Reckoning with Race
America's Failure
"Reckoning with Race is a compelling account of both racial history and race today. Dattel’s persuasive detailing of race in the North - from the antebellum period to the present - should be required reading in the classroom and incorporated into public dialogue. Racial animosity in the white North, not just the South, created a national tragedy. Although the removal of barriers has made progress possible, Dattel rightly calls for blacks to engage in self-examination. He adds clarity to the distinction between black leaders of the 1960s and those of today.
Reckoning with Race’s emphasis on color-blind, universal values is absolutely necessary for success, as I describe in my own book A Mission from God. His focus on family, church, and community structures is the bedrock of a society. As a lifelong integrationist, I applaud Dattel’s concern about segregation in any form and the dire consequences of our increasingly separatist society."
James Meredith
The man who integrated the University of Mississippi (1962) and author of A Mission From God (2012)
Reckoning with Race confronts America’s most intractable problem – race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America’s exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos which still plague America.
Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no structures – family, community or church – to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty.
The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?
