Crying wolf

Ellis Cose's Newsweek cover story set out to celebrate America's racial good news. So why did it wind up singing the same old despairing song?

By Joan Walsh

Jun 11, 1999 | Ellis Cose is at it again. Six years ago the Newsweek reporter zeroed in on an intriguing social paradox: The higher African-Americans climbed on the corporate and social ladder, the more alienated and pessimistic they became about race relations in America. He wrote a Newsweek article on the topic, and later a book, "The Rage of a Privileged Class," which was alternately moving, provocative and maddening. Cose seemed torn between criticizing the tragic myopia of the blinkered black elite -- because indeed its worldview is deeply sad, and deeply wrong -- and arguing that it was justified.

Now Cose has written a kind of follow-up piece, "The Good News About Black America," on the cover of Newsweek this past week. He lays out statistics that chart the amazing turnaround in the African-American community over the last decade: Teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births are down, and school achievement and employment rates are up. Crime has plummeted while home-ownership rates have climbed. More blacks are in college than ever, and fewer are on welfare. Cose talks for a while about that transformation, and skims over some of the fascinating details of what's behind it. But then he spends more than half the piece talking about how things aren't as good as they seem, outlining the gaps in family income, school achievement, incarceration rates and substance abuse between blacks and whites. These gaps are disturbing, of course, but they're not the news.

What's up with that? Why would a piece on "good news" spend more than half of its ink on bad news? Why are writers like Cose, and many black leaders, so afraid of good news? Cose asks the question himself, less than halfway through the piece: "If the news in black America is so good, why are people not dancing in the streets? Why are civil-rights leaders not proclaiming it from the rooftops? Why has the dialogue on racial relations not fundamentally changed to accentuate the progress instead of the lingering problems?"

But having asked the question, Cose doesn't much like what he hears. California's anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly (whose "Racism is dead" rap is another kind of myopia) tells him the civil rights establishment "is locked into the mind-set of the '60s that society is racist." The much more thoughtful and persuasive sociologist Orlando Patterson basically agrees.

Cose does not. He lets Urban League president Hugh Price answer critics who accuse the black establishment of harping on the bad news. "We have celebrated the economy, the reduction in unemployment, the reduction in teen-pregnancy rates," Price says flatly, with no mention of where, or when, or how, or to what end the good news has been celebrated. And Cose leaves it at that. The rest of the piece is a litany of what's wrong in black America, most of which he argues is caused by good old-fashioned racism. The article itself is an example of the muddled, and all too predictable, thinking about race that Cose sets out to explore.

Next Page: The ritual invocation of racial despair

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