How Race Is Lived in America: Pulling Together, Pulling Apart

Rating:
Summary: How Race Is Lived in America is very carefully!
Review: Editors & writers for The New York Times asked one central question: "What are race relations like today?" These are the raw stories & candid observations they found just below the surface of this country's private & public discourse on race relations.

That said hold onto you seat for a bumpy read about a subject that upsets most of us & still fills us with dread & hope.

There are 15 articles written by 15 very different reporters - each focusing on an aspect of race relations that speaks particularly to them. I cannot separate them here for you - suffice to write that each article will put you through your complacency paces, set your nerves ajangling & raise a host of old ghosts most of us wish would lay low.

How are race relations lived today? Very, very carefully & rather schizophrenically for the most part & for other parts? Pure, teeth-grinding swallowings of crow food, blundering inconsiderations - hell, they treat their dogs better! & hope - what a faint & fragile zephyr is hope!

While we may no longer have to storm into Cicero to demand equal rights to live in equally pleasant homes - we sure are determined to judge each other for the way we talk, about what we talk, the way we walk & to where we walk, even the way we say hello - the color of our skin may be the least of it!

In the end both photographers & reporters speak their piece about their piece & make peace with the process - their stories are as vital as the previous ones & just as telling as they tell about their own prejudices, foregone assumptions & epiphanies.

How Race Is Lived in America touches each & every one of us: from the farmer in the field watching Indians drive by on their way to a hunt he is no longer allowed to make to the dainty dames in Southern places who simply can't understand what all the fuss is about; to athletes whose prowess on the field is less than their will to survive; to best friends torn apart by the pressures of their cultures to laborers in bloody jobs whose blood all runs red & to anyone who sees others shrink away because of their skin color & what it symbolizes.

This is a keeper for it will take quite a while to think through the dust these reporters have raised! It is appropriate that a Pulitzer Prize has been awarded for this moving & troubling effort.

Rating:
Summary: great read
Review: How race is lived in america deals with the issues of race that we are still dealing with today and how race still does matter. The collection of new york times pieces deals with how race is played out. From race being a straign on frienships (a group of inter-racial friends making the transition from middle school to high school and two cuban friends-one white and one black-coming to america and facing different challenges) to race in the work place (looking at race relations at a tyson factory in north carolina to a black-white owned internet company). The book gives a rather good detail of where are in terms of race now.

Rating:
Summary: Can't put down
Review: I picked this up last night and couldn't put it down. Not only that, but after each chapter I just stopped and thought for a minute or two. Just incredible.
Get it and read it.

Rating:
Summary: The True Value of Courage and Strength
Review: This collage of independant stories revealed the courage of ordinary Americans doing extra-ordinary things. In each of these stories, the indiviuals challenged their own personal beliefs, and cultural and ethnic diffrences, to come together and build alliances that transcended race. This is the ideal of what true Americans are and the values of real patriotism and heroism foiled up into an amazing hardcover, that all peace-loving humanitarians should own. The NY TImes and Joseph Lelyveld, You get 2 thumbs up for this incredible work of art. My gratitude to you,
Sincerly, Malik Padgett

Rating:
Summary: an excellent modern survey
Review: this is an insightful collection of articles for anyone wishing to gain a well-rounded and modern perspective on race issues in america. if anyone thinks the race issue is dead and buried, s/he needs to read this book! i was so impressed that i am using this in my race and ethnicity in america class at the university i am going to be teaching at next fall as a discussion starter.

Rating:
Summary: Almost there.
Review: We now live in such a media conscious world that no one was fold for a single minute when the New York Times began its series on Race. No one believed they had any intention to honestly explore and take a fresh look at the issues surrounding race relations in America. No one expected them to get beyond the hoariest platitudes and exhausted clichés. There was never even the remotest chance that they would challenge their own, and their readers, elite assumptions. The fundamental unseriousness of the project was reflected in the parodies that even the Times's fellow liberal organs, like The New Republic, felt compelled to publish and by a comment from Mickey Kaus, of Slate magazine, whose Kaus Files provide the Series Skipper, condensations of interminably boring newspaper serials like this one so that folks can discuss them as if they'd read them. Even Kaus said that he hadn't condensed How Race is Lived because he would have had to read it first. No, from the start it was well understood that this much ballyhooed endeavor was simply a bid to win a Pulitzer, which it promptly and predictably did.

