Customer Reviews

Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle For Integration

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"If you can't call a black thug a thug, you're a racist." Newsweek reporter Tamar Jacoby poses the kind of questions that makes well-meaning white liberals flinch. But it is these people, I think, she is trying to prod to finish the work their forebears began so well.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s accomplished so much that by the early '70s the goal seemed in sight. Jim Crow was dead, and it must have seemed that one more push would bring America to racial equality.

And we've been stalled on the edge of that dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. Nothing much since then has panned out. Jacoby wonders if we haven't abandoned the dream altogether. What would Martin Luther King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? Can we claim to be honoring his legacy, which had integration (of hearts and minds as well as bodies) as its goal, while we chant new mantras of separationism?

In America today there's bitter resentment against what is seen as "special treatment." About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder."

"Just what accounts for this new resentment is not easy to untangle," writes Jacoby, "but it is not always the same as out-and-out bigotry. A white man who thinks a black woman on welfare should get a job may in fact be responding to her color, voicing an ugly and unthinking assumption about black attitudes toward work. Or he may be reacting to something he didn't like in the racial rhetoric of recent decades: the claim that white society is responsible for the problems blacks face. Thirty-five years of color-coded conflict have taken a huge toll on both sides, and fairly or not the showdown has left many whites embittered. Their feelings may be an obstacle to harmony, but they are not necessarily prejudice in the conventional sense."

What have we learned? Jacoby writes, "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that."

But, as Jacoby writes, "That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is a long, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."

Jacoby's ultimate tough question is this: Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?

Tamar Jacoby carefully descibes how the ideals of integration gave way to divisive emphasis on diversity. Her journalistic explaination of public policies from the 60's, 70's and 80's coupled with thought-provoking analysis of their outcome, provides the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the path we've traveled over the past 40 years. I recommend this book to anyone interested in history, public policy and race issues. I think her book is beautifully written.

To summarize, Tamar Jacoby's book is compelling and blatantly honest. Perhaps it is too honest for some people to handle. Race relations and the successes and failures of public policy were analyzed in several US cities. Having grown up in the NY area, I found her take on NY incidents to be insightful and brutallly candid

Growing up in Detroit in the 1970's, I had no concept of what a suburb was until some of my friends started moving out of the city. Their parents moved there primarily for the better schools. Once I started visiting them, I begin to wonder why everything out there was so nice and new, while things in the city were so run down and increasingly blighted. This book provides the best description I've ever read of the events that led to Detroit's demise. I encourage anyone who's interested in the problems of urban America to read this book.

