Untitled Document

America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible: Race in Modern America

By Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom

Simon & Schuster, 1997 $32.50

Reviewed by Jeremy Beer

Memo to campus radicals: Racists ensconced at Harvard University and The Manhattan Institute. Names: Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. Proof: "Evidence reveals particularly strong cultural differences among racial and ethnic groups in the realm of entrepreneurship; some group cultures seem highly conducive to business success and some do not." Remind you of anyone? Now go get 'em.

Of course Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom are not really racists. To see what a real racist looks like, read the first six chapters of their book. Real racists lynched around 3,000 blacks between 1883 and 1927. Real racists "dragged blacks to death tied to the bumper of a car; they tortured the life out of them with a blowtorch or a hot iron; they burned them to cinders in bonfires a Mississippi paper called, with sickening humor, 'Negro barbecues.'" Real racists engage themselves in a massive self-deception that members of another racial group are not really "humans" in the fullest sense of the word.

In short, real racists are thoroughly allergic to honesty. But that is the Thernstroms' chief crime - which, as the Graglia Affair has convincingly demonstrated, will probably get them called nothing but racists. But Contumacy readers know better.

Starting with an extensive review of the dismal situation of blacks in the era of Jim Crow, the Thernstroms proceed to document extensively the rise of the black middle class, the precipitous decline of white racism, and the extension to blacks of complete equality under the law. It is a story, as they note, which is not very popular today. The current generation of "civil rights" leaders has little to gain from success stories.

But even less popular is the fact that most of the economic, legal, and social progress which blacks have enjoyed in this century took place well before that complicated array of court rulings, laws, and bureaucratic regulations that is commonly called "affirmative action" was put in place. In 1940,

An institutionalized regime of racial preferences and quotas prevents honest discourse on the causes of social and economic differences between groups while at the same time shining a spotlight on those differences. As a cure for what ails us, it is doomed to fail.

black males had a median annual income equal to 41% of the white male median. By 1970 that had jumped to 59%; 25 years later, it was only 67%; the story is similar for black females. A minuscule 1% of black families had incomes at least double the poverty line in 1940. In 1970, 39% did. In 1995, 49% did (compared to 75% of white families). And so on. If anything, blacks' economic and social gains slowed down after 1970 from their former pace; they certainly did not speed up.

Survey data shows a dramatic decrease in white racism and unprecedented integration of blacks and whites in the workplace, at school, and in neighborhoods, yet we are inundated with talk about racial tension; many politicians, writers, and scholars would have us believe that race relations have never been worse. Why the mismatch between reality and rhetoric? Because "it nurtures the mix of black anger and white shame and guilt that sustains the race-based social policies implemented since the late 1960s," write the Thernstroms, policies which have themselves contributed very little to black progress and have demonstrably detracted from racial harmony. Any reduction in black anger or decrease in white guilt would be devastating to those who make a living playing racial politics.

For all their forthrightness in discussing the failures of affirmative action, the Thernstroms are disingenuous in discussing the causes of race differences in academic achievement. They explicitly distance themselves from Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve because of what they apparently view as its racist conclusions. Thus, they do not find the concept of IQ "useful," and are quick to point out that they have no sympathy for those who think that group differences on intelligence tests - whatever the causes of those differences - are a major cause of concern.

In fact, the concepts of "aptitude," and "ability," as these terms relate to intelligence, find no home in America in Black and White. Instead, the Thernstroms choose to consistently refer, somewhat euphemistically, to "cognitive skills," as if "skills" had nothing to do with underlying "aptitude." They surely would not have us believe, say, that individual differences in athletic ability did not play a pretty big role in determining individual differences in acquired athletic skills. But apparently we are to believe this with regard to academic achievement.

All of this in order to avoid grappling with some of the uncomfortable arguments put forth in The Bell Curve, the most important book dealing with race to appear in the last quarter century at least. The concept of IQ isn't useful? Then what psychological or sociological construct is? What concept is better validated? What concept has a more massive body of empirical research behind it? What concept has a wider range of correlates, both biological and social? And what concept predicts academic or occupational success better? The Thernstroms' IQ-phobia is an unfortunate lapse in intellectual honesty, one that prevents them from really delving into the depths of the race question. Fortunately it is a lapse that is localized.