The Dream Is Gone.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.
• Position: Review

Hollywood's executives found themselves scrambling last summer - scrambling to find some blacks. The networks' fall 1999 lineup was as white as the roster of a professional hockey team. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People declared itself outraged and threatened to sue. Ultimately, the show business powers-that-be managed to write a few minority roles into their otherwise white-centered shows. One can be sure that TV tokenism won't soon be neglected again.

But this is a step in the wrong direction, if one accepts the argument of By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, a compelling book by two American University communications professors. In fact, this book suggests the original network lineup revealed the real America: a society with virtually no black-white integration.

Leonard Steinhorn (who is white) and Barbara Diggs-Brown (who is black) argue that the fantasy of representational diversity hinders actual racial progress, which they define as black and white integration. "What television has done is to give white Americans the sensation of having meaningful, repeated contact with blacks without actually having it," write Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown. "We call this phenomenon virtual integration, and it is the primary reason why the integration illusion - the belief that we are moving toward a colorblind nation - has such a powerful influence on race relations in America today."

The authors are "believers in true [black-white] integration"; they just don't think it's possible. In a country of racial optimists and pessimists, Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown cast themselves as racial realists. And their realism leaves them with a "choice of telling a truth we did not want to tell or of perpetuating a fiction that we wanted to believe." They tell the truth, as they see it: America lives an "integration illusion," which they define as "the public acclaim for the progress we have made, the importance of integration symbolism, the overt demonstrations of racial harmony, the rejection of blatant bigotry, the abstract support to neighborhood and school integration - all coupled with a continuing resistance to living, learning, playing and praying together."

And the authors don't exempt themselves from this analysis. In a curious disclosure, they admit that neither of them lives an integrated life, as they define it. Steinhorn, like most other D.C. area whites, lives in a predominantly white suburb. Diggs-Brown lives "a predominantly black personal life." Even though they worked closely on the book for two years, their families never once socialized together. This distance becomes a model for their book: If they can't integrate, who else can be expected to cross the black-white color line? Perhaps this is why they are hesitant to assign blame. "But let's not be too hard on ourselves," Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown write in the book's final chapter, "for it is wrong to say that we have failed when our goal was never realistic in the first place."

By the Color of Our Skin is not a policy book. It aims to describe America's black-white condition, not to point the way to racial harmony. Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown support affirmative action; they could hardly avoid discussing the most contentious racial public policy issue, but they don't dwell on it. Rather, they dwell on academic studies, their personal experiences, interviews with others concerned about racial issues, and coverage by major media outlets: The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the newsweeklies. In two chapters, they use these sources to describe our condition: Blacks and whites live, learn, work, pray, play, and entertain separately. They spend five more chapters analyzing why this is the case. They conclude by looking at integration success stories and offering their vision for a more racially honest America.

Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown aren't shy about making strong claims, chief among them that America is no more integrated than "the day when a quarter of a million Americans descended on Washington for the great civil rights march of 1963." Shocking but true - if one accepts their terms. Their key point is to make a distinction between desegregation and integration. Desegregation, they say, "means the elimination of discriminatory laws and barriers." Integration, by contrast, is "governed by behavior and choice." It occurs only when individuals on both sides of the color line choose to cross it to live, to socialize, and to love, in addition to maintaining the pro forma workplace relations with which we are all familiar. "America is desegregating," the authors write. "But we are simply not integrating."

There are tricky definitional issues here, even after we recognize the distinction they propose. What exactly does it mean to live an integrated life? That one has black (or white) neighbors? That one invites one's black (or white) neighbors over twice a year for a barbecue? For those whose lives are less residentially based, is it a matter of peer or hobby groups?

Most would consider Washington, D.C., residentially segregated, and large sections of its northwest quadrant are predominantly white. Yet my white friends there just purchased a house next to a black family. They...