Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy.

Two especially interesting and important books on race in the United States appeared in 1995--Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (Routledge) and Stephen Steinberg's Turning Back. The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Beacon Press).

Ignatiev's focus is the mid-nineteenth Century. Steinberg's focus is on the post-World War II era. Both, however, challenge a powerful but bogus orthodoxy that racism is an aberration in American political life, a cancer of regional origin or an extraneous graft onto an otherwise healthy, sound, and egalitarian body

Ignatiev examines the role that whiteness played in the political assimilation of Irish immigrants in the context of nativist and xenophobic upsurges and the militantly pro-slavery coalition that dominated the Democratic Party in the Jacksonian Era. He argues that whiteness as a politically meaningful category was consolidated during this period, and that definition of the social status of Irish immigrants was crucial to the process.

He proposes a dialectical account in which whiteness took shape partly as a way of accommodating Irish immigrants into the party's electoral coalition, a putative attribute that expressed commonality with nativist Jacksonians.

He contends as well that this definition was reinforced and propagated by Irish-Americans' efforts--as a low-status group situated between blacks and "native whites"--both to establish an ideological and institutional floor of citizenship between themselves and the bottom of the social order and to expel blacks from their niches in marginal economic sectors.

Steinberg examines how academics and liberal social-policy analysts have a distinctive way of thinking about racial inequality, most systematically expressed by Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma. They define racism fundamentally as a problem of whites' views about blacks. This perspective established the discussion of inequality on a foundation of attitudes, rather than structured exclusion and material subordination.

In treating racism as a bizarre deviation from an otherwise healthy American creed--integral part of the political mainstream since the nation's founding--this perspective preserves the myth that racism was the exclusive property of the South, a myth that became untenable as black populations grew in non-Southern cities between the two world wars.

This perspective has also, Steinberg argues, thwarted basic challenges to existing institutional arrangements by insisting that petty tinkering is all that's required to achieve a just society.

Perhaps most significantly, Turning Back examines the retreat from even this partial and flawed form of racial liberalism since the 1960s, and Steinberg provocatively links Daniel Patrick Moynihan's racist 1965 Report on the Negro Family to the current work of William Julius Wilson and Cornel West as proponents of a victim-blaming, depoliticized orthodoxy about racial inequality.