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BOOK REVIEW     DELANY

welfare goal.)

One must continually try to distinguish the difference between what he calls symbolic goals and welfare goals. Are we then to conclude that if there is fair employment, open housing, integrated schools, equal use of public accommodations this will not be of benefit to the black population? The author writes about the fact that some of the civil rights groups, having obtained policy statements and changes on equal opportunity, don't themselves make sure that black people then apply for the jobs. 

Though he takes the civil rights groups to task for what he calls their emphasis on symbolic goals, he also, in the same chapter, explains why the stress on "symbolic" goals is important. He states, "the school board can mobilize community support for its position regardless of whether that position is segregationist or integrationist." If this is true, then it is of crucial importance for the civil rights groups to get the school boards to take policy positions. Crain, having raised the phony issue of the difference between "symbolic and welfare goals," provides us with the obvious answer as to why the civil rights groups have focused on what he calls symbolic goals: because they know the importance of getting policy changes since the power structure in the community is the one that determines what the community will do.

Crain, at times, displays his own bias. There are a number of illustrations of this running through the book, usually appearing in casual comments when for example he states: "Of the eight cities the civil rights leaders who expressed the most dissatisfaction to our interviewers were white in five cases. It may also be that the white leaders have a stronger sense of efficacy than Negroes and thus are less satisfied with, or accustomed to, taking "no" for an answer."

When one reads these sentences one is reminded of Whitney Young's recent address to the American Sociological Association in which he states: "When white sociology professors do study black people they do so with sterile questionnaires, developed and designed by and for white people and they do not find it necessary or convenient to associate themselves with black collaborators." He goes on to suggest that the sociologists should shift their focus to "the inherent racism of the white family and the pathology of white society." 

The author of this book might well take Mr. Young's admonition seriously. 

Lloyd T. Delany
New York Psychologist and Educator

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