NEGROPHOBIA AND REASONABLE RACISM: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America.<i> By Jody David Armour</i> .<i> New York University Press: 204 pp., $24.95</i> : CHANNEL SURFING: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth.<i> By Henry A. Giroux</i> . <i> St. Martin’s: 248 pp., $22.95</i>

Both of these books are largely concerned with the negative image of African Americans in the public mind and the baleful effects of that imagery on private conduct and public policies. Both contend that African Americans continue to suffer a peculiar and unfair stigmatization created by the widespread association of blackness with dangerous criminality. Both maintain, in Jody David Armour’s words, that “the most disturbing source of dread in modern America [is] Black violence.” “Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism” examines ways in which the specter of “black violence” shapes the administration of criminal justice. “Channel Surfing” investigates reflections of this dread and broader anxieties about other vulnerable groups, particularly youngsters, that emerge in various forums of popular culture, including films, newspapers, magazines and books.

The most significant aspect of Armour’s book is its confrontation with “rational” racial discrimination: racial discrimination that stems from strategic, non-prejudiced calculation as opposed to irrational, reflexive animus. A common example of rational racial discrimination is the practice of some cabdrivers to refuse to pick up black men of a certain age at night. In the eyes of these cabbies, blackness is a sign of an increased risk of criminality. The cabbies calculate that they will be better off avoiding certain black customers even though doing so will entail forgoing fares from black men who are not criminals. To the cabdriver under discussion, the cost of the forgone fares is outweighed by the increased security he hopes to have attained through his racially discriminatory strategy of self-protection.

Armour’s more dramatic example is the white person who wrongly perceives herself as the victim of an imminent assault by a black man, and who resorts to lethal violence with a handgun more quickly than she would have had the man been white. Viewed as an act of rational discrimination, the shooting of the innocent African American stems not from a racially motivated desire to hurt but from a calculation in which blackness again served as a sign of an increased risk of danger.

Some commentators, such as Dinesh D’Souza and Walter Williams, have suggested that certain kinds of rational racial discrimination are not only understandable but also unobjectionable. They contend that it “makes sense” for cabbies (and other private individuals) to take race into account (e.g. view blackness as a signal of danger) when negotiating the mean streets of our crime-plagued urban areas. By contrast, Armour views rational racial discrimination as a “canard” that is not only unreasonable but also “racist.” He writes that an aim of his book is “to add a nail to the coffin of this most recent embodiment of highbrow racism.”

Armour’s analysis is commendable in important respects. He points out problems in the theory of rational racial discrimination that many of its proponents ignore or overlook. He calls attention, for example, to the difficulty of “unscrambling the rational and irrational sources of racial fears,” noting that “for countless Americans, fears of black violence stem from the complex interaction of cultural stereotypes, racial antagonisms, and unremitting over-representations of Black violence in the mass media.” Whereas some apologists of rational racial discrimination assume the accuracy of media portrayals of crime, Armour notes that “television journalism on crime and violence has been proven to reveal, and project, a consistent racial bias.” Moreover, in contrast to those who overlook or minimize the costs imposed by so-called rational racial discrimination, Armour likens these costs to a special tax--”The Black Tax”--exacted from African Americans.

Zeroing in on the ways that many people who engage in racial discrimination seek to evade their complicity in a racially oppressive network of customs and policies, Armour assumes that “dutiful [police] officers see themselves as responding reasonably to a person who seems to be ‘out of place’--nothing personal. Likewise, it’s ‘nothing personal’ when store security personnel shadow blacks in department stores, ‘nothing personal’ when clerks refuse to buzz blacks into jewelry stores . . . and positively ‘nothing personal’ in the mountains of empirical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of justice. Without a doubt, the shibboleth of today’s apologists for the black tax is ‘nothing personal.’ ”

Armour is right to insist that the decision to engage in racial discrimination as a self-protective strategy is largely a function of subjective perspective and not merely a matter of objective calculation. He is also right to insist that courts narrow substantially the occasions on which police may properly take race into account when investigating or seeking to prevent criminality and that laws prohibiting racial discrimination should be observed and enforced much more rigorously than they are at present. Although many antidiscrimination provisions do not (and should not) contain exceptions for so-called rational racial discrimination, large numbers of people violate these provisions anyway, including some who otherwise insist loudly on color blindness and on the necessity for law and order.

