Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration

Thirty-five years after the 1963 March on Washington, blacks and whites are still trying to achieve Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic dream of racial inclusion. What ever happened to integration? What happened to the vision of a single, shared community in which both blacks and whites would feel they belong? Barriers have fallen; prejudice is abating. Blacks have made astonishing progress in many areas. Yet if anything, King's vision seems more remote than ever, and most Americans, black and white, remain divided by anger and mistrust. In Someone Else's House, Tamar Jacoby asks what happened to the King dream, calling the nation back to its most hopeful and promising ideal of race relations.

Moving beyond the stale blame game of left and right, Jacoby uses history to show what's worked and what hasn't. Her story of the unfinished struggle for integration leads through the volatile worlds of New York in the 1960s, the center of liberal idealism about race; Detroit in the 1970s, under the city's first black mayor, Coleman Young; and Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s, ruled by a coalition of white businessmen and black politicians. Based on extensive local research and reporting, her vivid, dramatic account evokes the specific flavor of each city and gives voice to a host of ordinary individuals, black and white, caught up in the frustrations of trying to translate a vision into reality.

Someone Else's House is a story of strong emotions and bitter conflict -- over Black Power, busing, ghetto policing and affirmative action. There are occasional heroes and some villains, but very few conventional morality tales. In Jacoby's view, the recent history of race relations is more often a story of blindness and tragic mistakes -- of blacks caught between their racial resentment and their yearning for integration, of whites led to do the wrong thing less by prejudice than by good intentions.

Jacoby's conclusions are as straightforward and clear as her history is nuanced. Most of the means we've used to achieve integration haven't worked. Our growing preoccupation with color consciousness leaves little room for the communality King dreamed of. The ideals of the early civil rights movement-integration, forgiveness and a sense of one community based not on color but on shared national purposes -- remain the only possible American answer for race relations. But if we can only listen to history, Jacoby tells us, we can still find our way back to that path.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s accomplished so much that by the early '70s the goal seemed in sight. Jim Crow was dead, and it must have seemed that one more push would bring America to racial equality.

And we've been stalled on the edge of that dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. Nothing much since then has panned out. Jacoby wonders if we haven't abandoned the dream altogether. What would Martin Luther King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? Can we claim to be honoring his legacy, which had integration (of hearts and minds as well as bodies) as its goal, while we chant new mantras of separationism?

In America today there's bitter resentment against what is seen as "special treatment." About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder."

"Just what accounts for this new resentment is not easy to untangle," writes Jacoby, "but it is not always the same as out-and-out bigotry. A white man who thinks a black woman on welfare should get a job may in fact be responding to her color, voicing an ugly and unthinking assumption about black attitudes toward work. Or he may be reacting to something he didn't like in the racial rhetoric of recent decades: the claim that white society is responsible for the problems blacks face. Thirty-five years of color-coded conflict have taken a huge toll on both sides, and fairly or not the showdown has left many whites embittered. Their feelings may be an obstacle to harmony, but they are not necessarily prejudice in the conventional sense."

What have we learned? Jacoby writes, "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that."

But, as Jacoby writes, "That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is a long, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."

Jacoby's ultimate tough question is this: Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?


What Went Wrong   August 31, 2001
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

