Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by James Traub

In Andrew Hacker's world, race is everything. In the real one, it's not so simple

Andrew Hacker, a political scientist not normally given to literary devices, offers the following parable in Two Nations: You are visited by an official who informs you that, owing to an unfortunate mistake, you were born white. You were, in fact, supposed to be black, and at midnight tonight you will become black, in features as well as skin, although "inside you will be the person you always were." The official represents a wealthy organization that will be happy to pay you any amount you think appropriate to compensate for this mishap over the 50 years remaining to you. How much would you consider appropriate?

Students to whom this hypothetical is put, says Hacker, tend to request around $50 million, conveying the value white people put on their own skins.

With this ingenious device, Hacker compels white readers to recognize the immensity of the gulf that separates black from white in America. Almost 50 years after Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma and almost 25 years after the Kerner Commission report, the situation of black people in America remains dire. The black unemployment rate is almost two and a half times the white rate, and the gap is growing; blacks' SAT scores are almost 200 points below scores of white students; blacks are three to five times as likely as whites to commit violent crimes-and to be victimized by them. To be black in America, Hacker writes, is "a disconsolate estate."

But most of Hacker's readers won't need to be reminded the bald facts. The real argument of Two Nations is that the racial attitude of whites is responsible for the failure of blacks-that blacks fail because whites want them to. For whites, writes Hacker, blacks constitute a psychic version of Marx's reserve pool of labor. "No matter how degraded their lives," Hacker writes, "white people are still allowed to believe they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority. No matter what happens, they can never become black.' White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence which, despite all its strains and problems, still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world."

Many other groups have satisfied this need in the past. At one time our Anglo-American founders made do with the Irish, and then Southern Europeans, Eastern European Jews, and Asians. "Whiteness" was not a biological characteristic, but a set of social attributes defined by the ruling class. The gradual absorption of these groups, many of them non-white," by the American mainstream shows that skin color is not in itself the issue. "White America has always had the power to expand its domain," writes Hacker. "However, in the past and even now, it has shown a particular reluctance to absorb people of African descent."

In other words, racism has proved to be transitory with all groups save blacks, upon whom has fallen the role of subordinate caste. Only blacks were enslaved, and the ideology of genetic inferiority that justified slavery in the face of America's formal commitment to human equality endures to this day. "There remains," Hacker writes, "an unarticulated suspicion: Might there be something about the black race that suited them for slavery?"

Like most right-thinking Americans, I have been trained to admit to almost any degree of unconscious racism; Hacker even lists this trait as one of the hallmarks of the liberal. But he presumes upon liberal guilt a little too far. "Some say quite openly," he writes, "that all too many blacks should not be bearing children." I don't even follow the syntax of that sentence. I also wonder whether if by "some" he means somebody other than David Duke. In any case, if one of his students at Queens College made a statement like that, I assume that Professor Hacker would tell him or her to marshal some evidence.

Hacker's sensitivity to the causes and consequences of racism is both the strength and the failure of this book. He knows that statistics will take him only so far, and so he ventures into territory unfamiliar to most social scientists. In a chapter titled "Being Black in America," Hacker tries to shed his "subject position," as the Marxists say, and put himself inside the mind of a black person. The ensuing chapter, "White Responses," attempts to document the conservative repudiation of race-based demands and liberals' fretful accommodation.

I don't know whether other scholars will tweak Hacker for going soft, or whether blacks will ridicule his presumption; when I mentioned the passage to a black academic, she just snickered. It seems to me that the willingness to place yourself in the position of the disadvantaged party is one thing that separates liberals from conservatives. But Hacker is aware that he may be charged with cultural trespassing, and he goes to great (I think excessive) pains to prove that he is a friendly visitor. Black writers of various ideological persuasions-Patricia Williams, Shelby Steele, and Lorene Cary-have described the difficulties, the hesitancies, the doubleness, of being black in America. Hacker describes victimization.