
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 31, 1995                   TAG: 9510310075
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TALKING ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE

IF TALKING about race relations is a start toward bettering them, then they must be on the road toward improvement. In the biggest response, by far, we've ever received for a Readers Forum, well over a hundred readers responded to our question, "What can we do to improve race relations?" In doing so, they mirrored nationwide interest in the subject.

Unfortunately, much of the conversation, both nationally and in the selection of responses published today on the page opposite, seems less a dialogue among people engaging each others' viewpoints than monologues by speakers talking past each other.

One part of the problem - the persistence of old-fashioned, overt white racism - is signaled by the fact that someone in 1995 could seriously advance the notion that slaves in the antebellum South were better off than their owners, as is asserted by Mabel M. France in her response.

On the other hand, most of white America would dismiss such an idea as manifestly absurd - a sign that the overt racism of an earlier age is in welcome decline. Indeed, that very decline seems a source of puzzlement for many whites, including several Readers Forum respondents: Why, they ask, do so many black people seem so focused on the grievances of a receding past, and so intent on maintaining a group identity?

But how, imply some respondents of African-American descent, could anyone forget such a legacy, especially when various vestiges remain? "Most of what I know," writes Dorothy Shelton, "comes from a race of people who held us in slavery .... Most white people who can speak or write, arrogantly, automatically and condescendingly assume they know what's best for everyone, especially blacks."

In part, the difference in attitudes may be due to this difference in historical perspective: What to much of white America are now-corrected wrongs of a past era is to much of black America the central theme of 500 years on this continent.

But history is not the only source of difference in perspective. Another is the simple demographic fact that in America today whites outnumber blacks eight to one, as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson notes in "The Paradox of Integration," in the Nov. 6 issue of The New Republic.

Public-opinion polls of white attitudes, Patterson reports, have shown a decline in agreement with racist statements from more than half in the 1950s to about 25 percent today. Whites see this as real progress toward marginalizing white racism; for blacks, though, it's hardly marginal when you're still outnumbered two to one by white racists - especially when the latter are overrepresented in sensitive places like big-city police departments.

Even that, however, doesn't explain a widespread belief, also echoed in the Readers Forum, that race relations are worse now than in the days of enforced segregation and pervasive, official discrimination. That, says Patterson, may result from the failure of both races to meet the rising expectations of the other, an ironic result of the integration that has forced both to concede the full humanity - thus the full moral responsibility - of the other.

Rising expectations can also inspire better performance - and a call for better performance in trying to understand each other at a personal level is another theme in several responses today. This may well be the answer ultimately, so long as it does not imply a rejection of public and collective efforts to improve race relations.

by CNB