WHITE MEN'S BURDEN: TIRED IDEAS

By Romesh Ratnesar

Things aren't always easy for white writers on race. Sift through the confused, conflicting feelings that most white Americans today harbor on race-charged issues--from affirmative action to interracial marriage, not to mention the Million Man March and O.J.--and try to make some sense of them. Don't stray too far right; you'll invite charges of callousness. But don't huddle too close to the left; you'll be criticized for rabble rousing. And along the way, be mindful of readers' easy exhaustion with the whole subject.

The task is daunting, but even as Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's new book upends liberal dogma on racial progress, several other white authors, all liberals to some degree, are making their own fresh attempts to grapple with America's racial dilemma--specifically, with the equivocal attitudes of whites toward African Americans. Unfortunately, none of them offers much in the way of innovative prescriptions.

In Liberal Racism (Viking; $21.95), Jim Sleeper argues that liberals' flirtation with race-based politics has exacerbated racial divisions and weakened the left's clout. "Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination," he writes. "It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it." Some of Sleeper's chosen targets for rebuke can mystify, but others are worthy, such as the often patronizing treatment of blacks as victims or the cynical redrawing of legislative maps to ensure the election of minorities to public office. Sleeper, a self-described liberal, calls on blacks and whites to "let race go" and move toward "the gossamer threads and raceless glue of an endless American belonging." Sounds wonderful--but what does it say?

A more grounded and accessible work is Jonathan Coleman's Long Way to Go: Black & White in America (Atlantic Monthly Press; $26.50), which focuses on ordinary blacks and whites in the "hypersegregated" city of Milwaukee. The narrative begins in 1991 with Milwaukeeans living under a black nationalist's threat of "all-out guerrilla warfare" in the city within five years. Throughout the book, Coleman finds white and black nerves fraying: a prosperous black Republican publisher relates the story of a racist slight at an awards banquet and tells Coleman, "You can achieve all you want to achieve in life, but you can't never get past being a nigger." In the end, Coleman says, it's up to whites, who "can either give up on the idea of racial harmony and just go on...or [try] to find ways to change hearts and minds."

A forthcoming book by Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist David K. Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (Knopf; $30), reaches similar conclusions. Shipler embarks on a sprawling, impressive tour along the "crucial fault line of America," crafting an absorbing theater piece of characters, from undergraduates at Princeton to probation officers in South Central Los Angeles. In one scene, a white waitress in Alabama jabs at a former school principal, a black man, for having suspended her 20 years earlier. The banter is lighthearted, but Shipler perceives more. "How galling...to feel helpless before a black man in authority," he writes. "How vividly the echoes of resentment reverberate into the present."

Shipler in particular should be commended for tireless and nuanced reportage. But there is a hollowness in each of these books. Sleeper's book will probably provide more ammunition to color-blind conservatives than to the liberals he intends it for, while the exhortations of Coleman and Shipler--that white Americans should look within and take up the cross of racial healing--will appeal mainly to those who already have. That three ambitious, intelligent books should fail to break much new ground suggests, sadly, how difficult thinking and writing about race in an innovative way has become for most Americans. But it reminds us too how important it is to keep trying.

--By Romesh Ratnesar