past president of Alabama A&M University, is a popular talk-show host and Republican presidential hopeful.

Their respective books on the condition of black America have much in common. Both men write about black America in a way that is analytically precise yet morally passionate, highly personal yet intellectually profound. Both men identify spirituality as the key to black success and the loss of Christ-centered family life as the road to black ruin. Neither suffers gladly liberal elites who persist in peddling the view that white racism explains all. But each reserves some of his harshest words for prominent conservatives whose views on black America betray (as Keyes puts it) "an appalling combination of bias, ignorance, and flawed reasoning," or who advance (in Loury's rendering) "the crudest racial generalization."

These are two of the best, most honest, most moving books about the American dilemma published since Martin Luther King Jr. stirred the nation with his dream. Five reflective pages of Loury's book are better than fifty typical "scientific" studies by policy scholars. The endnote commentary in Keyes's book (my favorite instance: black elites who push poor black mothers to have abortions turn "the logic of economic determinism from a justification for slavery into an argument for self-inflicted genocide") rings truer and burns hotter than a whole Jesse Jackson speech.

Loury believes American "society is fundamentally racialist," a word he prefers to "the more condemnatory and less informative term racist." It's 1995, yet white - black intermarriage rates remain low, residential segregation is still the norm, and "racial distinctions" condition "whom we befriend, whom we embrace." Of course, he's right. On the one hand, most Americans (65 per cent) now accept interracial dating as legitimate (unthinkable even a generation ago), flat-out worship Michael Jordan, and would love a chance to vote for Colin Powell. On the other hand, many whites hear "AFDC" and picture black welfare queens, hear "affirmative action" and think us-against-them.

I hereby nominate Loury as referee of our national debate over affirmative action. No one understands the economics of the issue better. And no one is more forthright in recognizing that preferential treatment often results in "the patronization of black workers or students," meaning "behavior that does not hold blacks to the same standard of expected accomplishment as whites, because of the belief that blacks are not as capable."

But Loury stresses that neither the perverse consequences of preferential treatment, nor the facts about crime, nor the data on the white - black IQ gap furnish any intellectual or moral excuse for ignoring the degree to which poverty and other ills remain concentrated among disadvantaged blacks. In particular, if you're a conservative who eschews "a more complete social integration than has yet been achieved," or would be content simply to forget, blame, or cast off "those who now languish at the bottom of American society," then you need to hear the gospel according to Glenn.