DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9710230671

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR. 

                                            LENGTH:  120 lines

ONE NATION, STILL DIVIDED

AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE

One Nation, Indivisible

STEPHEN THERNSTROM AND ABIGAIL THERNSTROM

Simon & Schuster. 704 pp. $32.50.

LONG WAY TO GO

Black and White in America

JONATHAN COLEMAN

Atlantic Monthly Press. 451 pp. $26.50.

``Perception is everything,'' it is said in the business world. In truth, perception may not be everything but it certainly colors everything, including the issue of American race relations during the final decade of the 20th century.

According to some people, the 1990s are the worst time for black Americans since the days of slavery. To others, they are times brimming with hope that African Americans will become full partners in the American Dream. Some believe that day would have arrived by now were it not for demagogues and haters - black and white - who, as President Clinton said two years ago in another context, are never happier than when they're creating divisions among us.

That said, I commend to your notice two of the more important recent books on contemporary American race relations: America in Black and White and Long Way to Go. In very different ways, these books address one of the vital questions facing American society: What went wrong? What happened to derail race relations since the mid-1960s, to the point that our national conversation on race sinks to shouting and name-calling within a sentence or two?

Of these books, the former is far and away the more important. In America in Black and White, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom - he, a history professor at Harvard; she, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of an earlier book on affirmative action - have pulled together a significant work based upon a staggering amount of research. Their work, which strives for balance and fairness, stands up well beside an earlier landmark study of race relations, Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma (1944).

Citing statistics and studies, the Thernstroms detail how, through great effort, African Americans rose from the deadly effects of Jim Crow laws to begin laying claim to a rightful inheritance as full citizens. The authors further recount the rise of the civil rights movement at mid-century, which culminated in the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the next year.

This era, according to the authors, was the high-water mark in interracial understanding. According to a common perception today, this achievement was reached almost entirely through legal victories. But as the Thernstroms carefully note, there was another, equally important side; interracial progress between the 1940s and the mid-1960s also came about by the gradual but distinct winning over of a sense of fairness and decency in the minds of white people, who had since colonial days held all the power in America. By the mid-'60s, much promise was in the air and better days seemed to lie ahead.

But things began to unravel, according to the Thernstroms, with the introduction of paternalistic government programs and affirmative action, the former despised by many blacks, the latter loathed by many whites. Affirmative action has proved the most divisive policy enacted into law since Prohibition. Based as it is upon assumptions of blacks as helpless pawns doomed to be crushed beneath the heel of white brutes, it has led to little real progress, say the Thernstroms, and to much fraying of the nation's cultural fabric.

Still, the Thernstroms find us one nation, ``no longer separate, much less unequal than it once was, and by many measures, less hostile. Moreover, the serious inequality that remains is less a function of white racism than of the racial gap in levels of educational attainment, the structure of the black family and the rise in black crime.''

Helping fuel the perception of no progress are people - black and white - who have made lucrative careers for themselves through race-hustling: through constantly snarling aobut how ``whitey'' is always out to get us or crowing that black people are stupid and that statistics prove it. Former CBS journalist and current Charlottesville resident Jonathan Coleman encountered several such demagogues as well as the people who admire and despise them during his research for Long Way to Go.

In the early 1990s, Coleman visited Milwaukee, considered the most segregated city in America, talking to people in the neighborhoods about the city's racial situation and trying to find out how the nation as a whole went awry in interracial relations. His unusual book reads partly like ``The Education of Jonathan Coleman,'' partly like a hard-as-nails documentary, partly like the musings of Alan Alda and partly like a harrowing tour through the outskirts of hell.

To Coleman, white bigotry, egged on by Ronald Reagan and George Bush, is primarily the problem, as it colors perceptions by blacks of themselves even when whites aren't in the picture. That racism exists is beyond doubt. But it's apparent that an ingrained belief that white racism is responsible for everything bad between black and white is the lens through which all Coleman's perceptions were filtered.

The few Coleman interviewees or other persons who express the need for gradualist, conservative solutions are waved away by him with a gentle smile. What's needed, Coleman believes, is something more, and he's not quite sure what that something more is - though ``there was some evidence that some of the Great Society programs were not given enough of a chance.'' (Just which Great Society programs or how many trillions more dollars need to be poured into them, Coleman doesn't say.)

More seriously, Coleman often views his interviewees as primarily economic beings, a viewpoint he shares with his subjects and with the Thernstroms. Not surprisingly, Coleman's groped-for solutions focus upon results-oriented data on education, jobs and housing for blacks that can only show a downward spiral when applied to people who are too often encouraged by their ``leaders'' to view themselves as helpless, hopeless victims. However, had Coleman been inside any houses of prayer and seen black and white worshipers together, and then followed up with some interviews, perhaps he would have seen glimmers of hope for something beyond empty intentions and government programs.

From these two books a bare outline of the beginnings of solutions to America's race problems can be discerned. For his part, in words with which the Thernstroms would concur, Coleman states that ``if each person is willing to focus his energy on . . . searching deep inside and being courageous enough to confront, and, if necessary, change what one finds there, then maybe, just maybe, we can regain a larger sense of collective purpose, a sense of just how important it is that this human dilemma be resolved for the generations to come.'' MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia, is a senior editor at

Gale Research, a reference publisher, in Detroit. He is also the editor

of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell Kirk.''

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