HAVRE DE GRACE -- Race continues to pervade the American consciousness in subtly pernicious ways, making us an edgier and ever more divided country, and there are many little signs that it's getting worse. But here and there are a few big signs that suggest the opposite, and they're as welcome as the first shafts of sunlight after a storm.
Last Sunday the Washington Post gave about a page of space to a young black reporter's reflections on the indirect racism he sees everywhere about him. He didn't mean the name-calling bigotry of the past, he explained, but the race-based responses of white taxi drivers to blacks seeking to hail them, of white women finding themselves alone in elevators with black men, of whites of all sorts confronted by black belligerence.
The reporter, John Fountain, set out with a white colleague to stand on opposite corners and try to hail taxis at night in the District of Columbia's deserted downtown. He knew pretty well what they were going to find.
Blacks, and especially young black men, are seen by white society as a threat, he concluded. And as a young black man he found that humiliating, infuriating -- and sometimes delightfully empowering. ''The verb is to gangster,'' he noted. ''You can gangster white guys off a basketball court. You can gangster your way to the front of a line. You can gangster for yourself the semblance of respect, if fear is respect.''
Then, having said that, he rattled off statistics purporting to show that whites who are afraid that they may be the victims of black crime are deluded. His assumption -- in a rational world a reasonably defensible one -- was that if whites only realized that most black people do not commit violent crimes, they'd be less inclined to see every black stranger as a potential assailant.
He failed to mention, however, that the more white people are ''gangstered'' by loud and bullying blacks, the less likely it is that their assumptions about black people in general will be charitable ones. And it won't make much difference if those doing the gangstering are in reality doctors, lawyers or nice young reporters from the Washington Post.
On the same day John Fountain's article appeared, CBS's ''60 Minutes'' did an absolutely wonderful show on another side of the same question. The show focused on the efforts of STRIVE, a New York organization, to teach the hard-core unemployed how to apply for, get and hold a job.
It's your attitude
