How to save America's cities.

• Author: Bradley, Bill

SLAVERY was our original sin, just as race remains our unresolved dilemma. The future of American cities inextricably is bound to the issue of race and ethnicity. By the year 2000, only 57% of the people entering the U.S. workforce will be native-born whites. That means that the economic future of the children of white Americans increasingly will depend on the talents of nonwhite Americans. If we allow them to fail because of penny-pinching or timidity about straight talk, the U.S. will become a second-rate power. If they succeed, America and all Americans will be enriched. As a nation, we will find common ground together and move ahead, or each of us will be diminished.

Life in cities is full of more complexity and hope than the media or politicians will admit, and part of getting beyond color not only is attacking the sources of inequity, but also refusing to make race an excuse for failing to pass judgment about self-destructive behavior. Without a community, there can be no commonly held standards, and without some commonly held standards, there can be no community. The question is whether we can build a set of commonly accepted rules in our cities that enhances individuality and life chances, but also provides the glue and tolerance to prevent us from going for each other's throats.

Urban America is not only divided by a line with blacks on one side and whites on another. Increasingly, it is a mixture of other races, languages, and religions, as new immigrants arrive in search of economic promise and freedom from state control. More than 4,500,000 Latinos and nearly 5,000,000 Asian Pacifics have arrived in the U.S. since 1970. In New Jersey, school children come from families that speak 120 different languages at home. In Atlanta, managers of some low-income apartment complexes that once were virtually all black now need to speak fluent Spanish. Detroit has absorbed some 200,000 people of Middle Eastern descent. In San Jose, Calif., the phone book reveals that families with the Vietnamese surname Nguyen outnumber the Joneses by nearly 50%. In Houston, one Korean immigrant restaurant owner oversees Hispanic immigrant employees who prepare Chinese-style food for a predominantly black clientele.

Even though our future depends on finding common ground, many white Americans resist relinquishing the sense of entitlement that skin color has given them throughout our history. They lack any understanding of the emerging dynamics of one world," even in the U.S., because, to them, nonwhites always have been "the other." Moreover, people of different races often don't listen to each other on the subject of race. It's as if we're all experts, locked into our narrow views and preferring to be wrong, rather than risk changing them. Black Americans ask of Asian-Americans, "What's the problem? You're doing well financially. " Black Americans believe that Latinos often fail to find common ground with their historic struggle, and some Hispanics agree, questioning whether the black civil rights model is the only path to progress. White Americans continue to harbor absurd stereotypes about all people of color. Black Americans take white criticism of individual acts as an attempt to stigmatize all black Americans. We seem to be more interested in defending our racial territory than recognizing we could be enriched by another race's perspective.

In politics over the last 25 years, silence or distortion has shaped the issue of race and urban America. Both political parties have contributed to the problem. Republicans have played the race card in a divisive way to get votes--remember Willie Horton --and Democrats have suffocated discussion of self-destructive behavior among the minority population in a cloak of silence and denial. The result is that yet another generation has been lost. We can not afford to wait any longer. It is time for candor, truth, and action.

Cities in crisis

America's cities are poorer, sicker, less educated, and more violent than at any time in my lifetime. The physical problems are obvious: old housing stock, deteriorated schools, aging infrastructure, a diminished manufacturing base, and a health care system short of doctors that fails to immunize against measles, much less educate about AIDS. The jobs have disappeared. The neighborhoods have been gutted. A genuine depression has hit cities, with unemployment in some areas at the levels of the 1930s. Yet, just as Americans found solidarity then in the midst of trauma and just as imaginative leadership moved us through the darkest days of the Depression, so the physical conditions of our cities can be altered today. What it takes is collective will, greater accountability, and sufficient resources.

What is less obvious in urban America is the crisis of meaning. Without meaning, there can be...