Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Book review: ‘Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure’ by Gene Dattel
Book review: ‘Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure’ by Gene Dattel
Jun 4, 2025 2:40 PM

Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure. Gene Dattel.

Encounter Books, 2017. 312 pages.

Long before they exploded into violence at Charlottesville, race relations seemed so intractable that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “the white and black races will [never] … be upon an equal footing.” Nearly two centuries later, this seems to be another doleful example of Tocqueville’s prescience.

In Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure, which is to be released later this month, Gene Dattel chooses to concentrate on what he dubs “the fulcrum of this issue: the entrance of most black Americans into the economic mainstream.” He plumbs the importance of education as a preparation for economic life. But he grounds both in the irreplaceable bedrock of a free and virtuous society.

Religious readers may be surprised to learn that blacks’ subordinate status came, in part, from false religious teachings about the Book of Genesis. An article in theConnecticut Journal in 1774 stated forthrightly that “God formed [blacks] … mon with horses, oxygen, dogs &c. for the white people alone, to be used by them either for pleasure or to labor with other beasts.” Similarly, Mississippi politician Sergeant S. Prentiss said in 1836 on the floor of the state legislature that slavery is “the legitimate condition of the African race, as authorized both by the laws of God and the dictates of reason.” Today, notions of blacks being pre-Adamite creatures, formed on the fifth day of creation with the “beasts of the field,” are confined to the fever swamps of the minuscule Identity Christian movement. The reference highlights the indispensable role traditional exegesis, correct anthropology, and a consequent respect for human dignity play in promoting liberty.

Blacks found themselves condemned to an existence as mere objects rather than subjects. Dattel, a financial historian and former investment banker, shows in exquisite detail how economic factors definitively shaped the black experience. Brought to this country as human chattel, slaves were denied any education that would allow them to escape the plantation system, before or after emancipation. Northern politicians wanted black slaves freed – and contained to the South. Blacks’ presence was only desired when leaders such as Massachusetts Governor John Andrew wished to use them to fulfill his state’s military quota without drafting whites.

Various institutions, especially the black church, tried to find a path into the economic mainstream. In 1831, Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn tried to open a vocational education college for blacks in New Haven, Connecticut – but town residents, including Yale University, shut him down. Labor shortages created by World War I began the Great Migration northward, yet economic codes – and barriers preventing blacks from taking mercial courses” – artificially restricted most to low-paying menial work more subtly than Jim Crow laws or the apartheid color bar.

When allowed to flourish, free enterprise benefited members of all “races.” Madam C.J. Walker presided over an all-black cosmetics empire that made her $600,000 during her lifetime. She used the money to fund Tuskegee Institute, and in 1917 she became a member of the NAACP’s mittee. Another heroine, “Pigs’ Feet Mary,” began accumulating her $375,000 fortune by selling chitterlings, corn, and pigs’ feet on the sidewalk from a baby carriage.

But economic opportunities within the segregated munity proved too narrow to create widespread prosperity. Dattel repeatedly states that businesses simply cannot generate enough revenue if they are confined to a racial and economic minority. As Jack Kemp and Jesse Jackson would later agree, “Capitalism without capital is nothing but an ‘ism.’”

The debate over how to move forward has centered on whether to embrace the free market or advocate greater government intervention and regimentation. Dattel personifies these forces in the persons of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1895, Washington encouraged blacks to flourish in whatever economic avenues are available to them, since “no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” By so doing, blacks could “rise to the level of owning stores, operating factories.” Frederick Douglass, too, advised blacks in 1853, to “learn not only to black boots but to make them.”Decades earlier, nationwide ethnic conventions longed for the day that blacks would “form panies and mutual-savings banks.”

Du Bois advocated a “fuzzy brand of Marxism,” once writing, “Folks ain’t got no right to things they don’t need.” Du Bois recognized family breakdown within the munity as a social malady, but blamed it on “economic hindrances to sound moral life.”

As he weaves his engrossing narrative Dattel, who explored this territory before in Cotton and the Making of America, underscores the importance of national economic growth lying beneath the surface of each historical development. In response to the long hot summer of 1967, when no fewer than 159 race riots roiled the nation, the Kerner Report suggested “creating one million new jobs in the public sector in three years, creating one million new jobs in the private sector in three years … [and] encouraging business ownership in the ghetto.” The funding for such programs e from unspecified “economic growth.”

Christians and all people of goodwill who seek racial reconciliation should pursue fiscal policies that expand the nation’s economic assets. Whether the individual sides with Washington’s view emphasizing initiative or Du Bois’ redistribution, resources must first exist. Free markets, more expansive trade, lighter regulations, and a flatter, broader tax code free entrepreneurs to generate wealth. The jobs they create, in turn, liberate each individual to offer his or her God-given gifts to the world.

Instead, the nation has instituted “myriad federal programs [that] have failed to transform employment for blacks in the workforce.” Failing schools – which he believes should petition from charter schools – place job security above children’s economic future. Further, college-bound blacks receive little guidance toward better paying jobs. A 2016 study from Georgetown University found blacks clustered in “lower-paying majors.”

Along the way, Dattel notes, single-parent households, divorce rates, and abandonment have expanded in tandem with the welfare state. A family-centered culture that encourages virtue, thrift, and “responsibility,” he writes, must replace berating middle-class values. He continually returns to the point, in his own words and through others, that the black church alone can instill the virtuous and hopeful order necessary to end four centuries of needlessly squandered human capital.

Reckoning with Race suffers, as well as benefits, from the author’s peculiar background. As a Southerner educated in the Ivy League, Dattel clearly intends to demythologize the North as a bastion of racially progressive thought and practice. It is unclear such an undertaking is necessary in the present context, particularly in a work of limited scope. Moreover, he spends pages at a time poring over the racial views of Northern figures who, we find at the end of his rabbit trails, held views entirely conventional for their day. This form of sectional presentism adds little to the book.

