ABSTRACT
The economist Peter Drucker says no other group in world history has ever made so much economic progress so fast as American blacks have since World War II. Three-fifths of African-Americans rose into middle class incomes, he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. Before the Second World War the figure was one-twentieth. We pay a high price for strategic negativism. Progress is made to seem hopeless. Blacks come to think whites will never let them in, even as the doors swing open. With so much money spent, whites come to think that blacks must be at fault for an impasse that doesn't really exist. And we can certainly quibble about what a middle-class income really is. No matter how much progress is being made, it is always brushed aside and fresh evidence of oppression is detected. It keeps constituencies resentful and loyal, and it keeps the lines of the new balkanized America nice and sharp.