In Someone Elses House, Tamar Jacoby lucubrates on many of the root problems that plague racial relations in America today. Wisely, she limits her scope within this vast arena to Black--White affiliations and geographically, she confines the effort to a comparison of New York City, Detroit, and Atlanta. Most of the trouble she discusses can be traced back to giving unmitigated credence to blatantly stupid ideas.
Each citys section devotes ample time to one of the metropolis long serving mayors. In New York City, John Lindsey is portrayed as an impeccably intentioned, dedicated public servant encumbered with an overwhelming streak of naiveté. Based on mountains of evidence, nobody can question his sincere commitment to racial reconciliation or to improving the quality of life for black citizens too long held back by endemic discrimination, but the vagaries he chose to rectify the situation severely compounded the situation. By listening to the loudest black radicals, rather than the intelligent but more tempered individuals, (tragically initiating a trend that has accelerated until today) genuine progress was sacrificed to attempt unobtainable placation. Ms. Jacoby does not lay all the blame at NYCs charismatic mayors feet; indeed there was plenty to go around. The White House, the all-powerful Ford Foundation, the psittacine major media, and a host of other allegedly liberal players either shared Lindseys unreasonable hopes or postulated that appeasement would be far easier to deliver than improvement.
Detroit is shown as a failure in every regard and much of the blame goes directly to the citys entrenched Mayor Coleman Young. He is limned as a racist/separatist who advanced the most radical elements of the Black Power movement. While spuriously claiming to have the best interests of their fellow black citizens at heart, Mayor Young and these thugs he countenanced made life a living hell for honest lower class back citizens. His open hostility to whites drove many business out of town leaving scores of unemployed poor black people behind with no way to reach the jobs in the suburbs. By declaring war on his own police department, he empowered criminals, and while a majority of perpetrators may have been black, so was a substantial majority of the victims. Sadly, even though Coleman Youngs near-eternal reign finally came to a close, Detroit still has not been able to put all its pieces back together, and long smoldering racial tensions remain strained.
Atlanta is clearly shown to be the most successful of the three profiled cities; yet it comes across as far from a model of harmonious interracial coexistence. Mayor Andrew Young lacked the hateful separatism of Detroits Young and displayed a firmer grasp of reality than New Yorks Lindsey; still he strayed from Martin Luther Kings dream and implemented dubious racial counting. After a decade of affirmative action, Ms. Jacoby documents how little concrete progress was made. She also adequately evaluates the damage done by this well-meaning problem. She writes of the resentment toward those who achieved status or jobs based soley on skin color. She discusses the defeatism that afflicted many blacks who knew that their qualifications were not the source of their success or some case not even of interest to their employers. Most interestingly, she recounts fraudulent cases of alleged black companies that served as fronts for dishonest white businessmen and provides evidence that a handful of black companies reaped the vast majority of affirmative action's spoils.
If the tome has a drawback it plods on occasion. The 600+ page work would probably have been enhanced by a 100 page edit--at least half of which should have come from the Atlanta section. Considerable information about the citys leap forward since the mid-1980s was interesting but not directly relevant.
While maintaining impressive objectivity throughout the historical reporting, Ms. Jacoby obviously has a firmly help point of view on race relations, and at no time does she attempt to obfuscate her convictions. She closes with a series of common sense recommendations and truthfully advocates acculturation, mentoring, and a valuing of individuality over group labeling. While most proponents of these proven techniques are conservatives who generally defensively suggest them while fighting to prove they are not racists, Ms. Jacobys overall political leanings are not on display here. She is to be commended for unapologetically putting forth such ideas. There is nothing racist about calling upon everyone to do his her or best, and giving one his or her own identity is more respectful than herding people together into some artificial category. While these opinions may appear revolutionary and controversial today, Tamar Jacoby is not the first person to call for judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

...this book was dissapointing.

It tries to be a complication of three "case studies" in racial harmony: New York, Detroit, and Atlanta. While it is surprising that someone who worked for the New York Times (on the editorial page, no less!) would write a book that highlights the failure of liberal policy to further the cause of racial harmony, it lacks cohesiveness & depth. It reads like a bunch of daily newspaper articles loosely stitched together--no foresight, no hindsight. There are detailed accounts of the day-by-day happenings of important events, but very little effort is given to tying these events into the big picture. Indeed, there were times I got very frustrated, because she would take 25-50 pages to explain an event in excruciating detail, then wrap it up with some statement like "But this event wasn't very important anyways."

There are no proper notations, either. The citations are just listed in the appendix, with a general page reference. This is a real shortcoming, as you never know whether or not a given statement will have a citation. If you're using this book for secondary research, beware!

Lastly, there are occasions where the author either contradicts herself, or appears to contradict herself with an ambiguous statement.

My opinion is that the author was well-intentioned, and this is an important subject, but the book fell victim to very poor editting. If more time and effort had been spent in making the book flow better, have greater depth, proper citations, and fewer errors, it (would have been) a lot better.

As well meaning as this book appears to be, it has, built-in into it, a fatal flaw: It is a solitary white view talking down "from on high" to black people about black people's role in the race problem. It is, as are all discussions about race in the U.S., a narrative told completely from the very much inherently distorted white-centric point of view.

To the extent black views are reflected in this book at all, they are the stereotypical white re-interpretations of what "whites think" blacks are feeling and thinking. However, all of these unnecessary after-the-fact mental gyrations of what black views are "suspected to be" created mostly out of whole cloth from deep within this white darkness is done unconsciously by the author who clearly does not recognize it for what it is: unconscious pontificating that is the last, but the most profound expression and reflection of white privilege: the right always to define the playing field, to shape any threatening discussions, especially those where white racism might be implicated.

