Products that aspire to be seen as "all-American" — from Coke to Chevrolet — are now "compelled to depict a racially diverse image," says Mr. Wynter, while a growing number of large companies (like Cisco, which has purveyed insistently multicultural imagery in its television commercials) "are browning their corporate images in order to sell themselves to the broad public, to potential investors, employees and voters." "The transracial vision," Mr. Wynter writes, "has acquired an aspirational value in the broad market not because it's politically correct but because it's how America wants to see itself: as a unified multiracial society."

...."I have never claimed that transracial pop culture represents a trend toward political racial equality," he writes at the end of the book. "But it has undeniably leveled the playing field in terms of cultural value judgments. Simply put, nonwhite cultural tropes in the mainstream and their nonwhite practitioners cannot easily be put down or marginalized on the basis of race, because their appeal is too broad. Moreover, I think, at a certain level it's hard to deny that as the trend in pop culture is self-sustaining, it must eventually be replicated in society itself." I have no particular disagreement with this assessment, but I am concerned that white and black America seem to often glom on to the worst and not the best of each other's culture: some of the black underclass has borrowed a radical materialism without the underlying work ethic that has made it go; and white America has often adopted the most cliched surface signatures of black culture without comprehending the soul nor the struggle that supports them.