Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.

• Author: Reinhardt, Stephen R.

The thesis of Derrick Bell's(1) new book is chilling: racism in this country is permanent; it is intractable. We are, as Professor Bell sees it, a society of former slaveholders and former slaves; and never the twain shall meet. His message is one of despair, yet of strength: a country with a black minority ("the faces at the bottom of the well") destined to suffer permanent second-class status - but a minority that can nevertheless achieve dignity and self-respect by pursuing its foredoomed struggle. It is a message that must strike a responsive chord deep within us; we must have all feared, consciously or unconsciously, that integration is, in many ways, a failure; that the glory days of the civil rights movement have ended; and that the result is, as accurately depicted by Andrew Hacker,(2) "two nations: black and white; separate, hostile, unequal."

The two authors express similarly despairing views, but their works otherwise bear little resemblance to one another. Bell's book is brilliant, witty, literate, creative. It captivates its audience from the first to the last page. There is no doubt that if Professor Bell runs out of law schools - as he well may someday soon - he could easily earn a living as a writer. Professor Hacker's book is clearly the work of a social scientist: plodding, unexciting, but useful and informative. It provides all the facts and statistics necessary to substantiate Bell's views. However, Hacker's book, unlike Bell's, is not one to read for pleasure - or for its literary merit.

Bell's eloquence and imagination are expressed in fictionalized tales that starkly dramatize the primary issue that confronts, and has always confronted, American democracy. Each tale is more fascinating and disturbing than its predecessor. It is only at the end that the reader realizes that Bell has raised and dealt with almost every major question involved in the American Dilemma - and has done so most effectively. However, it is the last tale that sums up Bell's theme and gives full vent to his cry of despair. The tale, entitled "The Space Traders," tells the story of spacemen (more correctly, spacepersons) who emerge on our shores and offer to provide all the wealth necessary to rescue our national, state, and local govemments from their states of semibankruptcy, all the chemicals necessary to restore our environment to its original pristine state, and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel sufficient to satisfy all our future energy needs. What the Space Traders ask in return is the right to take back to their home star all African Americans resident in the United States. The tale can, of course, be read on several levels, all equally depressing, all involving the state of black Americans today. As the story winds to its inevitable (to Professor Bell) climax, we see before us just how white America appears to the black co-inhabitants of this land -and we had better understand the bitter nature of their fear and disillusion.

Bell's theme is echoed in Hacker's figures. There are indeed two separate Americas. As of five years ago, two thirds of black children were born out of wedlock, and the figure was rising rapidly. Meanwhile only one out of seven white children suffered a similar disadvantage at birth (p. 80). The number of births per thousand African-American women who had never been married is 1020 as compared to 127 in the case of unmarried Caucasian women (p. 76). Forty-five percent of black children are raised in homes where the income is less than the poverty level (p. 99). Only 16% of white children are subjected to so destructive an economic environment (p. 99). Almost a third of all blacks live in poverty, as compared to only 9% of whites (p. 100). The rate of unemployment is almost three times as high among African Americans as among Caucasians, and the disparity is growing rapidly (pp. 102-03). Forty-five percent of the inmates in state and federal prisons are black, although African Americans constitute but 12 to 13% of our population (p. 180). In 1990, well over half the suspects arrested for major crimes were black, as were 40% of the persons awaiting execution on death row (p. 180). As if the facts and figures were not grim enough, Professor Hacker closes with some jarring quotations from de Tocqueville. The final...