An Honest Conversation about Race, by Peter c. Myers “Claremont Review of Books,”  Spring 2018

Americans, it seems, can never get enough race talk. We speak of race incessantly, yet continue to call for more, in the persisting hope that more talk will yield better talk. What we want—or so we say—is an honest conversation about race.

That we call almost metronomically for aconversation we do not expect to have attests both the importance and the sensitivity of the subject. An honest conversation about race is important as a means for healing and unity, even more so as an imperative of national honor; America cannot be America, in the full and proper sense, until our race problem is resolved. Given, however, the unique sensitivity of the subject, we expect our race talk to be clouded by evasion or dishonesty; for in the matter of race, everyone has something to hide.

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Race and America’s Soul — A fearless, eye-opening new book probes the wound, by Myron Magnet “City Journal,” November, 5 2017

What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.

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