Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: H1

Section: Books

Rituals of Blood
Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
By Orlando Patterson. Civitas/Counterpoint. 330 pp. Illustrated. $29.50.

No Equal Justice
Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System
By David Cole. New Press. 218 pp. $25.

In our 350-year conversation about color, power, rights, and justice in this country, we find consensus on some points and deep disagreement on others. There is no real doubt that Americans of African ancestry have made great strides in legal and social justice, in education, and in economic security in the last 100 years, especially in the last 50. Nor is there doubt, even so, that as a whole they still have greater ills than Americans of European background. They are more likely to be poor, inadequately trained and educated, unemployed, stuck in dangerous neighborhoods; more likely to be victims of crime and to be incarcerated; and their life expectancy is lower.

Consensus evaporates, however, over the question of why things are as they are and what to do about them, and also over who should take responsibility for which problems. These two books -- Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's scholarly and brilliantly written ``Rituals of Blood'' and law professor David Cole's clear and eloquent ``No Equal Justice'' -- approach different problems with different answers.

Orlando Patterson is a fearless analyst who hasn't received as much attention as some other scholars, perhaps because he is so independent and individual in his thinking. Born in Jamaica and educated in Britain, he has written several seminal books, including ``The Ordeal of Integration'' and ``Freedom in the Making of Western Culture,'' which won the 1991 National Book Award, as well as three novels.

This new book consists of three essays. The second, ``Feast of Blood,'' argues that the grisly history of Southern lynching in the Jim Crow era should be understood as a system of communal blood sacrifice consistent with Christian sacramental psychology. The third, ``American Dionysius,'' deplores the exaltation of often-mysogynistic sports and entertainment heroes, and the crowding out of quality culture (such as jazz) by the hip-hop culture among African-American males. The heart of the book, though, is the first essay, ``Broken Bloodlines,'' which surveys and analyzes demographic and survey data with provocative conclusions about African-American social life.

For Patterson, one of the most corrosive and least acknowledged conflicts affecting Afro-Americans (he rejects ``white'' and ``black'' because of their value associations, and dislikes ``African-American'' because it lays too much stress on Africa and not enough on America) is not between them and ``Euro-Americans'' but between African-American men and women. Dismissing the idea of the `` 'hood'' -- informal community bonds in African-American communities -- Patterson writes, ``There are no ` 'hoods' out there. . . . the simple, sad truth is that Afro-Amerians are today the loneliest of all Americans.''

Patterson finds that ``Afro-Americans have the lowest rate of marriage in the nation, and those who do get married have the highest rate of divorce of any major ethnic group. . . . The result is that most Afro-Americans, especially women, will go through most of their adult lives as single people.''

In his reading of various studies, Patterson finds significant contrasts between African-American men and women in their attitudes toward relationship and family. Women give higher importance to security and stability in marriage, while men place the emphasis on emotional satisfaction. Women believe in a more shared power arrangement in marriage, while men are more likely to believe that the husband should have final say in the home.

While attitudes toward marital infidelity are not permissive among the majority for either sex, men are much more likely to view it as tolerable -- for themselves, though not for their women -- and the rates of infidelity among men are relatively high (as reported to researchers in a University of Chicago survey that Patterson calls ``the best and most representative'' study). Patterson believes that enormous damage is done to marital (and therefore social) stability by this attitudinal difference, and by other attitudes and behaviors that studies disclose among many Afro-American men -- especially lack of responsibility to, and abandonment of, children.

All of this is volatile stuff, but Patterson believes it must be talked about and faced within the African-American community. He attributes these problems not primarily to present-day poverty or discrimination (though he assuredly does not minimize their effects) but to the legacy of slavery. We are only a few generations removed from slavery, he points out, and it existed for centuries. The essential psychological underpinning of it was the encouragement of reproduction, coupled with the extinction of masculinity and of the idea of responsibility among male slaves. He writes that ``slavery and the slave master decimated the roles of father and husband and indeed all other significant male roles -- which, by their very nature, were preoccupied with the power and authority of officeholding, and with honor, status, and dignity. . . .

``Afro-Americans, and American society at large (like Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin societies), are still living with the devastating consequences of this male attitude toward reproduction. In all of these ex-slave societies, male descendants of slaves believe that `birth control is a plot to kill the Negro race.' And in all of them, men bear children whom they have no resources to support and whom they, in the majority of cases among the lower classes, simply abandon.''

It should not surprise us, as Patterson sees it, that these attitudes would be transmitted from one generation to the next, so that boys and girls learn them from their fathers or other adult males they know.

To be sure, Patterson writes that the dominant Euro-American culture, over the long history of racism since slavery, tended to reinforce this cultural legacy. Yet he does not pass off the responsibility for remedying the situation wholly to the world outside the community. ``Stable co-parenting,'' he writes sternly, ``will not be possible under the present sexual code and behavior of Afro-American men. . . . The problem and the solution are overwhelmingly in the hands of Afro-American men. They must radically alter their ways. . . . This is not a moral plea. It is a sociological imperative if Afro-Americans hope to have the remotest chance of ever catching up socioeconomically with other Americans.''

Changes in attitude among black men are not the solution for the racial divide in criminal justice, according to David Cole's short and well-argued book, ``No Equal Justice.'' ``The per capita incarceration rate among blacks is seven times that among whites,'' he writes. ``African-Americans make up about 12 percent of the general population, but more than half the prison population. They serve longer sentences, have higher arrest and conviction rates, face higher bail amounts, and are more often the victims of police use of deadly force. . . . If incarceration rates continue their current trends, one in four young black males born today will serve time in prison during his lifetime.''

Cole, who teaches at Georgetown University, contends that unequal treatment throughout the legal system is not just accidental, but an essential part of the system: ``The rhetoric of the criminal justice system sends the message that our society carefully protects everyone's constitutional rights, but in practice the rules assure that law enforcement prerogatives will generally prevail over the rights of minorities and the poor.'' He gives as an example the much more severe sentences, mandated by Congress, for possession of crack than for powdered cocaine; crack is far more popular than powder among African-American drug users.

Cole's solutions involve more than changes of heart: He prescribes more stringent rules governing police searches and detainments, a more race-sensitive process of jury selection, provision of counsel at more points along the way in the criminal system, and community policing. He also advocates strengthening neighborhood social organizations and striving harder to fight truancy and improve schools. Probably most difficult to implement would be his idea of cutting incarceration rates by using ``reintegrative shaming'' penalties -- a kind of de-facto pillory within the offended community.

Both these books, different as they are in their approaches and solutions, remind us how deep-seated and tenacious are the challenges facing African-Americans. And however and by whomever the problems are addressed, there can be no doubt that African-Americans' problems are all Americans' problems.