Although the index to this book refers to "bloc voting," "black militants," "Black power," the "Black Panthers," and Louis Farakkan, you will be hard pressed to find a single reference to "white racism," or even "racism," not to mention, "white power," "white resistance, or even the commonly used and more acceptable "white backlash?" Except for the names of two authors, "white" does not even appear in the index. There are references to "the old bigotry, to polls that show vast improvements in "majority attitudes," and of course references to "well-meaning whites who think they are helping race relations by "encouraging black identity politics," etc.

How can anyone serious about racial issues in the U.S., take such a one-sided book seriously?

It may come as a surprise to this author that most blacks feel about integration the way Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. felt about it days before his death, and as he expressed to Harry Belafonte just before he was murdered. According to Belafonte (on the Bill Maher show) King said that "blacks integrating with whites is like integrating into a burning house": the moral foundation has been so eroded by a half millennium of racism, that there just is not much left to be integrated into? And while I can no more speak for all blacks than the author can, Dr. King's comment certainly expresses how I feel more than the misrepresentations in this book.

Where the author got this cockamamie idea that blacks are dying to be included in the white mainstream is simply baffling and mystifying, and I believe is born of willful white blindness, arrogance, and yes, indeed due to residual white racism. All one has to do to discover the truth about what black people really think and feel is to ask them. Or, better yet, allow them to participate in the national dialogue on race. But, of course to do that would violate one of the unwritten rules of American racism: Never allow non-whites (but especially not blacks) an authentic voice in the national conversation on any issue, but especially not on an issue as sensitive as race.

Simply because Blacks and Native Americans have been carefully screened outside the "all white circle," does not mean that we do not in principle still consider ourselves full stakeholder in this American land and in a non-racist dream about this nation's possibilities: Our forefathers blood has been spilled in every war since the country's inception. We do not need white permission to make choices about whether we consider it a privilege to "be included in the white only main stream." No matter what the conventional racist view is, we do not, and have never, seen America as a "white only country." No matter how lowly our position in America's racial caste system may be, America still remains "our country too." The psychological boundaries of this nation do not stop just at white skin.

The idea that the only choices we have is to integrate into a "burning house" or forever remain national lepers, is the author's fanciful and wishful delusions oozing out from deep within a congenitally afflicted racist mind. Perhaps this author has been whistling pass the "white supremacist graveyard" one time too many, as maybe she did not noticed that blacks and native Americans are not the only ones who are taking a pass on the integration offer: Hispanics, now the largest emerging non-white minority, are also "taking the pass." In large measure that seems to be what the immigration issue is all about. The grand white lament today is: Why are all these people choosing not to assimilate?

And the answer is: Because morally there is very little left to assimilate into. White racism has left a morally scorched earth as the foundation for integration. Would whites want to integrate into such a burning house? I doubt it.

Anyone who fails to get this very important point is not qualified to speak for, or even speak about, the black perspective on race in America. All due respect to the author, this book reflects the "safe route" to racial discussions: Leave all authentic non-white views out.

Two stars

An incredible book, that details the struggle for integration in New York, Detroit, and Atlanta. Jacoby's prose make a possibly boring subject into a pageturning story. I am only eighteen, and I read this book in three days.

Ms. Jacoby appears to believe that what holds black people back is their own shortcomings and the bigotry of some white people. I find missing any comprehension that when the people in power have discriminated against another, mostly powerless group for hundreds of years that what results is a dramatic imbalance of power. Racism in this country has resulted in a system of white priveledge that still today gives many white people an advantage over black people. She can easily fault black leaders for their initiatives when she doesn't recognize that what blacks are trying to overcome is a basic imbalance of power. Why do we need affirmative action, she seems to ask, when blacks are held back by their problems and by a few white bigots? If the question is how do we achieve integration at all levels of the power structure in this country, then the answer might be different. Jacoby never tells us what her personal beliefs are, appearing to tell what she thinks is the truth. But there are many ways to interpret the same set of "facts," and she has clearly interpreted some things using her own preconceptions.

I had a rare chance to watch a book develop from research to writing to publication in this case. This book affords insights about the reasonable "middle" on race, America's most enduring and painful issue. I hope, as the author does, that we can move beyond racial animosity.