Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown

Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown are professors at American University’s School of Communication and the authors of By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race. In the following viewpoint, they contend that genuine racial harmony does not exist in America. While the majority of Americans condemn overt racism, whites tend to avoid integrating with blacks, moving away from neighborhoods and schools when they become populated by blacks. Moreover, the authors maintain, most whites believe that America’s racial problems were solved during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, while most blacks see discrimination as a current and ongoing problem. Such differences of opinion between whites and blacks belie the vision of a racially congenial America.

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