A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1998 by Timothy Noah

Cedric forges a more successful friendship with another white boy, Zayd Osceola Ayers Dohrn, who shares Cedric's enthusiasm for cutting-edge urban music. Zayd turns out to be the son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground fugitives-turned-Chicago-yuppies, whose chief (perhaps only) positive contribution to society, it seems, was raising an apparently bright, likeable, and empathetic child. Suskind portrays Dorhn, in particular, with gentle irony, and shows that even ex-radicals can make overbearing and embarrassing mothers. (At one point, she humiliates Zayd by using the word "fuck" in public on Parent's Weekend) A minor quibble: To my taste, Suskind downplays Dohrn's and Ayers' monstrous past too much, portraying it merely as outre Nowhere, for example, does he mention Dohrn's famous pronouncement about the Manson family: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach."

By the end of the book, Cedric is drifting into Brown's black clique, rejecting the warnings of Clarence Thomas ("Try to say to yourself, I'm not a black person, I'm just a persons") and his own, somewhat less doctrinaire, aspirations to integrate himself into the wider culture. Although Suskind as painted a mildly disapproving picture of Brown's army of multiculturalism facilitators -- who are shown constantly corralling students to discuss race and gender, and seem to ignore Cedric's tentative arguments against identity politics -- it seems inevitable that Cedric will end up befriending more blacks than whites as he becomes more sure about who he is. By this time, in any case, the reader feels certain that Cedric has undergone a transformation that has carried him out of the ghetto forever -- and that, despite whatever preferential treatment he's received, Cedric clearly belongs at Brown. Before you utter another word about affirmative action -- favorable or not -- please subject yourself to the pleasurable and edifying experience of reading this superb book.

Timothy Noah is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and an assistant managing editor of U.S. News & World Report.