(Click here to view the entire P&R issue)
A discussion of whether integration is really possible in the United States.
Part One
This arguably is the biggest dilemma facing America’s democracy. Recently, Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown, professors at American University’s School of Communication – one African-American, one white, believing that “integration is an ideal both of us would prefer to see realized in our lifetimes” – produced a book laying out, in telling-it-like-it-is fashion, why real integration (as opposed to desegregation) just ain’t gonna happen (By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, Dutton, 1999). We recommend reading their entire, well documented case. We’ve excerpted key sections (footnotes deleted) and asked a number of thinkers and activists (the two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive) to provide comments.
- “By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race” by Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown
- “The Politics of Equality” by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman
- “An Integration Scenario OR Ending the Illusion” by Herbert J. Gans
- “Viable Integration Must Reject the Ideology of Assimilation” by John O. Calmore
- “Setting the Record Straight” by Eric Mann
- “A Wake-Up Call for Liberals” by Richard Kahlenberg
- “Now We Are Engaged in a Great Civil War, Testing Whether That Nation, Or Any Nation So Conceived and So Dedicated, Can Long Endure” by Howard Winant
- “The Morally Lazy White Middle Class” by Robert Jensen
Part Two
We continue with a second set of commentaries on the excerpt we ran in the November/December issue from By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, by American Univ. professors Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown. (New subscribers and those who missed that issue can send us a SASE with 55¢ postage for a copy of the book excerpt and the commentaries, by Jerome Scott/Walda Katz-Fishman, Herbert Gans, John Calmore, Eric Mann, Richard Kahlenberg, Howard Winant and Robert Jensen.) My own view of the situation tends toward the pessimistic, I’m sorry to say. A recent poll, co-sponsored by the NAACP and Zogby International (reported in the Aug. 17, 1999, Minneapolis Star), had slightly over half of the 1001 randomly selected young adults (18-29) surveyed saying that racial separation is all right “as long as everyone has equal opportunity” (Plessy lives!) – and people tend to answer polls on racial attitudes more positively than they really feel and act on (as Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown emphasize). – CH
- “Today’s Integration Challenge” by Angela E. Oh
- “Half Full? Half Empty?” by James W. Loewen
- “Needed: An Antiwhite Movement” by Noel Ignatiev
- “Is Integration Possible? Of Course…” by Florence Wagman Roisman
- “What is the Question: Integration or Defeat of Racism?” by James Early
- “Education and Incentives to Actualize Integration” by Don Demarco
- “Should Racial Integration Be Pursued As the Only Goal?” by Joe Feagin and Yvonne Combs
- “Progress in Integration HAS Been Made” by George C. Galster
- “Unillusioned” by S.M. Miller
- “Keeping the Dream” by William L. Taylor
- “No One Even Knows What Integration Is” by John Woodford
- “The Gautreaux Experience” by James E. Rosenbaum
- “We Aspire to Integration and Practice Pluralism” by Frank H. Wu
- “Do We Still Have a Dream?” by Paul L. Wachtel
