The Ordeal Of Integration: Progress And Resentment In America's "Racial" Crisis

A professor at Harvard, Orlando Patterson has been called a radical by conservatives and a conservative by radicals. His tendency, he notes in his introduction, is "not to care where my ideas originated--as long as they strike me as sound--or where the chips fall as a result of what I write or say." The Ordeal of Integration is what Patterson calls a work of economic sociology. He looks at the "remarkable facts of" black progress, refuting the notion that black America is in dire crisis. He then considers how liberals, conservatives, and those who espouse the "hereditarian or genetic" view discuss race in the United States. Throughout, Patterson calls for a return to common sense in discussions of race.