Why would anybody want to write a book about the most difficult topic in America’s history?
That is the question Ruleville native and author Gene Dattel posed at a signing of his latest book, “Reckoning With Race: America’s Failure,” at Turnrow Book Co. on Tuesday evening.
Dattel said he was drawn to the issue growing up in the 1950s in the Delta, a Jewish white kid whose father ran a dry goods store.
“On Saturday nights, the black people came in to shop,” sparking his interest in the racial divide, he said.
In 1962, Dattel went to Yale, where he was the only Mississippian. When James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi amidst a barrage of protest, gunfire and race-based strife, Dattel was put on the defensive, trying to understand the racial dynamic of his home state and ultimately the nation at large. He became a devoted student of racial history in America, went on to study law at Vanderbilt and then moved overseas and entered the world of international finance.
Living in Japan for nine years, he observed what he called a homogeneous, hierarchical society and its accompanying weaknesses. This added another dimension to his interests: the idea of assimilation and multiculturalism as key building blocks for a dynamic nation.
When he returned to the U.S., Dattel co-authored a play called "Parallel Lives: Growing Up Black and Jewish in the 1950s," comparing his childhood growing up white in the Delta to author Clifton Taulbert's experiences growing up black during the same time.
Dattel built a successful career in the New York financial world while turning his attention to the history of the cotton economy and identifying that industry as a key reason race-based slavery persevered in the U.S. through the Civil War. His book “Cotton and Race in the Making of America” was heralded as a breakthrough in understanding African-American history.
Now, in “Reckoning With Race,” Dattel turns an economic historian’s eye on the failure of integration and assimilation of the races in America, and what’s required to overcome the social ills that continue to plague black Americans.
The fulcrum of the issue, he argues, is the entrance of black Americans into the economic mainstream. In the book, he identifies barriers throughout African- American history that made that particular assimilation impossible, including shining a light on areas outside the South that were equally as guilty of putting those barriers in place.
In the North, he told the crowd gathered at Turnrow, “you could be an abolitionist but also anti-black,” driven by fear of blacks gaining economic power. Indeed, he outlines many laws excluding blacks from citizenship outside the American South, something he said his Northern audiences don’t appreciate.
Perhaps most controversially, Dattel argues that the way forward for black Americans is through a thorough self-examination that admits shortcomings and prescribes solutions from within. Institutional obstacles to full citizenship have been removed, and entering the economic mainstream will require rebuilding broken institutions within black communities that are necessary to support assimilation, he says.
Dattel is careful to distinguish the assimilation he refers to — not a whitewashing of African-American culture that has been railed against by leaders and universities since the civil rights movement, but an assimilation that “allows for practical and efficient adjustment to common values while retaining different cultural heritages.
“Without appropriate assimilation, a harmful road to separatism follows.”
That separatism is a potential great danger to the nation, Dattel said. He argues that only when black citizens are set on a road toward economic prosperity will America’s racial dilemma be resolved.
Values count more than race in achieving this fundamental equality for people brought to America in slavery, and the black community has to do what is required to enter the economic mainstream with “full buy-in,” he says.
Dattel said white people have a responsibility to understand African-American history in full, both prior to the mid-20th century and after. White people need to make an effort toward daily contact with blacks and “stop walking on eggshells when talking about race,” he said.
“We need to have polite, frank discussion about all the things that divide us,” he said.
“Contact between the races is essential.”
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
