Still No Shades of Gray

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 29, 1999 | by Kim Asch

Two professors -- one black, one white -- began a study of integration with high hopes of finding good news. Instead, they discovered a people that remain divided by skin color.

Chauntelle Tatum is "tight" with several white girls in her American University dormitory. But her closest confidants -- and boyfriends -- are black like her.

"I don't have anything against interracial dating, if that's what you're comfortable with," says Tatum, 20, who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Fort Washington, Md. "But the guys I'm attracted to are African-American."

This doesn't surprise Barbara Diggs-Brown and Leonard Steinhorn, professors in AU's College of Communication. They recently collaborated on a book that says racial integration in America does not, and may never, exist

By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race is an unflinching work with a "broken heart," write Steinhorn, who is white, and Diggs-Brown, who is black, "for it is with little joy or enthusiasm that we reach our conclusions."

The "virtual integration" created by ER, NYPD Blue and other popular TV shows gives viewers the impression that the races are mingling all across America -- if not in their neighborhoods. "What television has done is to give white Americans the sensation of having meaningful, repeated contact with blacks without actually having it" the authors write. "Black people have become part of white people's lives, virtually."

Only the U.S. military, with blacks comprising 20 percent of its ranks, and about 5 percent of American communities, such as Shaker Heights, Ohio, can be characterized as integrated, according to the authors. And it took social engineering to make it happen. These communities illustrate that integration requires time, patience, a committed central authority, color-conscious policies and a population that is either obliged or willing to trim some of its privileges for the greater racial good -- "not a recipe most Americans readily follow," write the authors.

Prince George's County in Maryland -- a suburban Washington enclave -- is more representative of demo graphic patterns, say Diggs-Brown and Steinhorn. Despite being the first American county where income and education levels rose as the area turned predominantly black, the white population dropped from 85 percent in 1970 to 31 percent in 1997.

In most American communities, write the authors, "Black and white Americans wake up in separate neighborhoods, send their kids off to separate schools, listen to different radio stations during the morning commute, briefly interact on the job but rarely as equals, return to their own communities after work, socialize in separate environments and watch different television shows before going to sleep and starting the same process all over again."

The reasons for this separateness are complex, and the authors have refrained from "pointing fingers" -- liberals, conservatives, white politicians, black leaders and the media are "bit players in the larger theater of our nation's racial history." Fear of black crime is part of the problem, the authors say, pointing out that blacks make up 13 percent of the population but commit about half of the robberies and murders. Black teens are about eight times as likely to commit homicide as white teens.

Yet to many in the civil-rights community, "The white fear of black crime is way overblown and may be a cover for deeper prejudice," according to Diggs-Brown and Steinhorn. "Most blacks never commit a crime, and only a tiny fraction -- below 1 percent -- are ever charged with a violent crime"

What's keeping blacks and whites apart has more to do with skin color, slavery and segregation than people are willing to admit, argue Diggs-Brown and Steinhorn. Whites are tired of having to prove they're not racists and are fed up with what they see as whining by blacks, who now have many advantages.

Blacks, meanwhile, are tired of rejection. The vast majority of African-Americans have a better standard of living and more plentiful economic opportunities, but they are unable to shed the "double-consciousness" that black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois described as "the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." It's more comfortable for many blacks to live in predominantly black environments because, if their work life is defined by this double-consciousness, "they certainly don't want the rest of their lives determined by it," conclude Diggs-Brown and Steinhorn.

But doesn't the authors' close collaboration on a book about race show integration in action? They speak openly about how race has influenced their lives, as well as their relationship. Steinhorn grew up in an all-white suburb of New York and lives in an all-white suburb near Washington. Diggs-Brown was reared in an all-black area of Washington and now navigates between her predominantly white world of work and her predominantly black personal life.