‘All Eyes Are Upon Us,’ by Jason Sokol - The New York Times

In many northerners' self image racism is the province of the south or of ignorant white workers. Few remember that the contracts of sale in Levittown - the  archetypal Long Island suburb where we grew up - contained a covenants to sell only to caucasians.  I remember in high school walking up Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn smoking with a pack of cigarettes.  A guy asked me for a cigarette.  I gave him the whole pack - I thought I was being robbed.  That's prejudice. -gwc
‘All Eyes Are Upon Us,’ by Jason Sokol - The New York Times

ALL EYES ARE UPON US

Race and Politics From Boston to Brooklyn

By Jason Sokol

Illustrated. 385 pp. Basic Books. $32.

review by: David Levering Lewis  January 11, 2015

As the Obama presidency ends, and with many achievements to its credit, the vision of a national postracial reorientation seems to have been fatally undermined by worsening racial conflicts — by Supreme Court majorities restricting African-American and Latino voting rights, by a reborn nativism that in many instances appears more virulent than its mid-19th-century version and by questions about the criminal justice system raised by cases like the ones in Ferguson and Staten Island, which were perceived as outrageous enough to prompt nationwide demonstrations. It is certainly possible that when this decade ends it will have confirmed the relevance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s grim prophecy about America’s everlasting racism. Jason Sokol’s exceptional “All Eyes Are Upon Us” prepares us for just such a possibility.

If, as many believe, America’s experiment in postracialism is over, then “All Eyes Are Upon Us” is a prescient book that offers a great deal to explain a national self-deception of stunning brevity. According to Jason Sokol, whose anecdotally rich first book, “There Goes My Everything,” tracked white Southerners variously coping in the civil rights era, historians have paid insufficient attention to the Janus-faced ­responses of white Northerners to the struggles of black Americans. To be sure, monographs by James Goodman and Thomas Sugrue have explored the dark side of Northern race relations. They found that although the dominant racial philosophies of whites in the North and South were antithetical, opportunity for a majority of black men and women in the North was not very different from what it was in the South.

Sokol agrees: “Rampant segregation in cities across the country rendered racial inequality a national trait more than a Southern aberration.” He argues for a somewhat novel understanding of the North’s “conflicted soul,” which combined two parallel narratives — knee-jerk opposition to change and tokenistic inclusiveness. On the one hand, the region’s violent opposition and calculated amnesia in relation to the civil rights of ­African-Americans; on the other, its high-minded conceit as custodian of the nation’s conscience and embodiment of John Winthrop’s words: “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

ALL EYES ARE UPON US

Race and Politics From Boston to Brooklyn

By Jason Sokol

Illustrated. 385 pp. Basic Books. $32.