The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call.

• Author: Wicker, Tom

Carl Rowan has given The Coming Race War in America the subtitle: "A Wake-Up Call." Well, hell, as he might say in this colloquially written book, there's plenty for the nation to be awakened to. And what does it matter that I believe the apocalyptic prediction of his book is somewhat overwrought? If it alerts an either blind or uncaring America to its disastrous race relations--or. worse, if it fails to do so--a little overstatement will hardly matter.

Anyway, Rowan is on target most of the time. Even in an impassioned introduction, where he writes that a race war can be averted "only if we stop denying that a grave threat exists," his point is powerfully taken. Even if you don't believe there's a realistic threat of armed racial conflict, you'd better believe there is a high probability of economic and social decline that will blight the nation's future far more surely than the federal deficit over which so many crocodile tears are shed.

Americans cannot afford to deny that threat. Rowan puts it graphically: "While some blacks found dignity and political clout and economic opportunity over the last thirty years, the great mass of black Americans have not."

In other words, for all the illusory successes of the civil rights movement, and despite the deluded or willful belief of so many whites, including Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, that the movement resulted in a color-blind society, the nation remains a house divided--or, as other writers have put it, two nations, separate and unequal.

For confirmation, choose any statistic--that black unemployment consistently runs at twice the level of white joblessness, that the median net worth of black households is $4,604 compared to $44,408 for white households; or that, as Rowan writes, "the normal black family has $57 for every $100 available to the normal white family" That's a drop from the ratio of $64 to $100 in the Great Society era.

White racism, whether expressed as discrimination or indifference, in Rowan's view, is the primary cause of such disgraceful differences, and has made possible the unthinkable--a race war. There's a limit, he argues, "to how much oppression black Americans will take," regardless of how much firepower would be arrayed against the armed rebellion. He cites the Mayan Indian Zapatistas of the Chiapas state in Mexico for precedent--a weak people but one who "wouldn't take it any more" Even if their revolt can't win, they have made it clear "that life in Mexico [can]...