Current Racial Situation in the U.S.

Andrew Hacker, in Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, paints a picture of a society dominated by the injustices of racism. The book is a far from hopeful portrait of the current racial situation in the United States. It is a work buttressed not only by great insight, but by pertinent and startling statistics revealing the direct and destructive effects of racism in the areas of "household income, family arrangements, child-support payments, criminal victimization, educational attainment, and fertility expectations" (233). In every instance, blacks are shown by Hacker to suffer greatly as a result of that racism.

Neither does the book offer much optimism with respect to the future of relationships between the races nor with respect to the maltreatment of blacks by overt and covert means in the future in the country. It is meant not to merely indict the white-controlled society and its racist policies and institutions, but to offer a moral appeal to whites to change their racist attitudes and practices:

A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that the coming century will see it closed. A century and a quarter after slavery, white America continues to ask of its black citizens an extra patience . . . that whites have never required of themselves. So the question for white America is essentially moral:is it right to impose on . . . [blacks] a lesser start in life and then to expect from them a degree of resolution that has never been demande

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but even in the scientific community. One of the more persistent arguments the author makes has to do with the changing attitudes of whites, especially white liberals, with respect to the failings of civil rights programs and others designed to right racial wrongs. This change is marked by a discouragement on the parts of those whites, a lessening of commitment to such programs, and, most importantly, a blaming of blacks for such failings (69-70). This attitudinal shift exposes the lack of white understanding of the rage and frustration of blacks in racist America. Whites cannot understand, says Hacker, that blacks believe they have waited too long to live in a fair and racially blind society. Racism, says Hacker, impacts with destructive effect on blacks on every level of society---in the classroom, in the pocketbook, in the home, in the workplace. This remains true despite the fact that the country and the government have been concentrating and working on righting racial injustices for decades (at least since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation), and for over a century if we consider the ending of slavery after the Civil War and the subsequent efforts to right the wrongs of the past. This dreary fact

Category: Government - C