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The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America. By Philip A. Klinker with Rogers M. Smith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. vii, 417 pp. $32.50, IsBN 0-226-44339-6.)
In The Unsteady March, the political scientists Philip A. Klinker and Rogers M. Smith juggle, somewhat unsteadily and with occasional drops, several different themes and schemes. The book purports to be a comprehensive depiction of the history of American race relations, but its subtitle overreaches its content. All but the twentieth century is dusted off in some sixty pages, about the same space allotted to the "where we are now" discussion. This idiosyncratic three-hundred-page sweep across two or three centuries is just too broad to grapple convincingly with such a momumental, diverse, and tangled subject.
The Unsteady March also promises to offer a revisionist thesis whose revisionism many American scholars resist: to wit, as the...