Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?: Narrowing the enduring divisions of race

The Fractious Nation?: Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages 155-169

  Hochschild, Jennifer ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 39349097397     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (48)

1. Edmund Wilson, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" New Yorker, Jan. 20, 1945, 66.
2. Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, Oct. 27-31, 1995. By 2000, three out of five whites and blacks agreed that the goal of achieving racial equality in the United States was best approached through equal opportunity rather than integration or equal results (NBC News/Wall Street Journal News Poll, March 2-5, 2000).
3. New York Times/CBS News Poll, "Race Relations in New York City," June 17-20, 1990. African Americans with at least some college education found all three charges much more plausible than did African Americans with less than a high school education. Among whites the pattern was reversed. See Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 106.
4. New York Times/CBS News Poll, Oct. 10-13, 1996. On this survey, also, more well-educated than poorly educated African Americans found the drug hypothesis true or plausible. My thanks to Michael Kagay of the New York Times for analyzing the data on this and the previous poll for me.
5. Hochschild, Facing Up, 60-61.
6. Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University, Racial Attitudes Survey http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/sidebars/polls/race_071101.htm, accessed April 22, 2001.
7. Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University, The Four Americas (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 1995).
8. Evidence for this and the preceding paragraph are in Hochschild, Facing Up, 60-67.
9. "Conflict and Convergence: Race, Public Opinion, and Political Behavior in Massachusetts," University of Massachusetts McCormack Institute Poll (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998);
10. Gallup Organization, "Hispanics, Whites Rate Bush Positively, While Blacks Are Much More Negative," June 21, 2001 www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010621.asp, accessed Nov. 8, 2002;
11. General Social Surveys, 1972-2000: Cumulative Codebook (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2001).
12. Richard Morin, "Poll Reflects Division over Simpson Case," Washington Post, Oct. 8, 1995, A31, A34.
13. Supreme Court ratings are from Gallup Organization, "Hispanics, Whites Rate Bush." The views on voting are from Washington Post et al., Racial Attitudes Survey.
14. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1992);
15. Derrick Bell, Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
16. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 17, 492;
17. for a similar argument see Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York: Viking, 1997).
18. William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
19. William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Knopf, 1996).
20. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994).
21. Molefi Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990);
22. Asa Hilliard III, Lucretia Payton-Stewart, and Larry Williams, eds., Infusion of African and African-American Content in the School Curriculum (Chicago: Third World Press, 1990).
23. John Ogbu, The Next Generation (New York: Academic Press, 1974);
24. John Ogbu, "Diversity and Equity in Public Education," in Policies for America's Public Schools, ed. Ron Haskins and Duncan MacRae (New York: Ablex, 1988), 127-70;
25. Signithia Fordham, Blacked Out (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
26. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995).
27. Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
28. Robert Goodin, personal communication, May 21, 1996.
29. This argument has affinities with the European principle of subsidiarity, as well as with Saul Alinsky's recipe for neighborhood regeneration and rebellion. Thus it does not have either a clear leftist or rightist caste.
30. Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (1946; reprint, New York: Random House, 1991).
31. Michael Tomasky, "All Fall Down," New York Magazine, Feb. 12, 1996, 44-49.
32. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, 134-35.
33. Goodin, personal communication. As I wrote almost two decades ago, after reviewing the history of school desegregation policies, "incrementalism . . . does little to help either minorities or whites and does a lot to harm them. Half a loaf, in this case, may be worse than none at all" (Jennifer Hochschild, The New American Dilemma [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984], 91).
34. For further analysis of this ideology
35. Hochschild, Facing Up.
36. For citations and further evidence for the past three paragraphs
37. Hochschild, Facing Up, 55-56;
38. General Social Surveys, 1972-2000;
39. Pew Research Center Values Update Survey, Nov. 5-17, 1997.
40. Charlotte Steeh and Maria Krysan, "Trends: Affirmative Action and the Public, 1970-1995," Public Opinion Quarterly 60 (1996): 128-58;
41. Washington Post et al., Racial Attitude Survey.
42. Jennifer Hochschild, "Affirmative Action as Culture War," in The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries, ed. Michele Lamont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
43. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1996 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice), 114-15, 148-49;
44. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1999 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice), 102, 115, 126-27, 130-31;
45. Jennifer Hochschild and Reuel Rogers, "Race Relations in a Diversifying Nation," in New Directions: African-Americans in a Diversifying Nation, ed. James Jackson (Washington, D.C.: National Planning Association, 2000).
46. To cite only one example: 37 percent of African Americans, compared with only 4 percent of non-Hispanic whites, claim to have been "unfairly stopped by police." "Poll: Racial Profiling," Washington Post, June 21, 2001 www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/sidebars/racepoll/062101racepoll.htm, accessed Nov. 8, 2002.
47. Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1999: 102, 109-11.
48. Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 4.