Many people argue that the issue of race is more than black and white, but three authors with differing views discussed the subject in that context last night in Rackham Auditorium in a dialogue sponsored by the Diversity Theme Semester.
"Race in Black and White: Different Perspectives from Recent Research" featured authors Abigail Thernstrom, Tamar Jacoby and James Jackson on the significance of race in the United States and its place in the public sphere.
Thernstrom, co-author of 'America in Black and White,' argued that people who say they support race preferences because they create "the backbone of the black middle class" are wrong.
"The impact on black America is a matter of evidence, a matter of data," Thernstrom said. "This is not a question of feelings." She added that she doesn't believe in race preferences because they "are morally wrong and they don't work."
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| DARBY FRIEDLIS/Daily Author Tamar Jacoby speaks yesterday at Rackham Auditorium on race issues. |
She also said statistics on race-neutral admissions in California show that without racial preferences "more black students will actually graduate," and the steep percentage drop of minorities in the University of California system was simply a redistribution of students.
"There is a school in the United States for every student who wants to go to college, and it's more important to graduate than it is to start and drop out," Thernstrom said.
"Judging citizens by the color of their skin is indeed as American as apple pie," she said. "But the civil rights leaders wouldn't have put their lives on the line to perpetuate such a racial policy."
Jacoby, who wrote the book 'Someone Else's House,' said the United States is in a racial stalemate right now because of continuing segregation.
"Black and white, we've never gotten over that 'us versus them' thing," Jacoby said, adding that integration is "more than just physical mingling." It means the inclusion of minorities in mainstream society, she said, but more importantly, it's "achieving a a sense of a single shared American community where both blacks and whites feel at home."
The failure of integration has led to a mistrustful, "peaceful co-existence" in which black citizens have made progress, Jacoby said, but a sense of community between black and white peoples is non-existent.
"Most blacks don't feel they belong in white America, while whites don't feel responsible" for those feelings, Jacoby said. Challenges for both groups are to develop poor and isolated black communities and to "cut those cynical self-fulfilling prophecies that poison race in America today," she said.
Jackson, director of the Center for African and African-American Studies and the author of 'New Directions in Thinking about Race in America,' focused on the multiracial and multiethnic composition of the United States in the future.
"It is not a primarily black/white country," Jackson said, mentioning the range of differences within ethnic groups and that the Latino/a population will replace the black population as the largest non-white racial group within a few years.
"But informal discrimination and segregation have not disappeared," Jackson said, explaining that despite progress made with affirmative action, there still is "a magnitude of racial disparities."
Kinesiology senior Mikerra Bostic said the diverse range of opinions offered by the panel members allows unique individual perspectives to "come together collectively to identify the problem and propose solutions.
"It's impossible for one person to dictate or define a problem from one perspective," Bostic said.
03-17-99
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