A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America.

Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson. New York: Broadway Books/Bantam Doubleday Dell. 1998. 355pp. $27.50 (cloth).

It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation. It is a thought that persists in the minds of many in our society who are not black. For blacks, such people are the real troubling presence in American society: those citizens who claim priority or privilege over citizens who are not white. They are identified, by some, as "nativist racists." How is such a tangled web to be unsnarled?

Perhaps President Clinton's widely advertised national conversation on race eventually will bring able hands to the task - in spite of how bogged down that conversation now seems to be in familiar economic and political oppositions and in old definitions (there is no scientific, genetic basis for the notion of "race"; it is a historically recent political and social invention to justify privilege). But we need not await that outcome.

Seemingly absent from the conversation is a critical mass of minds capable of absorbing multiple perspectives with nonjudgmental but not uncritical intelligence. Also missing are the voices of those enmeshed in the mundane frustrations and joys of mingling with Americans of different colors and cultures, those who have replaced aversion or unfamiliarity with personal friendship, even intimacy. Dispelling one's ghosts through the recognition of present, real persons requires an arduous commitment to continuous self-education.

That commitment is evident in the four recent works under review.

In Seeing a Color-Blind Future, Patricia J. Williams - a professor of law at Columbia University - gives us analytically compressed and anecdotally illuminated responses to questions she posed in these 1997 BBC Reith Lectures: "How precisely does the issue of color remain so powerfully determinative of everything from life circumstance to manner of death, in a world that is, by and large, officially 'color-blind'? What metaphors mask the hierarchies that make racial domination frequently seem so 'natural,' so invisible, indeed so attractive? How does racism continue to evolve, after slavery and after legislated equality, across such geographic, temporal, and political distance?"

Pervasive racial denial is a significant part of the problem. For blacks this means "the systemic, often nonsensical denial of racial experiences; . . . an assimilative tyranny of neutrality as self-erasure." Blacks still cannot avoid the "double-consciousness" W. E. B. Du Bois called attention to at the turn of the last century. As Williams puts it, "You need two chairs at the table, one for you, one for your blackness." But for white people, "racial denial tends to engender a profoundly invested disingenuousness, an innocence that amounts to the transgressive refusal to know." Williams says that this is not a matter of assigning blame; "it is simply to observe the way we know race, or don't."

You will find no quick solutions to the "small aggressions of unconscious racism" that Williams points out in these lectures. This does not mean that there are no solutions, as those who would prefer to throw up their hands and walk away would have us believe. Williams identifies possible solutions. But they are not quick fixes. As a beginning, "it depends upon eradicating the troublesome attitudinal divide between the paralyzing anxiety of well-meaning 'white guilt' and the smoldering unhappiness of blacks who dare not speak their minds." Those who would rise to this arduous challenge must understand clearly that, among other things, blacks are not ciphers for poverty or the subhuman. The sustained effort required to know them is not a process of exotic entertainment.

In A Country of Strangers, David K. Shipler, a former Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter, treats us to a probing anatomy of lives across the color line in the United States. It is not just one man's odyssey; as he points out, his book became "something of a family project." Ranging from lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Chicago and Birmingham, Alabama, from Detroit to Baltimore and Teaneck, New Jersey, as well as many other places, Shipler documents the lives of real people who are grappling with issues of immigration, mixing, myths, and memories of personal origins; of their images of body and mind; of their engagement with morality, violence, and power; and of the choices to be made in decoding racism, acting affirmatively, and breaking silences. He observes that "Americans make choices constantly as they try to navigate through the racial landscape. They hear or they do not hear. They speak or they remain silent. They keep a racist thought to themselves, or they translate it into behavior - overtly or covertly. They select one or another mechanism by which to control the prejudices inside them. They confront or evade, question or teach, learn or regard themselves above learning. They are not helpless in all of this, not prisoners of the past or pawns of the present. They are shaped by their surroundings, to be sure, but they also have free will. They act. They choose. And their first choice is how they listen." It is challenging and instructive to listen to Shipler's exposition of this country of strangers. Anyone who reads this book will come away with vivid examples of how to become less estranged in today's society.

Jonathan Coleman's Long Way to Go: Black and White in America is an odyssey of participant-observation over more than five years in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Why Milwaukee? Because it is not etched in our minds, as are some cities of the South, by searing racial conflict. It was a place to examine anew the every-day dynamics of what happened in an ordinary metropolis troubled by relations between blacks and whites. Coleman's mission was to find out "how far the country had come since the days of the civil rights movement . . . and how far we had - or wanted - to go." From 1991 to 1996 he kept a second home on Cass Street in that city and associated with a wide range of black and white residents, militant and otherwise aggressive black and white community leaders, white politicians who talk the talk but don't intend to walk the walk, white and black teachers desperate to preserve the light and promise in the eyes of their students, black children who are planning their funeral rather than their future.

