The “best kind of dialogue across racial lines is not dialogue about race,” said the historian, who has died. We “are all people with many common interests to talk about, and a call for a dialogue on race sets us in opposing camps. ‘Oh, you are the spokesman for the white position and you are the spokesman for the black position.’ That, I don’t think, is likely to lead us to a better society.”
Historian Stephan Thernstrom, who has died, was devoted to the scholarly study of race and ethnicity in America. He held academic appointments at Harvard University, Brandeis University and the University of California, Los Angeles. He and his wife Abigail, who died in 2020, were fellows at the Manhattan Institute for many years. They were awarded a Bradley Prize in 2007.
The Thernstroms extensively researched and wrote about the history and effects of race-based preferential treatment, which they opposed. Their most-prominent co-authored book is perhaps 1997’s America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. In 2002, they co-edited a collection of contributions to Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, and in 2003, they co-wrote No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.
Stephan also wrote the two-volume A History of the American People and two books on urban poverty and social mobility, and he edited the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.
In 2011—years before the controversial “DEI” label, of course, but not its identity-based thinking—he appeared on a panel, put together by the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, with the president and vice president of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to discuss the foundation’s five-year, $75 million “Racial Healing” grantmaking initiative and its intellectual underpinnings. He had greeted the plan’s announcement with skepticism in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“I find it troubling in various ways,” Thernstrom said at the Bradley Center event, “Race and Racism in America: Are We Now a Color Blind Society?” “There are two central premises. One is that the great problem in our society today is white privilege. … I can’t really find out exactly what white privilege is, and how you know when you’ve identified it.”
Kellogg’s “other central premise is that today we have ‘a blatant racial/social caste system in the United States,’” said Thernstrom, quoting a piece by the Kellogg v.p., Gail Christopher. “Well, we did have a caste system in the southern United States, right down to the 1960’s, and it is unrecognizably different from our society today. … [I]s there anything like that today?”
Thernstrom complimented Kellogg president Sterling Speirn’s welcoming of open and frank dialogue. “[M]any of the people who call for such dialogue don’t really want a dialogue,” however, Thernstrom said. “[T]hey want, in Dr. Christopher’s words, for blacks to explain ‘the painful experiences and destructive impact associated with our national, individual, and group racial wounds.’ And for whites to say, ‘Ah, at last I get it. I agree with you. What should we do about it?’”
Of the major philanthropically prescribed initiative, Thernstrom said, “I am somewhat doubtful that the effort being made here will in fact produce genuine racial dialogue.” He then concluded with a call for a different kind of dialogue.
[T]he best kind of dialogue across racial lines is not dialogue about race. It’s dialogue about whether the Knicks will beat the Celtics in the first round of the playoffs. It’s dialogue about what’s going on in this weird war in Libya. It is dialogue not focused on race, because in fact we are all people with many common interests to talk about, and a call for a dialogue on race sets us in opposing camps. “Oh, you are the spokesman for the white position and you are the spokesman for the black position.” That, I don’t think, is likely to lead us to a better society.