A little neighborly advice.

Quite a few years ago, our family was about to sit down to dinner with several visiting relatives when our doorbell rang. Standing outside the door in a pouring rain was a woman whom we had never before seen. With rain dripping off her, she blurted in a frightened voice, "I want you to know that a house on this block has been sold to Japanese!"

So startled by this apparition were we, that we could only mutter, "Thank you for the information," and gently closed the door. We never did know whether we had new "Japanese' (presumably Japanese American) neighbors in our solidly middle-class block, but the memory of this bizarre incident lingers.

Ironically residential segregation based on color or ethnic origin does much more than linger in U.S. urban areas today. And while the sheer hatred and violence that once greeted the introduction of minority families into majority neighborhoods is less frequent than it once was, only the naive can believe that it has disappeared.

One particularly ugly experience we know of in the 1950s comes to mind. When a distinguished African American doctor, his wife, and small son had moved into a modest apartment in a Chicago suburb over a store, a group of thugs burst into their home and proceeded to throw their furniture, including a spinet piano, out a second-story window.

If a roving TV reporter had circulated among the respectable people of that neighborhood, their response would probably have been to disassociate themselves from this vicious act. In their next breath, however, they might have said something like, "But, of course, they brought it on themselves by moving where they were not wanted."

We have only to reflect and ask how many "respectable" people, indeed how many churchgoing people, would still answer like that today.

Residential segregation based on color or ethnic origin matters a lot because, along with discrimination in employment and inferior schools, these are the principal causes of the restlessness and resentment that prevails in our cities. Even in smaller towns, among people belonging to so-called minority and majority groups, such feelings exist. Consider this restlessness and resentment to be a ticking time bomb.

Carl Rowan is an African American who has surely earned his stripes as a social commentator, not only in government service but especially as a syndicated newspaper columnist. His frequent appearances on college campuses have enabled him to feel at least part of the American pulse.

Rowan minces no words in his provocatively titled book The Coming Race War in America (Little, Brown, 1996). And commenting on its subtitle, "A wake-up call," reviewer Tom Wicker says, "What does it matter that I believe the apocalyptic prediction of his book is somewhat overwrought? If it alerts an either blind or uncaring America to its disastrous race relations--or worse if it fails to do this--a little overstatement will hardly matter."

In an impassioned introduction, Rowan writes that "a race war can be averted only if we stop denying that a grave threat exists." Even if you don't believe there's a realistic threat of armed racial conflict, you'd better believe there is a high probability of economic and social decline that will blight the nation's future far more surely than the federal deficit over which so many crocodile tears are shed, Wicker says.

And Rowan bluntly points out that "while some blacks found dignity and political clout and economic opportunity over the last 30 years [the growing black middle class], the great mass of black Americans have not."

For confirmation, look at some statistics: African American unemployment consistently runs at twice the level of white joblessness; the median net worth of African American households is $4,604, compared to $44,408 for white households; and as Rowan writes, "The normal black family has $57 for every $100 available to the normal white family. That's a drop from the ratio of $64 to $100 in the Great Society era of the 1960s."

Rowan believes that the discriminatory attitudes of many whites, together with the more lethal plans of supremacist groups hoping "to take back America," will bring on a race war in which "black involvement will largely be reactive." He also predicts that "the lack of adequate gun-control laws will result in extreme violence."

Many readers safely snuggled in white ghettos are likely to find this scenario of racial Armageddon hard to believe. But that hardly excuses apathy about the conditions that Rowan argues could cause so horrendous a climax. "If you run your society," he argues persuasively, "in a way that leaves millions of men and women poorly educated and untrained for work, and millions more denied decent jobs because of racial and sexual discrimination, then you are going to have millions of people living in poverty." And who can believe that a society with millions living in poverty will not fester and ultimately smolder beyond quenching?

Don't we Catholics and other believing people have a special responsibility to take a stand that demands equal justice for everyone? If we truly believe that God has created all of us equal and that Jesus has taught us that we must love others as we love ourselves, can we be indifferent to this cancer in our society? That would not only be something we can't afford, it would be wrong.