Dickerson grants that blacks still suffer from innumerable problems — among them poor scholastic achievement, crime, family breakdown and infant mortality — but she argues that these problems need to be considered in their own right and not simply in comparison with those of whites. For one thing, whites have their share of social problems and so should not necessarily be held up as the norm. For another, the appeal to whites to help solve black problems is based on outmoded assumptions. The idea that black behavior always — and only — implicates the racist past stands in the way of individual and group progress, she maintains: In the hands of many of its advocates, this racism-first analysis denies blacks' individual agency, choice and responsibility.

I could not agree more with Dickerson's reported assertion that white America should not be held up as a norm, or worse yet, a role model. (However, it seems to me that black conservatives are more likely to do that than the liberal civil rights establishment.) As James Baldwin put it, why should one want to be integrated into a burning house? Instead, the task for progressive people of all complexions should be to improve ourselves as human beings and rehabilitate our national house simultaneously.

Whether to blame institutional racism for the problems of people of color turns on the circumstances, I believe. Individuals definitely should do what they can to improve their lives. But, the societal framework one operates in determines how well those efforts work out much of the time. A black child in Mississippi with an IQ of 150 is probably still more likely to find herself stymied by resentful whites than helped. If her potential isn't met, a society that deems her inferior even when she surpasses its measures of merit is at fault. To try to shift the responsibiliy from society's shoulders to hers is unfair.

But, I am wary of crediting such a position to Dickerson. The review is marred by the reviewer's very conservative perspective on race. It is sometimes difficult to determine whether Lasch-Quinn is describing Dickerson's views or inserting her own. The criticism in the following passage makes no sense.

Dickerson's entire argument — that blacks need to let go of old notions of black identity and the forms of identity politics and racial grievance at their core — is subverted early in the book by a surprising chapter on "white intransigence" in which she presents a litany of complaints against whites. Here she lumps all whites together — just the thing she opposes in the case of blacks — and casts them as still in denial about the nation's racial crimes. Taking the occasional bigoted remark — the kind usually vilified and exposed in the press today — as indicative of late-20th-century white opinion, she undermines her own argument in the previous chapter that the civil rights movement brought revolutionary change. After urging blacks to forsake old patterns of complaint and redress for a newly courageous civic participation, dedication to the common good and individual flourishing, she invokes the usual culprit — white supremacy — as if it were an unmitigated and eternal force. Earlier faulting blacks for wrongly feeling excluded from America, she later says that blacks "find themselves defined out of America." Well, which is it?