The entire series has been collected here and there are accompanying websites which reprint most of the material, as the Times imitates a demented Roman Emperor building monuments to himself. Unfortunately, to have them all gathered in one place and to try to struggle through the turgid pages is to realize just how utterly banal the whole project truly is. Though the settings for the various pieces range from churches to boardrooms to tv studios to army barracks to locker rooms to slaughterhouses, the stories have a deadening sameness to them. But even worse, where one would think that the sameness is the story, it is instead ignored, because what it tells us is inconvenient and doesn't fit a storyline that the Times wants to tell.

First of all, the only races in the series are black and white. Asians and Hispanics only rarely make appearances, and when they do it is often to illustrate a point about blacks. Thus, Governor Gary Locke of Washington shows up, but only so we can see how he was able to use his Asian background and the accompanying positive stereotypes to his advantage in politics, while black rivals felt compelled to play down their race, with its negative stereotypes. Likewise, in the story on two Cuban immigrant friends, they are not on hand to explore the plight of Hispanics in America, instead the story focuses on how much harder it has been for the darker skinned man to assimilate than the fairer skinned.

The second unifying theme is that the whites in these pieces are universally sick of the entire subject. To a man (and woman) they just want to get beyond it. They recognize that blacks have been victimized by racism in the past, seem genuinely sorry about that fact, seem to be trying very hard to improve their own attitudes and behaviors, and are now ready to let the whole matter drop.

The third theme is that blacks are not so willing. To judge from the Times, black America very carefully nurses its grievances, perceives racism and discrimination lurking behind every statement, glance and action of white Americans, and is now just waiting around for some external force to change this situation. In the most chilling scenes in the series, blacks act to segregate themselves, to push away whites who seek to join with them, and to denigrate any black who "acts white"--i.e., shows an interest in getting an education. The most depressing story here is about three girlfriends in the South Orange-Maplewood, NJ school system who drifted apart in High School, largely because the black girl's black peers put pressure on her not to associate with non-blacks. The other affecting piece is about the young white man who was recruited to play quarterback by historically black Southern College but left after two years of race baiting and death threats.

As the general themes and these specific articles show, there is an interesting and important story just waiting to be told, but the Times ignored it and its implications. Suppose the Times had asked and sought to answer the question that its own reporting raises : if racial tension in America essentially boils down to lingering black resentment, however justified, against whites, and if whites are no longer willing to apologize and compensate for past prejudices, then where will racial progress in America come from in the future ? Doesn't it necessarily have to come from blacks themselves, figuring out some way to get beyond the horrible things that were done to them in the past ? And while, presumably, no one would suggest that blacks abandon their own culture, doesn't the general hostility to and rejection of white culture that the series chronicles suggest that blacks will continue to have an extraordinarily difficult timer succeeding in what, like it or not, remains a fundamentally white (western European, Judeo-Christian, liberal/capitalist/protestant/democratic) culture in America ? Set aside the issue of whether blacks are entitled, in some abstract sense of concepts of justice, to more compensation from white America; the fact is that they aren't going to get it, so what do they do now ?

But to even ask these questions would antagonize the readers and the core constituencies of the Times. And worse, they don't give out Pulitzers to series that ask these kinds of questions. So the reader is faced with a massive psychic disconnect in this book as it relentlessly refuses to consider the most obvious questions it raises. There's a funny scene in the movie Barcelona where a lunkheaded character asks his friend something to the effect of :

Okay, I get the idea of subtext, but what's above the subtext.

How Race is Lived in America has a similar problem, it is all subtext with no text. One can only assume that's because the text that the stories force upon the whole series was simply unacceptable to the editors of the Times. Therefore, coherence and the potential for social usefulness were sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

GRADE : D+