Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration

"If you can't call a black thug a thug, you're a racist." Newsweek reporter Tamar Jacoby poses the kind of questions that makes well-meaning white liberals flinch. But it is these people, I think, she is trying to prod to finish the work their forebears began so well.The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s accomplished so much that by the early '70s the goal seemed in sight. Jim Crow was dead, and it must have seemed that one more push would bring America to racial equality.And we've been stalled on the edge of that dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. Nothing much since then has panned out. Jacoby wonders if we haven't abandoned the dream altogether. What would Martin Luther King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? Can we claim to be honoring his legacy, which had integration (of hearts and minds as well as bodies) as its goal, while we chant new mantras of separationism?In America today there's bitter resentment against what is seen as "special treatment." About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder.""Just what accounts for this new resentment is not easy to untangle," writes Jacoby, "but it is not always the same as out-and-out bigotry. A white man who thinks a black woman on welfare should get a job may in fact be responding to her color, voicing an ugly and unthinking assumption about black attitudes toward work. Or he may be reacting to something he didn't like in the racial rhetoric of recent decades: the claim that white society is responsible for the problems blacks face. Thirty-five years of color-coded conflict have taken a huge toll on both sides, and fairly or not the showdown has left many whites embittered. Their feelings may be an obstacle to harmony, but they are not necessarily prejudice in the conventional sense."What have we learned? Jacoby writes, "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that."But, as Jacoby writes, "That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a b

To summarize, Tamar Jacoby's book is compelling and blatantly honest. Perhaps it is too honest for some people to handle. Race relations and the successes and failures of public policy were analyzed in several US cities. Having grown up in the NY area, I found her take on NY incidents to be insightful and brutallly candid

Growing up in Detroit in the 1970's, I had no concept of what a suburb was until some of my friends started moving out of the city. Their parents moved there primarily for the better schools. Once I started visiting them, I begin to wonder why everything out there was so nice and new, while things in the city were so run down and increasingly blighted. This book provides the best description I've ever read of the events that led to Detroit's demise. I encourage anyone who's interested in the problems of urban America to read this book.

Tamar Jacoby carefully descibes how the ideals of integration gave way to divisive emphasis on diversity. Her journalistic explaination of public policies from the 60's, 70's and 80's coupled with thought-provoking analysis of their outcome, provides the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the path we've traveled over the past 40 years. I recommend this book to anyone interested in history, public policy and race issues. I think her book is beautifully written.

An incredible book, that details the struggle for integration in New York, Detroit, and Atlanta. Jacoby's prose make a possibly boring subject into a pageturning story. I am only eighteen, and I read this book in three days.