New Left Review I/196, November-December 1992

David Roediger

The Racial Crisis of American Liberalism

Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal [1] Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, Scribner’s, New York 1992, $24.95 hbk. All subsequent page references to Two Nations are in parentheses in the text. indicts race relations in the contemporary us as a system of what its publicity packet calls ‘de facto apartheid’. But its most chilling contribution to showing just how bad things are is an unwitting one. Unlike earlier liberal studies of racism, Two Nations can only indict. Hacker sketches an apartheid system and adds ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin’, so far as strategies for changing it are concerned. The pessimism of Two Nations stands out especially when compared with the tradition of liberal epics on race relations with which it identifies itself. Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma, which Hacker counts as ‘America’s most notable book on race’ (p. xi), matched Two Nations in its stark portrayal of black life and of the consistent betrayals of the ‘American Creed’ of equality by whites. But Myrdal stressed the tension between an overarching American commitment to justice and the brutalities of white supremacy. He saw room for progress and offered policy prescriptions with that end in view.

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