The American racial and ethnic landscape has been fundamentally transformed in recent decades," write editors Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their introduction to Beyond the Color Line (Hoover Press and Manhattan Institute, 2002). "But public understanding has lagged behind new realities. Our gaze in often fixed on the rearview mirror, and even that view is distorted."
A generation ago, blacks had much less education, had much poorer jobs, and were more likely to live in solidly black neighborhoods than they are today. Yet the old notion of "two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal" still persists thirty years after it first appeared in the misguided diagnosis of the Kerner Commission report.
"The past is not the present," write the Thernstroms. "We have been moving forward. Much of the territory that now surrounds us is unfamiliar."
America's changing racial and ethnic scene is the central theme of Beyond the Color Line. In essays covering a range of areas including education, law, religion, immigration, family structure, crime, economics, politics, and more, this volume examines where we've been, where we are, and where we're going. Along the way, the authors attempt to illuminate how we have moved from Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of all Americans being judged solely by the "content of their character, not the color of their skin," to today's vaguely Orwellian civil rights orthodoxy that it is necessary to treat some persons differently in order to treat them "equally."
The work of the Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity—formed in 1998 as an alternative to the one-sided official "dialogue" on questions of color—many of these twenty-five brief essays offer either explicit or implicit public policy recommendations. A common theme unites them: new realities require new thinking, and old civil rights strategies will not solve today's problems. Beyond the Color Line takes the first steps toward a new civil rights agenda.
About the Editors
Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since 1995, and Stephan Thernstrom, the Winthrop Professor of History at harvard University and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, are coauthors of America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and write frequently for a variety of journals and newspapers, including The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, and the UCLA Law Review.
Contributors: Hoover fellows David Brady, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and C. Robert Zelnick; other contributors include David J. Armor, Michael Barone, Douglas J. Besharov, Clint Bolick, Linda Chavez, William A.V. Clark, Ward Connerly, John J. DiIulio Jr., Tamar Jacoby, Everett C. Ladd, George La Noue, William J. Lawrence, Nelson Lund, Christine H. Rossell, Sally Satel, Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom, Martin Trow, Reed Ueda, Eugene Volokh, Finis Welch, and James Q. Wilson.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic public policy and international affairs.
