Reasoning on Race

Nothing could be rarer or more welcome than a reasoned book on race; but Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason is not the book. The Liberal ideologue sees only an undifferentiated, gray sameness among men, and will not even allow race to be discussed. But Mr. Putnam finds nothing but difference; in more ways than one, he sees everything “in black and white.” This is not because Mr. Putnam is a “racist” in the ordinary sense. He subtitles his book “A Yankee View,” and it is true that his passionate simplifications arise not from personal contacts and dislikes, but from the pure pursuit of a single theory. Like the Yankee Liberals, he is not talking about real men, but about an abstract idea; only where the Liberal is unbalanced on the idea of Sameness, Mr. Putnam goes astray on the idea of Difference. Both approaches lack the multiple norms, the restrictions, the degrees of certitude distinguished, that characterize the few sane treatments of the subject (notably Nathaniel Weyl’s The Negro in American Civilization).

Race and Reason: A Yankee View, by Carleton Putnam. Public Affairs, $3.25

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Garry Wills

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Nothing could be rarer or more welcome than a reasoned book on race; but Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason is not the book. The Liberal ideologue sees only an undifferentiated, gray sameness among men, and will not even allow race to be discussed. But Mr. Putnam finds nothing but difference; in more ways than one, he sees everything “in black and white.” This is not because Mr. Putnam is a “racist” in the ordinary sense. He subtitles his book “A Yankee View,” and it is true that his passionate simplifications arise not from personal contacts and dislikes, but from the pure pursuit of a single theory. Like the Yankee Liberals, he is not talking about real men, but about an abstract idea; only where the Liberal is unbalanced on the idea of Sameness, Mr. Putnam goes astray on the idea of Difference. Both approaches lack the multiple norms, the restrictions, the degrees of certitude distinguished, that characterize the few sane treatments of the subject (notably Nathaniel Weyl’s The Negro in American Civilization).

Race and Reason: A Yankee View, by Carleton Putnam. Public Affairs, $3.25