Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster,
David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman,
Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 349 pages, ISBN
0-520-23706-4, $27.50.
Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and
Black Prejudice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 192
pages, ISBN 0-691-09261-3, $24.95.
These two texts represent a somewhat unlikely pairing. What could an
empirically detailed but wide-ranging, really indignant indictment of
new right-wing homilies about racial politics—that's
Whitewashing Race—have in common with what inquiring
minds want to know about Black Pride and Black Prejudice, a
carefully stepping report of results mostly from a 1997 survey, posing
and answering such questions as whether African Americans share the
“larger culture's” values, succumb to conspiratorial
thinking, or are anti-Semitic? At the level of pure geography trivia,
it so happens that all of the authors involved in generating these new
books have some claim to Northern California roots or associations. But
beyond that, do they have anything in common?