Orlando Patterson On Racial Diveristy And Social Incorporation

Patterson's recent New York Times op-ed argues, among other things, that "for nonblacks, assimilation is alive and well in America. It is not passive integration into a static, Anglo-Protestant mainstream (which was always a sociological fiction anayway), but an endlessly dynamic two-way cultural process." But black Americans as the "great excpetion to this process of social incorporation" as the result of poverty (black poverty "stands at three times the white rate, just as it did in 1970)" and "chronic hypersegregation, true not only of the great majority of poor blacks but of working-class and middle-class blacks as well."