The news is not all good, however. After all, the white poverty rate in 1995 was only 9 percent. Why the continued disparity? The Thernstroms persuasively argue that the decline in marriage and the corresponding increase in out-of-wedlock births, occurring nationwide but reaching far higher levels among blacks, explain the persistence of the poverty disparity far more than other factors.
They also report the sad news that after converging since good national tests began in the early 1970s, the reading and math scores of whites and blacks began widening again in the mid-1980s, possibly because of increasing school violence and a growing unwillingness to apply rigorous academic standards to blacks. (They make a plausible case, but properly admit that no one yet knows precisely why this is happening.)
The Thernstroms puncture holes in every defense of racial preference in higher education. This is probably the best part of the book. Even if you tossed out the SAT and high school grades and focused only on extracurricular activities and socioeconomic factors, the numbers of blacks in elite institutions of higher education would be much lower than they are. This is not to say they would be shut out of colleges: The vast majority of colleges and universities have a noncompetitive admissions process; if you apply and have minimal qualifications, you get in.
For whatever reason, black high school students aren't being prepared well in high school for the few hundred competitive schools that do exist: They aren't taking college prep courses, they aren't keeping their grades up, and they aren't developing the other experiences or skills necessary to get in on their merits. This isn't just because of incomes; on the SAT, even poor whites on average score better than black students from relatively wealthy families. Rather than dealing with this difficult problem, university leaders are pretending it doesn't exist. They admit students who are demonstrably unprepared for their college coursework and either fail to graduate them or further lower academic standards so they can.
For the 1989-1990 college freshman class, 60 percent of black students failed to graduate within six years, compared to 40 percent of whites. When colleges attempt to display their social commitment by admitting high-risk students from minority groups, it is the students who suffer when the risks don't pan out. The schools may feel better for demonstrating enlightened racial attitudes, but many of the presumed beneficiaries end up worse off.
In many cases, colleges defend their policies by citing the need for diversity, as if this goal is more important than scholastic rigor. The nation's competitive colleges are, in effect, playing a crude racial counting game--either because of the ideological pretensions of their faculties and leaders or because they think they have no choice--and the Thernstroms heap deserved scorn on it.
While the Thernstroms are fastidious about documenting their arguments, there is one important area in which they are generally unconvincing. As a native Southerner who has had many a locker-room conversation, I don't share the Thern- stroms' trust of public opinion polls in identifying improvements in racial attitudes. Lots of white people retain prejudices, of varying degrees of magnitude and kind. Probably lots of black people do, too. They just don't share them with pollsters.
Still, what America in Black and White shows is that, to the extent a problem persists in social relations among whites, blacks, and other minorities, it is only exacerbated by race-conscious public policies such as preferential admissions and minority contracting goals. Modern liberals celebrate the statement of Justice Harry Blackmun, in the infamous Bakke case on college admissions, that "in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race"--even though it is self-evidently moronic. In public policy, getting beyond race means getting beyond race. Nothing less.
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