He is not sanguine about the answers to the questions that initiated his research. He tells us that "race, as I've learned without enthusiasm, is incorrigible, defies a writer's natural, cozy desire to order things. . . ." But some things are clear: "whites can either give up on the idea of racial harmony and just go on - living insular lives, content to say we tried, endlessly remarking on the gains and accomplishments of the black middle class and continuing to pay lip service to 'valuing diversity,' or we can keep trying to find ways to change hearts and minds." If all of us are to go farther than we have so far in engaging the way race challenges us, each person must do it "from the inside out." This means that whites would "no longer make their acceptance of blacks conditional on their being 'more like us' or 'acting white'; they could no longer fear that having blacks live in the same neighborhood would either bring disharmony or bring down the value of their property; they could no longer exploit, consciously or not, the advantages that come to them just because they are white." And blacks must find a way past seeing themselves as victims on those occasions when they are not; they must not see conspiracies where none exist, racism when it isn't there. They "would have to keep in mind that they knew white people who were good and honorable and could be relied upon (just as whites had to keep that in mind about blacks), that staying away from polarization and stereotyping . . . [is] an essential thing for both to do in taking the next step."

A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America is an extraordinary historical chronicle providing a wealth of missing pages from our nation's history. Beginning with the story of the young African woman called Oni, who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, the year before the Mayflower reached Plymouth Rock in 1619, we are brought into the company of numerous previously little-known or unknown women, both black and white, as well as men, whose lives helped shape this nation. How many of us knew that in 1644, twenty-five years after Oni's arrival, a good part of what we know now as Greenwich Village in Manhattan was owned by a group of African American men? Or that the first depositor at the National Savings and Trust Bank in Baltimore was Clara Keaton, a black woman born in 17987 Or that the first American woman to lecture publicly to an audience of both men and women was Maria W. Stewart, whose 1831 pamphlet Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which we Must Build not only called for abolition but advocated African American economic independence and self-sufficiency - an early black nationalist position. We also learn that the first American women's anti-slavery society, founded in 1832 as the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, was a society of free black women.

This is not a book of lists, however. It is a richly woven work of scholarship that is utterly readable. Not incidentally, authors Darlene Clark Hine (John A. Hannah Professor of American History at Michigan State University), and Kathleen Thompson (author of Against Rape and historical supplements to the televised Portrait of America series), not only enrich the record of our nation's history; as two American women, one black, one white, they exemplify the serious and sustained work we can do together.

These authors exemplify, in different ways, a capacity to function comfortably and effectively in more than one culture. For Darlene Clark Hine, Patricia J. Williams, and multitudes of black Americans - whether intellectuals and scholars or not - this is an ordinary reality of life in our national society. It is an ordinary reality for multitudes of Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, American Jews, and American Muslims.

Given my experiences as an educator, as well as a publisher and bureaucrat - in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors - it seems that for too many white Americans the effort to comprehend and move comfortably and effectively in any culture other than their own is too daunting a stretch. To a great many it seems utterly unnecessary. Their expectation is that the world will come to them. That is the epitome of ethnocentric isolation. Wittingly or not, they pay an incremental price for their arrogance and isolation. The real danger to such citizens of these United States is that one day soon they may wake up and find themselves fatally over their heads in intercultural ignorance.

It has been more than two decades since Edward T. Hall (Beyond Culture, 1976; 1 and 7) called our attention to the "more subtle but . . . lethal" crisis facing all of us: "The relationships among the many individuals and groups that inhabit the globe." He cautioned us about the irrationality of ignoring the uniqueness of cultures: "Denying culture and obscuring the effects that it can have on human talents can be as destructive and potentially dangerous as denying evil. We must come to terms with both."

Coming to terms with cultural uniqueness requires that we avoid the familiar impulse to say that deep down inside we all are the same. "The thought that everyone is the same deep down is comforting," LaRay M. Barna (174) acknowledges in her essay, "Stumbling Blocks in Intercultural Communication" (1). But "if someone acts or looks 'strange' (different from them), it is then possible to evaluate this as wrong and treat everyone ethnocentrically." Such a point of view "reduces the discomfort of dealing with difference, of not knowing." In the process, I would add, it accommodates misrecognitions and stereotyping of people unlike oneself, people of a different culture.

It would be a mistake to assume that the challenges Hall and Barna are addressing have to do only with our communications with people of different cultures living outside of the United States: the British, the French, the Japanese, Tanzanians, Russians, and Chinese. These challenges face us daily in our own society. It may be comforting to say that we are all Americans, which means that deep down we are all the same. To assume the validity of that point of view would be naive, since to be an American is a many-layered thing; and the layers are not the same for each of us. Often it is challenging enough to get along with someone who shares our particular ethnicity, national culture, or religion. Little wonder that the challenge, to Americans, of getting along with those who do not share their ethnicity, national culture, or religion can be so demanding. It is far better to rise to these challenges than to ignore the discomfort of dealing with these differences. To deal with them is far more civil and more cost effective than coping with the eventual burdens from erupting aggressions fueled by increased alienation, resulting in familiar or unimaginable televised social unrest. This requires us to resist the siren songs of self-absolving simplists who would have us believe, among other things, that in America "racism remains primarily a black and white problem" (D'Souza, 1997, xiv). Racism crosses all ethnicities, national cultures, and religions in this nation. To engage and incrementally dissipate the corrosive evil with which it confronts us is the responsibility of each of us. In this effort we can take heart from the works of personal examples of Patricia Williams, David Shipler, Jonathan Coleman, Darlene Clark Hine, and Kathleen Thompson.

ALFRED E. PRETTYMAN teaches social studies at Rockland Community College.