A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS: Black and Whites in America
By David K. Shipler
Knopf, 607 pages $30
Given the astonishing number and variety of excellent books pub-lished in the last few years on the subject of race, David K. Shipler’s aim in “A Country of Strangers” seems like a modest one: to offer a compendium of how whites and blacks perceive one another in the United States.
After decades of integration and consciousness-raising and multicultural studies and sensitivity training, that we still require so basic a book is dis-tressing enough. Much more disturbing, though, is the conclusion that Shipler reaches after hundreds of pages of interviews, anecdotes and observations. “Blacks and whites do not listen well to one another,” he writes. “They infer, assume, deduce, imagine, and otherwise miscommunicate. They give each other little grace and allow small room for benefit of the doubt. Dialogue is exceedingly difficult. Nor do blacks and whites listen well to themselves as they stigmatize, derogate, slur, slight, and oth-erwise offend.”
The evidence that Shipler, formerly a New York Times reporter, offers in “A Country of Strangers” is devastating. He visits public high schools and private colleges, corporate of-fices and hospitals, supermar-kets and churches. And every-where the message seems to be the same: Not only have blacks and whites failed to get along in this country, they have failed to learn enough about one another to even know how to get along.
What Shipler offers, then, is a nearly encyclopedic exami- nation of the misperceptions and mistreatments, the stereotypes and slurs that abound when whites and blacks cross paths.
White students at a Midwestern col-lege see Otto Green Jr., a large black student, and immediately determine that he is a football player on an athletic scholarship. ” `You can imagine my ex-perience,’ “Green tells Shipler. ” ` “What position do you play?” Not “What is your name?,” “Where are you from?,” or “What is your major?” None of these questions.’ ” Green was not an athlete.
A black teacher at Teaneck High School in New Jersey makes clear to students his opposition to interracial dating, referring in class to one white girl’s black boyfriend as “a sellout.”
In a hospital, a physician sees a white patient’s alarm when the patient realizes that this black woman will be her doctor.
A group of black students gather to discuss race relations and agree that, indeed, white people can’t dance.
The list of such incidents goes on and on until Shipler has clearly delineated what he refers to as the line that runs through the heart of America, a line that “intertwines itself through police departments and courtrooms and jury rooms, through textbooks and class-rooms and dormitories, through ballot boxes and offices, through theaters and movie houses, through television and radio, through slang and music and humor. . . .”
Much of Shipler’s book is devoted not to the obvious emblems of such a line-the overt racism that was for so long a hallmark of our country-but to the unconscious racism that persists despite our sincere and well-meaning efforts to the contrary. Even when we try to gracefully cross the line, Shipler shows, we often stumble, and that stum-bling only makes the line more appar-ent, more real. Racial stereotypes “sleep at the depths,” he says, and when they emerge the pain they cause is profound.
And the call for reconciliation, for peace between blacks and whites, often hits a roadblock with the notion of colorblindness. While whites tend to believe that assimilation is the answer, that blacks should embrace and be embraced by white America, blacks feel the need to preserve their own identity and culture. This failure to assimilate is perceived by whites as hostile and threatening. And this defensiveness is in turn perceived by blacks as debasement, a lack of appreciation and respect.
One black woman tells Shipler that she never wants to stop thinking about race ” `because if I have transcended the issues of ethnicity, that means that I have sort of devalued part of who I am and part of my culture.’ “
What “A Country of Strangers” demonstrates is that, no matter how complex the issue might be, no matter how distressing our lack of progress, we cannot afford to stop thinking about race. Shipler ends his compelling, disquieting book on what is clearly meant to be a positive note. He recounts a musical play performed by a group of Washington-area children of various races and backgrounds, children who lift their voices in song, in a call for healing. “There was a sad joy,” he says, “in seeing tenuous strands of caring across the line that runs through the heart of America.”
A sad joy. Tenuous strands of caring. “A Country of Strangers” presents clear and convincing testimony of how very far we all still have to go.
