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In the second of a three-part series on race relations, David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, talks with David Shipler, author of A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.
A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
NEWSHOUR LINKS:
July 9, 1998
A dialogue on race with President Clinton.
Browse NewsHour essays , and coverage of race issues.DAVID GERGEN: David, President Clinton has been calling for a national dialogue on race. And you’ve actually been out conducting one for the last six years, talking to blacks and whites all over the country. What did you find?
The importance of history.
DAVID SHIPLER, Author, A Country of Strangers: I found a lot of miscommunication, a lack of communication, black students at Lincoln University listing the attributes they thought blacks would place on whites and whites would place on blacks used the word "ignorant" to describe both. And I found a tremendous gap in understanding between blacks and whites and differences in the way, for example, blacks and whites view history and the different weight that’s placed on history. I found many white Americans rather ahistorical and many black Americans feeling the resonance of history into the present, interpreting present events in terms of history. That’s one example.
DAVID GERGEN: So that’s why you call it a country of strangers because people are living in their own worlds?
DAVID SHIPLER: Yes. I felt very much that blacks and whites were strangers to each other. The line actually comes from Anna DeVeere Smith, an actress, who made that observation. When I read that she had, I thought, yes, that’s exactly right.
DAVID GERGEN: I was struck in your book when you talked about the miscommunication how many--how words such as tolerance and integration mean different things to blacks than they do to whites.
Different interpretations of words.
DAVID SHIPLER: I think traditionally whites have regarded those words as positive, tolerance meaning acceptance, integration meaning the mixing of the races, and equal opportunity. Increasingly, I think, many black Americans--not all--see tolerance as meaning barely accepting, and tolerating deviations from the norm, and integration is--
DAVID GERGEN: But they’re labeled as deviants.
DAVID SHIPLER: They’re labeled as deviants and that integration is seen by many black Americans as meaning assimilation; that they have to shed their culture to become more "white" in order to be accepted. In addition, integration, which I think really ought to mean sharing power in America, has not been very effective in most institutions where blacks often feel like invited guests into a mostly white setting, sometimes rather unwelcome guests, where they don’t feel that they have ownership of the situation, whether it’s a mostly white college or a mostly white company. One exception to this, I think, is the military, which has done better than most institutions at working at this at least.
DAVID GERGEN: Can you tell us a little more about that? Because you did describe in your book the diversity training that takes place under the Defense Department.
DAVID SHIPLER: Well, the Defense Department has an institute at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida where they put senior non-commissioned officers and officers through a 15-week training course, and there are other shorter courses as well, to send them out into units to become equal opportunity monitors or advisers. The whole theory of this is that you’ve got to take the temperature of units and understand what’s going on racially in order to prevent outbreaks and to make sure that people feel--people of all groups feel that they have opportunity. Otherwise, you’re not going to get the kind of volunteer force that you want. Now there are problems in the military still. Some of them have to do with the indirect expression of prejudice.
For example, a black B-52 pilot said to me that when I asked him why there were so few black pilots in the Air Force--of nearly 15,000 pilots in the Air Force, fewer than 300 are black--he said many blacks wash out of flight school, and he said that he thought one reason was that a white flight instructor in the cockpit with a black trainee has to make split second decisions about whether to take control of the aircraft. Now, if in the back of his mind he’s got that image of blacks as less competent, less intelligent, less able, which is still a widespread prejudice United States surveys have found, he may move a little more quickly with a black trainee than he would with a white to take control of the aircraft if he thinks the black person is flying dangerously. That’s a kind of subjective judgment. And if he repeatedly does that, the black trainee will not be able to advance to the next level of training. And what makes that such an interesting scenario is that it’s almost impossible to prove. I mean, you cannot prove that the white flight instructor in this particular case is acting out of a prejudice. He may not even be aware of it himself. The only answer to it may be for him to get introspective enough to identify that prejudice and correct for it.
DAVID GERGEN: You devote a good deal of your discussion in the early part of your book to the clustering problem that occurs on college campuses, as well, of course, as in places of employment, where there’s a voluntary segregation that takes place. You know, blacks go and sit in one part of the dining room or dining hall, and whites go sit in another, and there’s very little communication back and forth. How would you address that?
"Clustering" at college campuses.
DAVID SHIPLER: I began to understand that a little better at Colgate, where I sat around with a group of black students who explained to me how tense and difficult it was to be in a mostly-white institution where there may not be overt racism, although at times they thought there was, but there were little comments that were made, assumptions that were made about them that they weren’t as smart; that they came from broken homes; and they felt constantly on stage. And a couple of them said to me, you know, we grew up in mostly white towns, went to mostly white high schools, had a lot of white friends, but at night we could go home to our families, and we could relax, and they said, you know, if we didn’t have the black dorm there, which is called the Harlem Renaissance Center at Colgate, we just couldn’t survive here; we need a place to go back and kind of recharge our batteries and feel comfortable. So I think that a lot of blacks are creating comfort zones for themselves out of which they move every day into the mostly white situation. Now, where this gets to be problematical is where people don’t feel free to move out and make white friends. And at Princeton, where I taught a few years ago, black students told me that when they tried to hang around with whites, other blacks would call them "incog-Negro," a terrible word if you take it apart, "incog-Negro," suggesting a loss of identity, a subservience. Now, in high schools--
DAVID GERGEN: Which goes back to what integration means to some blacks, and that is a loss of identity.
DAVID SHIPLER: Yes, that’s right. So I think that--by the way--some whites also use terms such as that to denounce other whites who hang around with blacks. "Wiggers" is the popular term. So it goes both ways. It deprives people of free choice really because the peer pressure can be immense, but it’s understandable in a way to me that many blacks would seek zones of comfort. I mean, I was a foreign correspondent for many years. In Vietnam I had a lot of Vietnamese friends; in Russia I had a lot of Russian friends; in Israel I had a lot of Israeli and Palestinian friends; but when I want to relax, I get together with other Americans and not only other Americans, other American journalists, the sub-culture within the sub-culture.
DAVID GERGEN: So to some extent the clustering is a natural phenomenon, and it’s not necessarily just a racial phenomenon. It may be something that’s got a lot of other attributes, and that probably will be with us in some fashion for a long time to come.
DAVID SHIPLER: I think it will, and I think that we have it institutionalized in the fraternity systems, for example, where people cluster together. Whites cluster together, and people who work on the newspaper, the football team, and so forth. It’s there. The question is: Can you get out of that circle and move into other circles so that you are exposing yourself to a variety of people?
DAVID GERGEN: May I ask one last question. We’ve had Abigail and Steve Thernstrom on the air here with their new book, saying there’s been a lot of progress on racial issues. You’re more skeptical of that. Question: Without debating the facts, I’d like to know whether you’re optimistic about the future of race relations in the country.
The future of race relations in America.
DAVID SHIPLER: I think I’m a little optimistic and a little pessimistic. First of all, it’s hard with a subject so complex as race to come up with an index on progress. I mean, there are more black corporate executives and more black prisoners today than there were 10 years ago, but which number do you choose to focus on? School segregation is actually getting worse. On the other hand, I found a lot of very good people all over the country who are working hard on these issues in the small areas of their influence. You know, in their communities, on their jobs, blacks and whites, they don’t get into the press very much; they are in the book, many of them; and so looking at those people I’m hopeful but I also am afraid that we could do some backsliding, if we’re not careful. This is not an issue that is inevitably going to lead to progress. It’s a tough problem. We’ve got to learn to talk to each other about it better than we do.
DAVID GERGEN: David Shipler, thank you for joining us.
DAVID SHIPLER: Thanks for having me.
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