We need a frank and honest discussion about race. Or as James Baldwin said in 1964 and as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in 1967, “Tell it like it is.” How many times have you heard or read this dictum about America’s most sensitive, tragic and inflammable topic, race?

Although the call persists, the conversation never occurs. Instead white Americans are surprised, in fact stunned, by the level of racial tension in America, especially when it turns violent. It fuels the fear of a large, permanent black underclass that will not go away. Fifty years after Baldwin and King, why is the racial divide still our defining social issue?

In my new book, “Reckoning with Race,” I concentrate on what I see as the fulcrum of this issue: the entrance of most black Americans into the economic mainstream. Make no mistake: blacks see economics, exacerbated by past injustice and discrimination, and expressed as the income gap or poverty, as the main cause of their frustration.

Economics — which means jobs — dominates talk within the black community. But not many blacks recognize that the prerequisite for broad participation in economic advancement is assimilation, denied to blacks until the mid-20th century.

Assimilation is sometimes falsely assumed to deny one’s cultural differences. In the word game that has ensued, “integration” and “acculturation” are often preferred.

Let’s be clear: the right kind of assimilation allows for practical and efficient adjustment to common values without surrendering one’s cultural heritage. If appropriate assimilation is ignored, a harmful road to separatism follows.

From the birth of the nation, America has relied on assimilation to mold a cohesive society. Assimilation has meant the acceptance of common goals, common values, a common language and a common legal system that leaves abundant room for cultural heritage.

White immigrants left the “old country” and came voluntarily to America. African Americans, involuntary immigrants, arrived in slave ships, first in the 17th century, and have been struggling with their identity — national or separate — ever since.

The first Naturalization Act in 1790 specified that “any white alien, being a free white person,” was eligible for citizenship.

In an America with race-based slavery, where did a free black fit into the assimilation scheme? Although the 14th Amendment in 1868 granted citizenship to blacks, social norms continued to exclude them from the process of assimilation.

In the American story the major exception to assimilation was the exclusion of black America. But the Supreme Court’s ending of legal segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision marked the beginning of a new era. With restrictions removed, values and merit might now prevail over race and ethnicity.

Despite Southern resistance, most Americans thus assumed that our racial dilemma was being solved in the 1960s. The promise of Brown seemed to play out in the Civil Rights Acts, the War on Poverty, the end of overt public segregation and the removal of suffrage barriers. Yet the Northern urban race riots of the ‘60s in New York, Watts, Detroit and Newark warned of a racial chasm filled with complex social issues.

Both whites and blacks have viewed the South as the exclusive and durable scapegoat in America’s racial ordeal. This singular focus on the South may be soothing to white Northern consciences, but it has also provided an escape from the reality of the North’s own unenlightened racial world.

In tracing the black experience in America, all roads lead to the wellcharted territory of race-based slavery. But from the signing of the Constitution in 1787 to the end of the Civil War in 1865, the situation of free blacks in the North is frequently overlooked.

Northern attitudes toward free blacks in the years before the Civil War form an indispensable guide to the African-American experience after the war. If blacks, a tiny 2 percent of the Northern population, could not be successfully absorbed there, the postwar acceptance of large numbers in the North after Emancipation would be impossible.

American historians usually gloss over a critical distinction between the attitudes of white Northerners toward Negro slavery and what they thought about free blacks. White Northerners were, for the most part, vehemently anti-black and obsessively feared a black migration north.

Consider this excerpt from the Oregon state constitution of 1857:

“White foreigners who are, or may hereafter become residents of (Oregon) … shall enjoy the same rights in respect to the possession, enjoyment, and descent of property as native-born citizens.

“No Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage.

“No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; an (sic) the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such Negroes, and Mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.” (The black exclusion law was repealed only in 1926.)

In fact the race problem in America has always been a national problem, not exclusively Southern. It is a mistake to think otherwise and leads to flawed responses to the problem. Hence, after the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the North, and after overt legal segregation in the South disappeared, no racial utopia emerged.

White Northerners reflexively cite odious Southern phenomena — lynchings, legal school segregation, “colored only” signs and “back-of-the-bus” status.

They ignore school segregation and race riots in their own communities, and the large black underclass in Northern as well as Southern cities. Civil Rights museums proliferate in the South while the North memorializes episodes of racial tolerance. Civil Rights courses generally study the South almost exclusively. Altogether the narrative is scarcely objective.

Upon visiting the North, the white Southerner invariably finds a subtle, and not so subtle, racial hypocrisy with an overlay of self-righteousness. Ample evidence shows that white Northerners, in the words of one black abolitionist, “best like the colored person at a distance.”

Today, in the age of political correctness, hypersensitivity to perceived disrespect has been met by black protest rather than objectivity and reliance on the legal system. Black leaders and white innocents encourage separatism under the guise of an exaggerated form of multiculturalism. This aberrant strain dominates campus curricula and politics.

An appropriate multi-ethnic approach asks what we have in common; today’s iteration dwells on what makes us different. The separatist implications lead to what Marcus Hanson in “The Immigrant in American History” would have pejoratively dubbed a disunited “patchwork nation.”

The governing political system for this unwieldly collection would necessarily be an autocracy, not a democratic republic.

If education is essential to economic advancement, color-neutral, middleclass behavioral norms are critical to building a successful educational experience for black children.

The separatist tendency toward racial self-segregation will prevent large numbers of blacks from scaling the economic ladder. Efforts to establish race-based economic self-sufficiency have not brought broad prosperity to any group. Demonizing Western civilization also impedes assimilation and economic prosperity.

The ever quotable Malcolm X inadvertently praised the Western economic model: in 1965 he advised a black church in Rochester, New York, that black Africans were moving to England and France because of the “high standard of living” there.

Freedom and a high standard of living, essentials of American life, are products of Western civilization. They are now fully accessible to those who are willing to assimilate in a nation that holds values more important than race.

This article was originally published in The Clarion-Ledger