Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation.

Meditations, Gerald Early calls these essays. Meditations for the end of the twentieth century on America's enduring dilemma: race.

Early, the very talented head of the department of African-American Studies at Saint Louis's Washington University, conceived the notion of asking about two dozen black intellectuals to commit to writing their thoughts on the psychological condition - some would say predicament - of blacks in America in this last decade of the century.

Much as a preacher might, Early gave them a text "as a kind of point of departure, something to get the brain cells working." The text was one of the most famous passages in African-American literature, from W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. "After the Eygptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian," the passage goes,

the Negro is a sort of seventh son,

born with a veil, and gifted with second

sight in this American world - a

world which yields him no true

self-consciousness, but only lets him

see himself through the revelation of

the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,

this double-consciousness, this

sense of always looking at one's self

through the eyes of others, of measuring

one's soul by the tape of a

world that looks on in amused contempt

and pity. One ever feels his

twoness - an American, a Negro;

two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled

strivings; two warring ideals

in one dark body, whose dogged

strength alone keeps it from being tom

asunder.

The history of the American

Negro is the history of this strife - this

longing to attain self-conscious

manhood, to merge his double self

into a better and truer self.

The results of Early's challenge are so varied that it is impossible to make any general statement about them.

The majority of the essayists felt that Du Bois was onto something and that his observations retained a certain validity even now. But several thought this whole "Du Boisian dualism" was so much buncombe, as likely as not the projection onto a whole people of one black man's own confusion, born of his upbringing and education among whites.

The best of the essays, the most thoughtful and mature, reflected a pedagogical concern. These were African-American scholars concerned with how best to raise and educate African-American children for happy, successful, spiritually wholesome lives in America.

The least of the essays, the whiny, immature ones, are concerned with political and ideological ax-grinding. Two of these stand out, sociologist Robert Stapes's "The Illusion of Racial Equality," and "Primal Orb Density" by Wanda Coleman, a poet. The latter includes this observation, presumably offered as evidence of some unfairness in American life:

... [I]f I want a job, I have to carry

myself in a way which is nonthreatening

or seen as safe by my

white employer. The energy I exert

in this barrier-bursting exhausts me.

My opinions and values must be suppressed.

The only place I experience

liberty is on the page (within limits

of what's salable imposed by the

white publishing establishment). I

cannot afford to do otherwise in the

course of daily commerce without

dooming my primary self.

These are not the thoughts of an adult, but of a college sophomore, circa 1969. And race is the least of such a person's problems.

Fortunately, such foolishness is far less abundant than the wisdom of thinker-writers like Stanley Crouch, Reginald McKnight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ella Pearson Mitchell, C. Eric Lincoln, and, not least, Gerald Early himself. But the essay that most impressed me - for its plain common sense, its philosophical highmindedness, its Catholic autobiographical details, its pedagogical responsibility - was that of Wilson J. Moses, professor of English and history at Penn State.

"It is true enough," Moses writes at the start of his essay (sensibly and honestly titled "Ambivalent Maybe"), "that my feelings as a black man have sometimes been in conflict with my sense of American nationality. But over the years I have become resigned to the fact that my interests, so far in this life, have always been inseparable from those of the United States." I suspect that that describes the feelings of most African-Americans, including many of those who call the greatest attention to their anguish with the state of things for black people in the United States.

But Moses's best lines follow the ones mentioned above. He writes: "I am restless and vulnerable, here at home. But in Europe or in Africa I have never felt any less vulnerable or alienated. Much of this certainly has to do with being black, but a portion of it simply derives from the human predicament. We must all feel lost and lonely and threatened by inevitable doom. Every age in the history of mankind has been an age of anxiety." It takes courage for an African-American to say that. It especially takes courage for one who hopes to be taken seriously among his own people.

But Moses isn't finished even after that. Toward the end of his essay, addressing the obligations of black intellectuals to black young people, he unearths a spendidly insightful quotation from the nineteenth-century black scholar Alexander Crummell: The "fashion of our life fills us with perplexities and breeds constant anxieties, but these are the heritage of all God's spiritual creatures ... created for the unending, the everlasting ventures and anxieties of their spirits in the deep things of God."

The black intellectual's job, Moses says, is to "teach our young people the importance of this inner struggle." Moses, Gerald Early, and all the contributors - even the weakest ones - have discharged part of that responsibility with this important volume.