Crossings
A White Man's Journey Into Black America
-
- $37.99
-
- $37.99
Publisher Description
One day in the dentist’s office journalist Walt Harrington heard a casual racist joke that left him enraged. Married to a black woman, Harrington is the father of two biracial children. His experience in the dentist’s office made him realize not only that the joke was about his own children but also that he really knew very little about what it was like to be a black person in America.
After this rude awakening, Harrington set off on a twenty- five-thousand-mile journey through black America, talking with scores of black and white people along the way, including an old sharecropper, a city police chief, a jazz trumpeter, a convicted murderer, a welfare mother, and a corporate mogul. In Crossings, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights, he relates what he learned as he listened.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A white man married to a black woman, spurred by a racist joke to feel ``fear and anguish'' for children, Washington Post Magazine writer Harrington decided to ``go out and travel America's parallel black world'' to explore the nation's racial conundrums. As he traverses the North, South and West, Harrington deftly paints vivid, brief scenes: a black businessman visits prison inmates, a worker in a road crew lights up at meeting Jesse Jackson, students at a small college in southern Illinois discuss interracial dating. He meets ``hard cop'' Charleston police chief Reuben Greenberg, filmmaker Spike Lee and novelist James Alan McPherson, who says, ``I'm not a great man, but I'm not just a race person.'' Reflecting on his own relationships with blacks, Harrington revisits relatives and former college classmates. While the insight ``racism still rages, but it is for too many blacks also an excuse'' hardly merits its presentation as a revelation, Harrington rightly observes that America's racial conflicts also involve culture and class. ``Blacks and whites in America are the same and different,'' he concludes, and his thoughtful mosaic should encourage fresh dialogue. Illustrations not seen by PW.