In ySomeone Elseys House,y Tamar Jacoby lucubrates on many of the root problems that plague racial relations in America today. Wisely, she limits her scope within this vast arena to Black--White affiliations and geographically, she confines the effort to a comparison of New York City, Detroit, and Atlanta. Most of the trouble she discusses can be traced back to giving unmitigated credence to blatantly stupid ideas.
Each cityys section devotes ample time to one of the metropolisy long serving mayors. In New York City, John Lindsey is portrayed as an impeccably intentioned, dedicated public servant encumbered with an overwhelming streak of naivete. Based on mountains of evidence, nobody can question his sincere commitment to racial reconciliation or to improving the quality of life for black citizens too long held back by endemic discrimination, but the vagaries he chose to rectify the situation severely compounded the situation. By listening to the loudest black radicals, rather than the intelligent but more tempered individuals, (tragically initiating a trend that has accelerated until today) genuine progress was sacrificed to attempt unobtainable placation. Ms. Jacoby does not lay all the blame at NYCys charismatic mayorys feet; indeed there was plenty to go around. The White House, the all-powerful Ford Foundation, the psittacine major media, and a host of other allegedly liberal players either shared Lindseyys unreasonable hopes or postulated that appeasement would be far easier to deliver than improvement.
Detroit is shown as a failure in every regard and much of the blame goes directly to the cityys entrenched Mayor Coleman Young. He is limned as a racist/separatist who advanced the most radical elements of the yBlack Powery movement. While spuriously claiming to have the best interests of their fellow black citizens at heart, Mayor Young and these thugs he countenanced made life a living hell for honest lower class back citizens. His open hostility to whites drove many business out of town leaving scores of unemployed poor black people behind with no way to reach the jobs in the suburbs. By declaring war on his own police department, he empowered criminals, and while a majority of perpetrators may have been black, so was a substantial majority of the victims. Sadly, even though Coleman Youngys near-eternal reign finally came to a close, Detroit still has not been able to put all its pieces back together, and long smoldering racial tensions remain strained.
Atlanta is clearly shown to be the most successful of the three profiled cities; yet it comes across as far from a model of harmonious interracial coexistence. Mayor Andrew Young lacked the hateful separatism of Detroitys Young and displayed a firmer grasp of reality than New Yorkys Lindsey; still he strayed from Martin Luther Kingys dream and implemented dubious racial counting. After a decade of affirmative action, Ms. Jacoby documents how little concrete progress was made. She also adequately evaluates the damage done by this well-meaning problem. She writes of the resentment toward those who achieved status or jobs based soley on skin color. She discusses the defeatism that afflicted many blacks who knew that their qualifications were not the source of their success or some case not even of interest to their employers. Most interestingly, she recounts fraudulent cases of alleged black companies that served as fronts for dishonest white businessmen and provides evidence that a handful of black companies reaped the vast majority of affirmative action's spoils.
If the tome has a drawback it plods on occasion. The 600+ page work would probably have been enhanced by a 100 page edit--at least half of which should have come from the Atlanta section. Considerable information about the cityys leap forward since the mid-1980s was interesting but not directly relevant.
While maintaining impressive objectivity throughout the historical reporting, Ms. Jacoby obviously has a firmly help point of view on race relations, and at no time does she attempt to obfuscate her convictions. She closes with a series of common sense recommendations and truthfully advocates acculturation, mentoring, and a valuing of individuality over group labeling. While most proponents of these proven techniques are conservatives who generally defensively suggest them while fighting to prove they are not racists, Ms. Jacobyys overall political leanings are not on display here. She is to be commended for unapologetically putting forth such ideas. There is nothing racist about calling upon everyone to do his her or best, and giving one his or her own identity is more respectful than herding people together into some artificial category. While these opinions may appear revolutionary and controversial today, Tamar Jacoby is not the first person to call for judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.


Compelling and honest   July 24, 2001
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

To summarize, Tamar Jacoby's book is compelling and blatantly honest. Perhaps it is too honest for some people to handle. Race relations and the successes and failures of public policy were analyzed in several US cities. Having grown up in the NY area, I found her take on NY incidents to be insightful and brutallly candid


Putting politics aside...   July 11, 2000
 5 out of 7 found this review helpful

...this book was dissapointing.

It tries to be a complication of three "case studies" in racial harmony: New York, Detroit, and Atlanta. While it is surprising that someone who worked for the New York Times (on the editorial page, no less!) would write a book that highlights the failure of liberal policy to further the cause of racial harmony, it lacks cohesiveness & depth. It reads like a bunch of daily newspaper articles loosely stitched together--no foresight, no hindsight. There are detailed accounts of the day-by-day happenings of important events, but very little effort is given to tying these events into the big picture. Indeed, there were times I got very frustrated, because she would take 25-50 pages to explain an event in excruciating detail, then wrap it up with some statement like "But this event wasn't very important anyways."

There are no proper notations, either. The citations are just listed in the appendix, with a general page reference. This is a real shortcoming, as you never know whether or not a given statement will have a citation. If you're using this book for secondary research, beware!

Lastly, there are occasions where the author either contradicts herself, or appears to contradict herself with an ambiguous statement.

My opinion is that the author was well-intentioned, and this is an important subject, but the book fell victim to very poor editting. If more time and effort had been spent in making the book flow better, have greater depth, proper citations, and fewer errors, it (would have been) a lot better.