"One of our best-kept secrets and one of our greatest tragedies" is the undermining of the civil rights movement's universalism and moral truths by diversity theorists, who aim to "liberate whites from their alleged racism and blacks from their assumed bondage of low self-esteem," declares Syracuse University historian Lasch-Quinn. By attributing racial tensions to psychological factors, people like Price M. Cobbs and William H. Grier, coauthors of Black Rage
(1968)—who "believed that slavery created a set of interracial dynamics that led to a particular pathological mentality in slaves" persisting through generations into the 1960s—drew attention away from bigger complexities of justice and inequality, she writes. The "rise of the therapeutic"—in the form of encounter groups and sensitivity training—created milieus in which psychological disorders are traced to all-pervasive white racism, Lasch-Quinn argues, rather than to social injustices that could be righted through political activism. In her view, such attitudes appear even in recent books like Beverly Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations about Race. Lasch-Quinn faults diversity trainers in latter-day workplaces for relying on broad stereotypes about groups She believes that children's multicultural "self-esteem literature" can affirm children (The Black Snowman) without resorting to "boosterism" (Nappy Hair). Despite many convincing examples, Lasch-Quinn ignores recent books that could complicate her thesis, such as Ellis Cose's The Rage of a Privileged Class. And while she notes that diversity experts frame a world in which social faux pas are deemed racism, she could better acknowledge the persistence of white privilege. (Oct.)
