Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks and Whites

Going beyond Cornel West's Race Matters and Derrick Bell's Faces At The Bottom Of The Well, Yale Law professor Harlon Dalton offers a tough but hopeful prescription for America's racial dilemma, based on the need for both blacks and whites to be brutally honest with each other about their fears and secret beliefs. In recent years, books dealing with the continuing conflict between blacks and whites have been enormously popular: Shelby Steele's The Content Of Our Character ; Stephen Carter's Rejections Of An Affirmative Action Baby ; Andrew Hacker's Two Nations ; Derrick Bell's Faces At The Bottom Of The Well ; Jim Nellson's Volunteer Slavery ; Nathan McCall's Makes Me Want To Holler. Building on this rich tradition of thoughtful and vibrant debate, Racial Healing offers the prospect of more open and harmonious relations between blacks and whites. When talking about race, Dalton writes blacks and whites "should simply put everything on the table. Own up to the tension. Acknowledge the risks. When someone inevitably screws up, rather than beat a hasty retreat, we should seize the opportunity to deepen the dialogue." Dalton's style is anecdotal, personal, and open -- not academic -- and his views will spark debate and controversy among and between blacks and whites, precisely because he is so honest with himself. After offering concrete proposals for what individual blacks and whites must do to bring about racial healing, Dalton presents a vision of what a truly just multiracial America might look like -- a note of hope long lacking in the debate over race.

"If you pick it, it will never heal" is poor advice, Yale law professor Dalton argues, on how to deal with race and the racial pecking order: we can hope to heal "what remains America's central social problem [only if we will] confront each other, take risks, make ourselves vulnerable, . . . put on the table all our fears, trepidations, wishes, and hopes," and unite "to transform how power and prestige are distributed in this society and, ultimately, the very meaning of race itself." Dalton's main goal here is honest engagement between Euro-and African Americans, and he spells out "What White Folk Must Do" (recognize the privilege white skin gives, accept joint ownership of the race problem, give up Horatio Alger, and resist the temptation to divide and conquer) and "What Black Folk Must Do" (retell their story in more complex, inclusive terms, restore community, take stock of African American culture, and build alliances with other people of color). Challenging as these prescriptions are, Dalton's book is lively and often funny, full of anecdotes that humanize issues too often viewed as abstractions Mary Carroll