uch as the disproportionately high levels of unemployment of blacks (Hacker, 1992). Also supportive are findings that nonwhite children have lower levels of income security than white children (Ozawa, 1983), the higher levels of stress experienced by blacks as a result of acculturation stress in which blacks are expected to speak and behavior in accord with white mannerisms and modes of behavior (Anderson, 1991), and the increased likelihood that black children will be raised in single-parent families.
For Hacker, the significance of these varied inequalities is that America is really the home of two and not one nation--one nation is privileged and the other is not. And, because of this fact, there is great hostility between these nations.
What is needed, Hacker states, is a new politic, one that is based upon race but which addresses and supports attempts to resolve racial conflict rather than to preserve blacks as a subordinate class to which even the poorest and most uneducated white may feel superior and receive better treatment merely by virtue of skin color.
The family in Julia Alvarez's story "The Kiss," is undergoing cultural assimilation. Although living in America now, many elements of the traditional family structure and value systems of the Dominican Republic remain strong. First, the family is strongly patriarchal.
Second, there is a devotion to the parents, especially the father; characteristic of the culture of origin, the psychoemotional bonding between the children and the father remains intense well into the girls' adult life with the father retaining undue and probably unhealthy control over his children despite the fact that they have become professional women are married and living adult lives.
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