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ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE | PAGE 1, 2 3
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If "A Dream Deferred" is a theoretical attack on orthodox racial thinking, Tamar Jacoby's "Somebody Else's House" is resolutely historical. Jacoby, a former New York Times reporter who now works with the centrist Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, examines the racial history of three cities -- New York, Detroit and Atlanta -- in an attempt to find out why the high integrationist hopes of the civil rights movement were dashed. Her detailed history, based largely on newspaper and magazine accounts and extensive interviews, is an incisive, if dispiriting, portrait of the consequences of the collision of black militancy with white liberalism.

Jacoby draws different morals from each of the three cities she studies. New York in the idealistic Lindsay years, with its divisive fight over school decentralization, represents "a lesson in the limits of goodwill and sixties-style top-down engineering." Detroit, where bitter racial divisions, a long battle over busing and the combative posturing of Mayor Coleman Young all contributed to white flight and black rage, "is a study in the consequences of choosing against integration." And Atlanta, which despite apparent progress remains profoundly separated along racial lines, poses the question "Is real integration possible in America today?"

But if the lessons are different, the mistakes Jacoby believes were made were the same. The same pattern unfolds again and again: a failure of leadership, both by well-meaning but misguided whites and demagogic blacks. White leaders, anxious to achieve immediate racial progress in the wake of riots and widening racial tension, handed a blank check to the black community. But the only leaders who stepped forward were militants, who were often more interested in racial posturing and amassing racial spoils than in working together with whites to solve the black community's problems from the bottom up. These angry -- often conveniently angry -- exponents of Black Pride, Jacoby argues, didn't really represent the feelings of the majority of blacks, but their willingness to stand up to the white man made them attractive, especially since "constructive, gradualist leaders were in short supply." So the Al Sharptons and the Malcolm Xs knocked out the Bayard Rustins and Martin Luther Kings, and set-asides and busing were enshrined as morally untouchable policies. When whites protested these policies, they were accused of racism. Intimidated and increasingly resentful, they literally and figuratively withdrew, leaving -- in the case of Detroit -- the virtually all-black inner city to wither away. Race relations, poisoned by mutual mistrust and irresponsible leaders, never recovered.

At times, Jacoby seems to me to push her thesis too far. For example, she describes how Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson "was determined to overhaul what he saw as a racist (police) force, no matter what the consequences for the city." The chief Jackson appointed was an old college roommate with no police experience, whom Jackson was forced to get rid of after he was connected in the press with various scandals. Nonetheless, according to Jacoby, Jackson had sent a message to the city's business elite "that he was more concerned with curbing the police than pursuing criminals," particularly black ones. In support of this, she quotes two merchants complaining about an unresponsive police force. "Within a few years, the growing lawlessness forced Jackson to crack down, significantly increasing the police department. But by then it was too late; as in Detroit, the crime rate in Atlanta was out of sight -- by the end of the decade, the worst in the country."

Jacoby implies that Jackson's race-mongering "reform" of the police department was responsible for Atlanta's soaring crime rate. But she doesn't offer any hard evidence for this correlation. It might be that the crime rate would have taken off no matter what Jackson did. Such arguments sometimes give "Somebody Else's House" a tendentious feeling, as if she had made up her mind in advance about her conclusions. In general, however, Jacoby's interpretations of the facts seem legitimate.

The particular liberal orthodoxy Jacoby is challenging is the belief that Black Power, for all of its excesses and corruptions, was essentially a healthy, necessary and constructive "stage" that blacks had to go through -- a salutary muscle-flexing, as it were. Jacoby admits that it was probably inevitable, but she emphatically disagrees that it was either healthy or constructive. Black Power, she argues, was all hat and no cattle, a gestural politics that simply empowered a small handful of connected blacks while leaving the impoverished and downtrodden inhabitants of the ghetto to fend for themselves. And by alienating that majority of whites who were open to the possibility of genuine integration, Black Power prevented the kind of deep coalition-building that might have brought the two races together.

A wearying sense of déjà vu runs through this book. Tawana Brawley, O.J. Simpson, Ebonics, the African-American Baseline Essays, Colin Ferguson's "black rage" defense -- all of these notorious recent racial embarrassments, with their cast of fools, knaves and opportunists, were prefigured in the '60s and '70s. It's worth reading "Somebody Else's House" just for its lacerating portrayal of New York's school crisis, an episode that permanently damaged relations between the city's blacks and Jews. Jacoby's account cuts through the soothing historical patina that makes idiotic racial posturing and outright thuggery seem noble after the fact. There is no nobility here, only a grotesque morass of anti-Semitism, meaningless "activism" and an utter lack of concern for the education of the children. In time-honored fashion, white liberals kowtowed to the militants. In Jacoby's account, they come across as well-meaning Neville Chamberlains of racial appeasement.

Like Steele's, Jacoby's book might be summed up as "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." "The liberal establishment, particularly the media, and much of the middle class shared (New York Jews') reluctance to say anything that might offend blacks or raise an obstacle to racial harmony," she writes at the conclusion of her study of New York. "This wasn't necessarily a bad impulse; on the contrary. But in New York and elsewhere, the concern not to look prejudiced could have disastrous consequences for race relations. By making it impossible -- unseemly and apparently bigoted -- to talk about ghetto crime or thuggish militants, the climate of opinion only made it harder to deal with the problems in the black community ... Because they did not want to look 'anti-black,' more and more whites would simply look away -- or paper over race-related problems."

In the end, like Steele, Jacoby argues that there are no quick racial fixes. She calls for acculturation, limited governmental intervention, an end to color-coding and responsible leadership -- remedies, in other words, that don't fetishize blackness, but look beyond it to our shared citizenship and our shared humanity.

But is it really possible for blacks and whites to look beyond race? And if they can do it in the street or the mall, can they do it in the bedroom? How eradicable is the scar of race? These are some of the questions explored in Howard Kohn's "We Had a Dream."

N E X T+P A G E+| Sexual healing: All you need is love?