By The Color Of Our Skin [Hardcover]

Barbara Diggs-Brown (Author), Leonard Steinhorn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1999

The signs of progress are everywhere-- white children want to "be like Mike," Oprah chats with millions everyday, Newt Gingrich quotes Martin Luther King. But when we look beyond the rhetoric and symbols, we find a very different reality: 70 percent of black children attend predominantly black schools; a Hispanic or Asian American with a third grade education is more likely to live in an integrated neighborhood than a black with a Ph.D.-- and the list goes on.By the Color of Our Skin is a provocative, readable analysis of race that argues three things: integration does not exist now, it was never a possibility in the past, and it will never exist in the future. Authors Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown want integration to be a reality. But their in-depth research, including polls, statistics, and powerful anecdotes about the daily lives of ordinary Americans, reveals the unfortunate truth. The book argues that the integration illusion keeps us from solving the problems of race. How did we get to this point? Why is this illusion so deeply entrenched in our society? And, if integration has failed, what should we do about race relations? In answering these questions, By the Color of Our Skin explodes one of our most powerful myths and outlines a new vision of race in America.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Professors Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown take an analytical look at American race relations, pointing out the difference between integration mythology and racial reality. While public facilities have been desegregated and black icons like Michael Jordan, Colin Powell, and Oprah Winfrey enjoy unprecedented popularity, there are still racial barriers left for blacks and whites to deal with. The authors examine the seductive imagery of integration, consider why blacks and whites view race differently, and explore the possibilities of translating some integration success stories into the broader fabric of American society. "We have no illusions that racial honesty will ever integrate our families, lives, schools, or communities," the authors write. "But we do hope that a more racially honest America can build bridges and challenge the stereotypes and images that too often guide our decisions and actions." --Eugene Holley Jr.

From Booklist

The authors, professors of communication, one black, the other white, have written a provocative and timely critique of race relations in America. They focus on both the image and reality of racial integration. The U.S. has created a grand illusion of racial comity and imminent integration. The authors contend that despite the achievements of political and civil rights movements during the 1960s, racial patterns in housing, education, and culture have made real integration all but unattainable. Desegregation is not the same thing as integration. The urban-suburban divide undercuts the goal of integration, the authors assert. The media, television in particular, have produced a "virtual integration," which many whites accept, if not prefer to the real thing. To achieve real integration requires hard work, risk, social engineering, sacrifice, etc. It also requires a more honest assessment of race relations, one that allows for peaceful coexistence, admitting the disadvantaged status of blacks and the need for remedies such as affirmative action. Vernon Ford

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525943595
• ISBN-13: 978-0525943594
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,557,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful, candid, well-written book about integration, June 1, 2000

By 

John P. Ryan (Bannockburn, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (Paperback)

This is a distinctive book about race and, in particular, the failures of integration in the United States. American University communications professors Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown document and discuss black-white relations, drawing upon social science scholarship, the media and popular culture, and their own personal experiences. The authors talk about integration and segregation not only in schools and the workplace, but also in worship, leisure, and recreational pursuits. In doing so, they provide a well-rounded but perhaps even more dismal assessment (than others) of the failures of formal, legal efforts to achieve both equality and integration.

Drawing upon their varied professional experiences, they argue that the media has helped to foster an illusion of integration. In particular, they point to the typically diverse casting of on-air television news reporters at the national and local level that suggest an interpersonal racial ease only rarely achieved. The more common view, they argue, is a society where black and white people may work together [if mostly on unequal terms], but then pass each other like ships in the night on the way home to neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly white or black. Their analysis is especially significant for large northeastern and midwestern cities, where black-white relations mostly define the race landscape.

In the end, this book challenges scholars and citizens alike to reflect honestly on our values, our residential choices, and personal practices, not just on rhetoric. Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown show us that a commitment to integration requires hard work and difficult choices, both at the personal and community levels, in ways that national rhetoric about race misses.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb. Honest, direct and well-written, September 4, 1999

By 

Vaughn A. Carney (Vermont USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: By The Color Of Our Skin (Hardcover)

The subject of race provokes more deceit, denial and dishonesty than any other issue in American life. The authors of this book explore the reality-versus-image dichotomy more analytically than any other work I've read. And they're right on the money with respect to affirmative action, which was developed as a counter-weight to racism, and those critics who declare that it gives rise to white resentment. This position is akin to using an experimental treatment for cancer, and then declaring that the treatment CAUSED the cancer. It is well settled that there was white resentment long before the words "affirmative" and "action" were ever used in the same sentence. This book should be required reading at every college in America.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a landmark book on race that is a "must" read., January 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: By The Color Of Our Skin (Hardcover)

The truth is not always pretty or palatable, but as the Bible says, it "shall set you free." That is the basic premise, and promise, of "By the Color of Our Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race," brilliantly written, argued and researched by Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown.

The 1990s have not exactly been famine years for books on race, and some of them, quite frankly, have an "attitude" and an ideological ax to grind. "By the Color of Our Skin," in contrast, gives us a stark and uncompromisingly fair and honest picture of reality, moving the reader -- with statistics, facts, and cultural and historical analysis -- across America's vast sociological landscape, to the conclusion that for all of the Colin Powells, Oprah Winfreys, Michael Jordans, and Bill Cosbys, we are surely calcifying into two separate Americas -- one black, one white.

Politicians, the media and the entertainment industries play and perpetuate a tune of integration-on-its-way-to-being-achieved, and they have "charmed" the American people into thinking that things are ultimately moving in the right direction, that all that is needed now is time. But it is precisely time that is working against us, and unless we -- to borrow a medical phrase -- take some "heroic measures," we will become two countries sharing one land.

Admittedly, the authors are not particularly optimistic that Americans will take such "heroic measures." The resistance to affirmative action makes that clear. Indeed, all the signs suggest that Americans have neither the will nor the inclination to make the necessary sacrifices. But then the question is, do we want to become like Belgium, fractured along Flemish and Waloon fault lines, or a Switzerland divided into separate national cantons? Perhaps the most we can hope for is co-existence, the authors say, but clearly Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown prefer to light a candle than curse the darkness.

For, as the authors point out, there are models for reasonably successful integration: Shaker Heights, Ohio; the Corning Corporation in New York state; the United States military. But it requires an enormous amount of work, will, dedication, and constant vigiliance to see that the disease of racism and separatism does not gain the upper hand.

The U.S. military is wise enough to understand that lives depend on racial harmony within the ranks. We should be wise enough to understand that the life -- the very survival -- of our country may depend on the same thing.

"By the Color of Our Skin" cuts to the bone of America's racial dilemma. More than any other book on the subject, it has the potential to change hearts and minds in this country, to bequeath to our children a better, more whole America. This book is the most candid, creative and refreshing treatment of the race question I have ever read. I cannot recommend it too highly.