Showing my color

Library Journal

All-new essays on racial politics from the black commentator you've read in the Chicago Tribune, heard on National Public Radio's Sunday Morning Edition, or seen on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

Ray Olson

Whenever "Chicago Tribune" based columnist Page appears on PBS-TV's "McLaughlin Group", you wonder what he's doing there. He's too sensible, sensitive, and self-possessed to fit in with those braying buttinskies. So he remains in this book of newly written work (not collected journalism) whose title announces that he intends in part to be, as he explains, "acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way." His innate gentlemanliness allows him, however, to discuss such heat-generating topics as black American self-segregation (especially on college campuses), black upper-middle-class guilt, the significance of Louis Farrakhan, black-Jewish relations, the stated conservatism of many black citizens, affirmative action, black relations with other nonwhite ethnics, and partisan politics concerned with race (Republicans playing the "race card" and Democrats the "class card" ) without adding fuel to any fires. His democratic decency compels him to assay inflammatory rhetoric and clever political pleading for the grains of truth in them and to name those truths even when they are not flattering to their speakers or to society, as when he ruefully concludes that "we have had less integration than simply "desegregation", . . . which may be the best we're going to get." Unfortunately, his excellent survey of race in America today is somewhat vitiated by poor editing, especially in the last several chapters.