NON FICTION

TWO NATIONS: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal by Andrew Hacker ($24.95; 320 pp.). 1992: the year when David Duke ran for President; when even gentle, progressive, liberal whites quietly confessed their fears of black gangs; when it was estimated that 61% of Americans arrested for robbery were black even though the ethnic group only made up 12% of the American population; when a poll showed that 32% of African-Americans believe AIDS may have been “purposely created” by scientists to infect them. 1992 is not what Martin Luther King dreamed.

Aware that racial divisiveness has become such a dirty secret that we cannot bring ourselves to discuss it openly, and realizing that the problem will only grow in silence, Andrew Hacker, a political science professor at New York City’s Queens College, aims here to confront it head on. Unfortunately, though, he is so conscious that he is holding a hot potato that he seems reluctant to examine its real dimensions. Instead, he intersperses effusive (and thus perhaps condescending) praise for African-Americans between statements so general that they seem obvious. These conclusions from his final chapter are typical: “The way people cast their ballots often provides an index of how they think and feel about race”; “In fact, the major determinant of white support is how black politicians are perceived by the white electorate.”

“Two Nations” inadvertently reveals another rift in America: the one between liberals and conservatives, who now seem virtually unable to speak the same language. Hacker, for instance, acknowledges the debate between those who feel that affirmative action is still a necessary reparation for blacks’ past subjugation and those who believe that it has actually come to work against blacks. But rather than making his case for affirmative action based on evidence that could persuade conservatives, he merely concludes--polemically and self-righteously--that “the question for white Americans is essentially moral: Is it right to impose on members of another race a lesser start in life . . .” Still, Hacker does offer new insights. He shows how Republican redistricting has cynically consolidated whites as a “self-conscious racial majority,” for instance, in order to dissipate Democratic strength, and how whites are clearly more suspicious of blacks than blacks are of whites. Whites “dread that blacks will treat whites as whites have treated blacks,” Hacker suggests, quoting Louis Farrakhan’s observation that “you fear we’ll do to you what you did to us.”