Closer to the prize.(Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America)(Book review)

Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, by John McWhorter (Gotham, 434 pp., $27.50)

CALL me Pollyanna if you like, but I'm convinced that race relations in the United States have never been better. There is no longer any government-backed or institutionalized racial discrimination (with the important but dying exception of affirmative action against whites and, frequently, Asians), and racism is about as legally and socially unacceptable as anything can be in an open society. A mere 50 years ago, none of this was true.

This is good news, because America has always been a multiracial and multiethnic society, and it is becoming dramatically more so. Were we bitterly divided into racial enclaves, this would be a scary time, but the remarkable fact is that Americans get along quite well with one another--so well, indeed, that most Americans can claim to be multiethnic and more and more can claim to be multiracial. Anti-assimilationists and identity-politics demagogues remain, so we need to focus more on assimilation and continue to press for the abolition of racial and ethnic preferences; but those fights are winnable and are being won.

The arguable exception to this rosy view involves a large chunk of the African-American population. To the extent that there is residual racism in this country--and there is not much--it is aimed mostly at blacks. But racism is not ...