Race rules

Dyson reveals the pernicious influence of racial thinking across the broad canvas of American social and cultural life, from the disjunction between how whites and blacks view the world, to the way perceptions of black masculinity thwart black leadership, to the politics of nostalgia that keeps us looking to an imaginary past rather than creating a positive future. Through painful examples drawn from within the black community - sexual conflict in the black church, the myth of the "head Negro," relations between black men and women - he depicts our ongoing failure to break free of the rule of…