美英报刊阅读教程Lesson 1 课文

【Lesson 1 Good News about Racial Progress

The remaining divisions in American society should

not blind us to a half-century of dramatic change

By Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom

In the Perrywood community of Upper Marlboro, Md.1, near Washington, D.C., homes cost between $160,000 and $400,000. The lawns are green and the amenities appealing—including a basketball court.

Low-income teen-agers from Washington started coming there. The teens were black, and they were not welcomed. The homeowners association hired off-duty police as security, and they would ask the ballplayers whether they “belonged” in the area. The association s newsletter noted the “eyesore” at the basketball court.

But the story has a surprising twist: many of the homeowners were black too. “We started having problems with the young men, and unfortunately they are our people,” one resident told a reporter from the Washington Post. “But what can you do?”

The homeowners didn t care about the race of the basketball players. They were outsiders—intruders. As another resident remarked, “People who don t live here might not care about things the way we do. Seeing all the new houses going up, someone might be tempted.”

It s a telling story. Lots of Americans think that almost all blacks live in inner cities. Not true. Today many blacks own homes in suburban neighborhoods—not just around Washington, but outside Atlanta, Denver and other cities as well.

That s not the only common misconception Americans have about race. For some of the misinformation, the media are to blame. A reporter in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, writes that the economic gap between whites and blacks has widened. He offers no evidence. The picture drawn of racial relations is even bleaker. In one poll, for instance, 85 percent of blacks, but only 34 percent of whites, agreed with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. That racially divided response made headline news. Blacks and whites, media accounts would have us believe, are still separate and hostile. Division is a constant theme, racism another.

To be sure, racism has not disappeared, and race relations could — and probably will — improve. But the serious inequality that remains is less a function of racism than of the racial gap in levels of educational attainment, single parenthood and crime. The bad news has been exaggerated, and the good news neglected. Consider these three trends:

A black middle class has arrived. Andrew Young recalls the day he was mistaken for a valet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. It was an infuriating case of mistaken identity for a man who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

But it wasn t so long ago that most blacks were servants—or their equivalent. On the eve of

World War II, a trivial five percent of black men were engaged in white-collar work of any kind, and six out of ten African-American women were employed as domestics.

In 1940 there were only 1,000 practicing African-American lawyers; by 1995 there were over 32,000, about four percent of all attorneys.

Today almost three-quarters of African-American families have incomes above the government poverty line. Many are in the middle class, according to one useful index—earning double the government poverty level; in 1995 this was $30,910 for a two-parent family with two children and $40,728 for a two-parent family with four children. Only one black family in 100 enjoyed a middle-class income in 1940; by 1995 it was 49 in 100. And more than 40 percent of black households also own their homes. That s a huge change.

The typical white family still earns a lot more than the black family because it is more likely to collect two paychecks. But if we look only at married couples—much of the middle class—the white-black income gap shrinks to 13 percent. Much of that gap can be explained by the smaller percentage of blacks with college degrees, which boost wages, and the greater concentration of blacks in the South, where wages tend to be lower.

Blacks are moving to the suburbs. Following the urban riots of the mid-1960s, the presiden­tial Kerner Commission14 concluded that the nation s future was menaced by “accelerating segrega­tion”—black central cities and whites outside the core. That segregation might well blow the country apart, it said.

It s true that whites have continued to leave inner cities for the suburbs, but so, too, have blacks. The number of black suburban dwellers in the last generation has almost tripled to 10.6 million. In 1970 metropolitan Atlanta, for example, 27 percent of blacks lived in the suburbs with 85 percent of whites. By 1990, 64 percent of blacks and 94 percent of whites resided there.

This is not phony integration, with blacks moving from one all-black neighborhood into another. Most of the movement has brought African-Americans into neighborhoods much less black15 than those they left behind, thus increasing integration. By 1994 six in ten whites reported that they lived in neighborhoods with blacks.

Residential patterns do remain closely connected to race. However, neighborhoods have become more racially mixed, and residential segregation has been decreasing.

Bigotry has declined. Before World Was ft, Gunnar Myrdal16 roamed the South researching An American Dilemma, the now-classic book that documented17 the chasm between the nation s ideals and its racial practices, hi one small Southern city, he kept asking whites how he could find “Mr. Jim Smith,” an African-American who was principal of a black high school. No one seemed to know who he was. After he finally found Smith, Myrdal was told that he should have just asked for “Jim.” That s how great was white aversion t …… 此处隐藏：5782字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……