Word: abigail
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Into this fray comes America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster; $32.50) by noted Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom and his scholar wife Abigail. The couple are the latest in a string of former liberals come round to denounce affirmative action. But unlike more polemical authors, the Thernstroms pin their arguments to seven years of research, modeling their approach on Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 benchmark racial survey, An American Dilemma. Their prose is cool, not overheated, and their 704-page book is stuffed with tables, charts and graphs tracking black progress over the past 60 years...
...percentage believe racism remains a huge problem. Is this mass delusion or something else? Is there no way to get to the motivation or the origin of such black discontent? Shouldn't a study as exhaustive as this at least try to plumb that point? "You may be right," Abigail Thernstrom told TIME. The Thernstroms were "sufficiently tired" of the voice of black discontent that they chose not to get to the bottom of it. "I think that's a fair criticism of the book," Stephan says. "We didn't have the energy, among other things. That's an arguable...
...authors certain that an America devoid of racism--and of affirmative action--would match their dream. "The fabric of society is very complicated," allows Abigail. Why, for example, did so many negative forces--high crime, low test scores, family breakdown, joblessness, poverty--worsen for black communities in the years after 1970? The book suggests it was ugly black rhetoric, ensuing white anger and the failures of affirmative action that accelerated pathologies in black communities--not the rise of drug use, or turmoil over the Vietnam War, or changing sexual mores, or a general cynicism about authority, which affected society...
Critics of affirmative action say the results in California and Texas bear out what they have been saying all along--that selective schools rely far too heavily on racial double standards. Some, like Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of a forthcoming book on race, used the new numbers to zero in on what she feels is the real problem: the public schools. "Our high schools graduate black and Hispanic students who are way behind whites and Asians in basic cognitive skills," she says. Admitting minorities with lower scores "lets these schools off the hook." That is why even such anti-affirmative...
John Adams seems to have started it all. The founding of our country, the Founding Father wrote to his wife Abigail, "ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore." And thus, he predicted, we would always remember that momentous date in 1776--the second of July...