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

The cost of America's nonintegration, therefore, is borne by blacks, many of whom didn't choose their isolation. And therein lies the rub: Responsibility for integration, in the view of Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown and other intellectuals, largely rests with whites, whose racism and unwillingness to live among blacks and accept blacks on their cultural terms are the main factors preventing real integration. Yet whites, for the most part, don't see the lack of integration as a problem.

I imagine that a significant proportion of whites - especially young, educated, urban-oriented whites - would prefer, in the abstract, to live more-integrated lives. In an interview, Fulwood says he thinks whites currently want integration more than blacks. But at what cost? Not a very high one. And since crossing the black-white color line can be quite costly for all involved, I share Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown's racial realism, up to a point. Whites simply aren't likely to see the world in Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown's terms and make extraordinary efforts to live integrated lives. In fact, it seems that even Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown aren't likely to do so.

So where are we left? Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown call for a racially honest America where blacks and whites basically coexist, similar to the environment at the bifurcated Mississippi school they describe. They argue that blacks should be separated from the minority coalition and granted special status for affirmative action purposes. In essence, they would have us recognize that blacks are a special case, and return affirmative action to its remedial roots. It's a tepid ending, incidental to the rest of the book.

I'm not quite so pessimistic. The major weakness of Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown's book is their insistence on interpreting everything in the worst possible light. This is probably a function of their one-time idealism and the sources they use. Newspapers report conflict. Racial conflicts, such as school board fights and hate crimes, are much more likely to get ink than signs of racial harmony, such as interracial friendships and marriages. The academic race specialists who carry out the studies on which Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown rely also have an interest in focusing on problems, especially problems that can be plausibly blamed on society at large. (For a lucid treatment of this issue, I recommend Shelby Steele's latest book, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America.)

I see America's rhetorical and "virtual" integration, as reflected on TV, as a sign of progress, even while I find the NAACP's threat to force it by lawsuit absurd. Theatrical and other public displays of racial harmony and mixing, however inaccurate in any given situation, may represent a standard to which an American audience aspires, perhaps even a model for eventual behavioral integration. They may even be the reason why I, emerging from a home that didn't place any independent value on integration, nevertheless find myself living what I consider an integrated life. I'm partial to John Updike's formulation, quoted by Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown: "An ideal colorblind society flickers at the forward edge of the sluggishly evolving one." Perhaps I'm still under an illusion. But I'm living it. I've already made my choice.