A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Alfred E. Prettyman

Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson. New York: Broadway Books/Bantam Doubleday Dell. 1998. 355pp. $27.50 (cloth).

It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation. It is a thought that persists in the minds of many in our society who are not black. For blacks, such people are the real troubling presence in American society: those citizens who claim priority or privilege over citizens who are not white. They are identified, by some, as "nativist racists." How is such a tangled web to be unsnarled?

Perhaps President Clinton's widely advertised national conversation on race eventually will bring able hands to the task - in spite of how bogged down that conversation now seems to be in familiar economic and political oppositions and in old definitions (there is no scientific, genetic basis for the notion of "race"; it is a historically recent political and social invention to justify privilege). But we need not await that outcome.

Seemingly absent from the conversation is a critical mass of minds capable of absorbing multiple perspectives with nonjudgmental but not uncritical intelligence. Also missing are the voices of those enmeshed in the mundane frustrations and joys of mingling with Americans of different colors and cultures, those who have replaced aversion or unfamiliarity with personal friendship, even intimacy. Dispelling one's ghosts through the recognition of present, real persons requires an arduous commitment to continuous self-education.

That commitment is evident in the four recent works under review.

In Seeing a Color-Blind Future, Patricia J. Williams - a professor of law at Columbia University - gives us analytically compressed and anecdotally illuminated responses to questions she posed in these 1997 BBC Reith Lectures: "How precisely does the issue of color remain so powerfully determinative of everything from life circumstance to manner of death, in a world that is, by and large, officially 'color-blind'? What metaphors mask the hierarchies that make racial domination frequently seem so 'natural,' so invisible, indeed so attractive? How does racism continue to evolve, after slavery and after legislated equality, across such geographic, temporal, and political distance?"

Pervasive racial denial is a significant part of the problem. For blacks this means "the systemic, often nonsensical denial of racial experiences; . . . an assimilative tyranny of neutrality as self-erasure." Blacks still cannot avoid the "double-consciousness" W. E. B. Du Bois called attention to at the turn of the last century. As Williams puts it, "You need two chairs at the table, one for you, one for your blackness." But for white people, "racial denial tends to engender a profoundly invested disingenuousness, an innocence that amounts to the transgressive refusal to know." Williams says that this is not a matter of assigning blame; "it is simply to observe the way we know race, or don't."

You will find no quick solutions to the "small aggressions of unconscious racism" that Williams points out in these lectures. This does not mean that there are no solutions, as those who would prefer to throw up their hands and walk away would have us believe. Williams identifies possible solutions. But they are not quick fixes. As a beginning, "it depends upon eradicating the troublesome attitudinal divide between the paralyzing anxiety of well-meaning 'white guilt' and the smoldering unhappiness of blacks who dare not speak their minds." Those who would rise to this arduous challenge must understand clearly that, among other things, blacks are not ciphers for poverty or the subhuman. The sustained effort required to know them is not a process of exotic entertainment.

In A Country of Strangers, David K. Shipler, a former Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter, treats us to a probing anatomy of lives across the color line in the United States. It is not just one man's odyssey; as he points out, his book became "something of a family project." Ranging from lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Chicago and Birmingham, Alabama, from Detroit to Baltimore and Teaneck, New Jersey, as well as many other places, Shipler documents the lives of real people who are grappling with issues of immigration, mixing, myths, and memories of personal origins; of their images of body and mind; of their engagement with morality, violence, and power; and of the choices to be made in decoding racism, acting affirmatively, and breaking silences. He observes that "Americans make choices constantly as they try to navigate through the racial landscape. They hear or they do not hear. They speak or they remain silent. They keep a racist thought to themselves, or they translate it into behavior - overtly or covertly. They select one or another mechanism by which to control the prejudices inside them. They confront or evade, question or teach, learn or regard themselves above learning. They are not helpless in all of this, not prisoners of the past or pawns of the present. They are shaped by their surroundings, to be sure, but they also have free will. They act. They choose. And their first choice is how they listen." It is challenging and instructive to listen to Shipler's exposition of this country of strangers. Anyone who reads this book will come away with vivid examples of how to become less estranged in today's society.