Word: racisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...addition, a double standard is at work in the Thernstroms' assertions about black shortcomings and white attitudes. For blacks, the Thernstroms have concrete data--marriage rates, test scores and employment figures. But a major part of their argument--that white racism has largely disappeared--rests on the answers that whites give pollsters when queried about intolerance. It's an axiom of the business that people give pollsters answers they believe to be socially acceptable. "Even Jesse Helms wants a black neighbor--as long as it's Colin Powell," says political scientist Andrew Hacker...
...authors certain that an America devoid of racism--and of affirmative action--would match their dream. "The fabric of society is very complicated," allows Abigail. Why, for example, did so many negative forces--high crime, low test scores, family breakdown, joblessness, poverty--worsen for black communities in the years after 1970? The book suggests it was ugly black rhetoric, ensuing white anger and the failures of affirmative action that accelerated pathologies in black communities--not the rise of drug use, or turmoil over the Vietnam War, or changing sexual mores, or a general cynicism about authority, which affected society...
Most cancers, while not curable, respond to treatment with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Each of these procedures exacts a price in pain and suffering. Racism is the cancer on the American body politic. There are no sure cures, and treatments specifically calling for the inclusion of those long barred by reason of race can be painful...
...lack of jobs as the key to black poverty and social disarray. The Thernstroms dismiss Wilson's work as simply "plausible." Some blacks have made it, they note; let those on the bottom emulate these role models. But even those blacks who have achieved are bitter about the racism they faced on the road to success. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, reminded that his people had come a long way, responded, "But so have other people come a long way...People say we are better off today. Better than what...
...barriers of race may be less blatant, but they are no less formidable. Hailing a change in racism's form as its eradication may provide short-term comfort. But it ensures rather than avoids long-term disaster...