Crying wolf Ellis Cose's Newsweek cover story set out to celebrate America's racial good news. Cose is at it again. Crime has plummeted while home-ownership rates have climbed.
More blacks are in college than ever, and fewer are on welfare.
Cose talks for a while about that transformation, and skims over some of the fascinating details of what's behind it. But then he spends more than half the piece talking about how things aren't as good as they seem, outlining the gaps in family income, school achievement, incarceration rates and substance abuse between blacks and whites. These gaps are disturbing, of course, but they're not the news. But having asked the question, Cose doesn't much like what he hears. The much more thoughtful and persuasive sociologist Orlando Patterson basically agrees.