There are, however, weaknesses in Armour’s analysis. He writes as if the association of blackness with an increased risk of criminality is all a matter of mythical stereotype, though at other points he acknowledges (albeit implicitly) that, in fact, in some contexts, the race of a person does signal an increased risk of danger. Moreover, Armour, like many other commentators on race relations, including myself, pays insufficient attention to defining key terms (e.g. “racism”) and then, partly as a consequence, muddies their meaning.

He is right in arguing that public policy is best served by prohibiting individuals from engaging in racial discrimination, even when they contend that they wish to do so for purposes of self-protection. He dilutes the connotation of the term “racism,” however, by affixing that highly pejorative label to anyone who violates such a policy. I certainly know people who cannot meaningfully be described as “racist” but who, in certain difficult circumstances, unlawfully use racial signals self-defensively to guide their behavior.

Two other weaknesses in Armour’s analysis are noteworthy. First, throughout the book he assumes whites to be the pertinent decision-makers. In many locales, however, black judges, jurors, lawyers and police officers are quite numerous. Are his analysis and the suggested reforms that flow from it applicable to blacks as well as to whites? It is difficult to infer from his book how he would respond.

Second, after having argued against permitting private people and police officers to draw racial distinctions in responding to risks of criminality, Armour then proposes that judges permit what he refers to as “rationality-enhancing color-consciousness.” More specifically, he urges judges to give more leeway to attorneys who want to discuss problems of juror racial bias as a way of putting jurors on guard against their own unconscious racial prejudices. Given that he is so (rightly) skeptical of the ability of police officers and others to differentiate “rationality-enhancing” from “rationality distorting” racial distinctions, Armour needs to explain more fully why he is confident that judges, who are also susceptible to unconscious racial biases, will be able to do so.

Despite these flaws, “Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism” is challenging and informative. The same cannot be said for “Channel Surfing.” According to Henry Giroux, his book represents “a critical reading of different cultural texts.” For me, it constitutes a catalog of naked opinions offered in an unattractive form that pays little heed to complexity, to the possibility that contending points of view may have something of value to contribute to a discussion, to the usefulness of substantiating empirical claims or to the rigors entailed in the effort to persuade undecided or skeptical readers. Giroux claims repeatedly, for example, that “demonized or trivialized, young people increasingly are portrayed in Hollywood films as either a social menace or as groveling dimwits.” Is it really true, however, that the Hollywood portrayal of teenagers is more unflattering now than in the ‘50s, ‘60s or ‘70s? Perhaps so, but I doubt it. And in any event, the point is that Giroux provides no information that substantiates his (dubious) assumption.

Throughout “Channel Surfing,” Giroux judges cultural artifacts of various sorts according to whether they are “productively educational.” For Giroux, a cultural performance is productively educational when it opposes “conservatism,” or “capitalism,” or “racism.” In his view, films or books or articles are bad or, worse, “irresponsible” when they fail to propound the correct ideological lesson. Hence, Giroux condemns Larry Clark’s excruciating but engrossing 1995 film “Kids” largely because, in his view, its “cinematic representations perpetuate racist discourse and practices in the wider society.” There is hardly a hint in Giroux’s commentary that “Kids” could reasonably be interpreted differently from the way he views it. Nor does Giroux acknowledge that perhaps the film should be evaluated on some basis other than its supposed effect on some sectors of the population--e.g., those whose prejudices will be reinforced by “Kids’ ” despairing portrayal of a group of juvenile delinquents. In this and other ways, Giroux shows himself to be a leftist version of rightist moralists such as Lynne Cheney and William J. Bennett. While they demand from artists and scholars obeisance to conservative “virtues,” Giroux demands from artists and scholars obeisance to “progressive” virtues. The messiness of art, reality, scholarship and imagination will always make a mockery, however, of Manichaean ideologues.