Unlike other studies, which treat the busing issue as simply a moral or legal issue, this book looks at it also in terms of what this decades-long battle actually accomplished for the education of blacks which was very little. More than most histories, America in Black and White traces the development of black people themselves, rather than simply the actions and attitudes of white people toward blacks. Most blacks, for example, had only an elementary school education as late as 1940. No small part of the later economic rise of blacks was a result of getting more years of schooling. Migrating out of the Jim Crow South was another factor.
Retrogressions are as much a part of the story as the successes that are so often celebrated.
These retrogressions include not only such things as soaring crime rates and family breakdowns in ghettos across the country, they also include a growing self-isolation of many blacks from mainstream America and their growing susceptibility to demagoguery and conspiracy theories. None of this is simplified by the Thernstroms. Indeed, they puncture many of the over-simplified explanations currently in vogue. America in Black and White is a penetrating analysis, as well as a superb history.