Dattel could have broadened his cultural critique menting more upon black criticism of the West as a whole. “Freedom and a high standard of living are products of Western civilization,” he writes. He notes that Andrew Young wondered aloud in 1970 if American blacks weren’t “the revolutionary vanguard that God has ordained to destroy” Western civilization – something he regarded as, on balance, desirable. Young would go on to serve as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the UN before ing president of the National Council of Churches. Such assessments merit a fuller response in an age when universities replace the writings of Plato with those of Frantz Fanon.

Like mentators, Dattel is better at analyzing the problem than providing concrete solutions. But his conclusions are presented in a remarkably unmodulated and prescriptive tone. “Economic advancement must be the number one goal for black Americans,” he writes. “If black family structure continues in its present form, educational and vocational obstacles may be virtually insurmountable.” In an age where dialogue has been replaced with admonitions to “check your privilege,” that bustible.

Clearly Dattel – a white Southerner – cannot hope to escape the same criticism leveled against Barack Obama, Don Lemon, and Bill Cosby. One must hope against hope that such criticisms will focus on the substance of his arguments, not the identity of the person making them. If they do, they will find that Dattel has offered his readers a well-documented account of how the intertwining cords of culture, virtue, and economic hope may ease America’s most enduring fault line.

Pierce. This photo has been cropped. CC BY 2.0.)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Macron’s African statement ignores human ingenuity
A French media outlet has captured an otherwise ment from French President Emmanuel Macron that Africa is overpopulated. When asked about a possible “Marshall Plan for Africa,” Macron listed among the continent’s current problems the need for “demographic transition,” lamenting the fact that some African “countries still haveseven to eight children per woman.” His concerns seem particularly worth examining today on World Population Day. During a July 8 press conference about the G20 summit, Macron began by naming truly concerning...
Pulling out of Paris agreement is a ‘market distortion’: European leader
The G20 summit in Hamburg e to an end, and the dominant story remains America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. It’s been less reported that some European leaders have implied that the EU should take economic revenge on the U.S. because – in their words – limiting government intervention in the economy is a “market distortion.” Germany currently holds the presidency of the G20 summit, with Chancellor Angela Merkel overseeing the violence-plagued event. The final declaration notes the U.S....
Is it cleaner to trade pollution?
Note: This is post #40 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. In an effort to reduce pollution, the government tried two policy prescriptions under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, notes Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution University. The mand and control—mandated that each power plant lower its pollution by a determined amount. However, different firms face different cost curves and, because information is dispersed, policymakers don’t always know those costs. The second policy prescription—tradable pollution permits—empowered firms...
Would school choice help conservatives recover from the ‘cultural massacre’?
The Spectator Australia published an article Monday claiming that the “culture war” between conservative and liberal values is, in reality, a “cultural massacre.” The carnage is evident in the numbers, specifically in education: in the United Kingdom, conservatives make up only seven percent of primary school teachers and only eight percent of secondary school teachers. In the United States, conservatives often focus on the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses. They are not wrong to worry. In September, the...
How ordinary economic thinking helps constrain political chaos
In an age where chaos and cronyism seem to be the defining characteristics of our politics, and where the political system is increasingly decried as being “rigged” by populists from both the left and right, the time seems ripe for a renewed focus on political constraints. When such concerns arise, we are quick to point back to the U.S. Constitution, and rightly so. Yet economist Peter Boettke sees another guide that can also offer some value. For Boetkke, our politics...
Dorothy Sayers, school choice, and long run student success
Today’s Wall Street Journal article on education choice, “New Evidence on School Vouchers,” might look oddly familiar for those of us who have read Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning. The WSJ piece refers to two new studies that investigated student performance in states with voucher programs: Louisiana and Indiana. In Louisiana, a state with a program that allows for vouchers for private schools, 7,100 students attend private or religious schools. Meanwhile, over 34,000 students utilize Indiana’s statewide voucher...
American students: Raw material or individual persons?
Catherine Pakaluk The quality of K-12 education in America is a major concern. This is largely because, despite marginally high spending per student, the United States does pete very well against other countries on standardized tests. The economics of education particularly interested Catherine Pakaluk, who holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard and is an assistant professor of economics at Catholic University of America. Pakaluk gave a lecture, “Economics of Education,” on June 23 at Acton University. In this talk,...
The ‘end’ of work
In the Q&A part of a session I led at last month’s Acton University on Abraham Kuyper and Leo XIII(based on this recent volume), I was asked about specific areas where the two figures have something concrete to contribute today. One theme I highlighted was to their shared emphasis on the centrality and dignity of human work. Today there is a great deal of anxiety over the future of work in an age of increasing globalization, automation, and structural changes...
Reading ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 2): What did Tocqueville mean by ‘equality of condition’?
This is the second part in a series on how to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” Read Part 1 and follow the entire series here. As we begin our study of Democracy in America, we bear in mind that the work’s distinguished author, Alexis de Tocqueville, blessed us with a clear, concise introduction to the two-volume work. The introduction is the most important chapter of the work in terms ing to grips with Tocqueville’s overall argument and purpose...
Can health care be left to the free market?
In one of the worst opinion pieces published in the New York Times in recent memory, Farzon A. Nahvi, an emergency medicine physician, argues the free market cannot provide health care because some patients arrive at the hospital unconscious: As an emergency medicine physician in a busy urban hospital, I have patients brought to me unconscious several times a day. Often, they are found down in the street by a good Samaritan who called 911 on their behalf. We are...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved