Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
The Big R
By William H. McNeill
Racism: A Short History
by George M. Fredrickson
Princeton University Press, 207 pp., $22.95
The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
by Glenn C. Loury
Harvard University Press, 226 pp., $22.95
In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery
by David Brion Davis
Yale University Press, 392 pp., $35.00
The three books under review address black–white relations—the most urgent and intractable domestic problem the United States faces today and has suffered from throughout its existence. George M. Fredrickson's short history conforms to the best academic tradition. Detached in tone, it carefully defines 'racism,' and goes on to discuss how it originated in late medieval Europe, emerged in Iberia, took root in the New World, rose to a virulent climax in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany and in the United States, and still persists, though 'it is less intense and intellectually respectable than it was a century or even a half-century ago.' The two other books under review, by Glenn C. Loury and David Brion Davis, are admirable in a different way, combining subtle analysis and argument with moral fervor. Neither, though, comes up with anything resembling a practical recipe for overcoming the racial divide in the United States—or elsewhere in the world for that matter.
Review, 3962 words
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