By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race. - Review - book reviews

Reason, Dec, 1999 by Michael W. Lynch

Some learn their lessons early. Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown describe a 1997 brouhaha at American University. It was election time, and the school paper had failed to endorse the president of the Black Student Alliance for vice president of the student government. It ran an op-ed piece by her criticizing the paper's position and made the mistake of running an unrelated editorial cartoon of two baboons complaining about animal testing under it. This prompted black students to protest, American University's president to declare the decision to run the cartoon "morally repugnant," and the newspaper editors to publicly apologize, while privately insisting that there was no racial content to the decision to run the cartoon.

By now we all know the drill: Black expressions of outrage trigger concessions from contrite and cowering whites. Whites are no different from other people: They prefer to be neither cowering nor contrite. Since they are never sure what will trigger outrage, it's just easier to avoid unscripted, and hence unsafe, interactions with unknown blacks. Write Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown: "Whites see so many racial double standards that they would prefer not to deal with them at all. Most whites choose their words carefully and are always amiable and polite when around blacks. But self-conscious civility is an effort, and it's just plain easier to avoid blacks altogether." Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown conclude that "black and white Americans [have learned to] accommodate one another in the public spheres that require interaction, but remain distant in the private spheres that involve choice or any form of intimacy."

Thus we arrive at a paradox. In a country that celebrates color blindness as an ideal, the only spaces in which Americans can live without thought to color - be they neighborhoods, offices, or social clubs - are nonintegrated. This is true for both blacks and whites.

What's the problem, if this is all a product of choice? Integration may have been the stated goal of the civil rights movement, but isn't desegregation the most that public policy can hope to achieve in a free society? And it's not as if segregation is being pushed on blacks. Journalist Tamar

Jacoby, author of the 1998 book Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration, notes that in 1962 "a black man defending integration risked looking like a chump." Integration may have been the rhetoric used to woo liberal whites, but in Northern black neighborhoods, a year before the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights movement was already about black power.

By the 1990s, even black candidates for statewide office were openly redefining integration. "Integration is not about sitting next to white people or going to the same school," Jacoby quotes Georgia gubernatorial candidate Andrew Young as saying in 1990. "It's about having equal access to the resources." In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson observed: "Even though the majority of African-Americans still favor ethnic integration, educated and middle-class African-Americans have largely abandoned it in favor of promoting ethnic pride and developing their own communities. There has been a return to the old Southern doctrine of separate and equal, as long as it is truly equal, at least for the middle classes."