Shipler - A country of strangers : blacks and whites in America

Discussions of race are imprisoned by words. The words whose meanings we think we know label and circumscribe peoples and ideas, honeycombing the untamed world with an illusion of clarity and order. As if that were not enough, meanings shift constantly.

Tolerance is an example. Long understood by its first definition in the dictionary (recognizing and respecting others), it is now tainted in many minds by its second and third definitions (leeway for variation from a standard and the capacity to endure hardship). Understandably, black Americans do not want to be tolerated as one tolerates deviance or pain. Anyone who advocates tolerance today risks being misunderstood as grudgingly accepting the unpleasant qualities of another group. Integration is the same. Once the nations noblest goal, it is currently taken by some to imply assimilation and loss of identity. Words that seemed so dependable have become little mines planted along our way.

Since words are my only tools, I approach this endeavor in a spirit of careful humility, mindful of how difficult it is to capture the racial reality of America within the matrix of our vocabulary. I use tolerance rarely, but I do so in its most generous meaning. I devote the first chapter to exploring the dynamics surrounding integration. I employ the latest versions of the self-labeling that has evolved, just in the course of my lifetime, from colored people to Negroes to blacks to African-Americans to people of color, the last embracing all who are not white. Since we seem to be stuck in what may be a period of transition, when black and African-American are still used interchangeably, I follow that style, mixing the two terms without endorsing any of the passion that often attaches to one or the other. Not many years from now, I imagine, this language will seem antiquated, perhaps even offensive, as the ear is trained to hear another lexicon.

Even the concept of race is suspect. It is too clear, too categorical to reflect the genetic whirlwind that has deposited humanity at the brink of a new millennium. Too much mixing has occurred to satisfy physical anthropologists that one or another person falls wholly within one or another racial box. Furthermore, those who call themselves white and those who call themselves black (or African-American) imagine their differences not merely as biological but as ethnic and cultural. Many prefer African-American precisely because it has an ethnic and cultural connotation, not only one of skin color or race. Peoples images and prejudices, which may be triggered by the physical characteristics of the others body, range far beyond the racial, or biological, and well into realms of ethnicity. I succumb to the necessity of using familiar words: black, white, racial. But much, perhaps most, of what we call racial conflict between blacks and whites has all the hallmarks of ethnic conflict. It does not always rely on a belief in genetic inferiority; indeed, it has become fashionable for white bigots to postulate a black cultural inferiority. Racial, then, is meant to include the swarm of ethnic tensions and interactions that infest the black-white relationship.

White is also an unsatisfactory term, for it encompasses a multitude of ethnic groupings and socioeconomic classes that relate to blacks in various ways. Most Americans of Hispanic origin are classified as white, but I use the term to mean whites of European descent, who still form the countrys majority, hold the power, and set the tone of the black-white aversion.

This book focuses on blacks and whites and lets the countrys other ethnic and racial divides fade into the background. Volumes could be done on the prejudice and hardship faced by Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians and on discrimination among whites of various ethnicities; these have also been crucial in defining the American experience. But the fountainhead of injustice has been located between blacks and whites, and that legacy remains the countrys most potent symbol of shame. Nothing tests the nation, or takes the measure of its decency, quite like the rift between black and white. No improvement would be felt as broadly as that between black and white; fundamental progress in that arena would reverberate throughout the other ethnic problems of the land.