Word: stephane
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Into this fray comes America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster; $32.50) by noted Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom and his scholar wife Abigail. The couple are the latest in a string of former liberals come round to denounce affirmative action. But unlike more polemical authors, the Thernstroms pin their arguments to seven years of research, modeling their approach on Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 benchmark racial survey, An American Dilemma. Their prose is cool, not overheated, and their 704-page book is stuffed with tables, charts and graphs tracking black progress over the past 60 years...
...this at least try to plumb that point? "You may be right," Abigail Thernstrom told TIME. The Thernstroms were "sufficiently tired" of the voice of black discontent that they chose not to get to the bottom of it. "I think that's a fair criticism of the book," Stephan says. "We didn't have the energy, among other things. That's an arguable failing on our part." Had they the energy or inclination, it might have made their arguments more persuasive...
This connection is lost on Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, who choose to magnify gains blacks have made and minimize the sizable gaps that remain. Black progress has been neglected, they tell us, while poverty, unemployment, welfare dependency and crime have been exaggerated in order to feed "the mix of black anger and white shame and guilt that sustains the race-based social policies implemented since the late 1960s...
...task is daunting, but even as Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's new book upends liberal dogma on racial progress, several other white authors, all liberals to some degree, are making their own fresh attempts to grapple with America's racial dilemma--specifically, with the equivocal attitudes of whites toward African Americans. Unfortunately, none of them offers much in the way of innovative prescriptions...
Incessant repetition of myths does not, of course, make them true. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom demonstrate in their newly published book that the economic rise of blacks was in fact more rapid in the '40s and '50s than in later decades...