Crossings

A white man married to a black woman, Walt Harrington has two mixed-race children. A racist joke made in the dentist's office one afternoon provoked first anger, then anguish and fear for his children as Harrington, a Washington Post Magazine staff writer, realized that the butt of the joke was not simply "those people" but his son and daughter. Crossings, which grew out of this incident, is the eye-opening story of Harrington's twenty-five-thousand-mile excursion through black America, a personal journey that is also a documentary look at African Americans today. Harrington travels as a white man in a black world with the intent of crossing over and engaging blacks in a way whites generally do not. He lets people talk - an old sharecropper, a city police chief, a jazz trumpeter, a convicted murderer, an architect, a welfare mother, a corporate mogul, and many others. And he tries to explain what he - as a white man - learned as he listened. He spends time with filmmakers Spike Lee and Charles Burnett, poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, rap star Ice T, Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson, gutsy executive of the Oakland A's Sharon Richardson Jones ("the first lady of baseball"), and the hottest personal talent manager in Hollywood, Dolores Robinson. He tracks down the first black man he ever knew - twenty-five years ago, as a teenager, Harrington played baseball with this man on an otherwise all-black team in a poor Chicago suburb. He looks up the campus black radicals from his undergraduate days. And finally he returns to his hometown to talk with young black kids at his old high school. What he finds is a wildly divergent nation of people who are more like him and less like him than he could ever have known. Rich, provocative, and utterly absorbing, Crossings speaks about race in America today as it cuts across geography, age, occupation, and income. Any book about the intimate intrigues and confusions of race in America is bound to be controversial, but in the end, Walt Harrington has taken the journey that many right-minded, good-hearted white Americans would like to take. And he has asked the questions they would like to ask of black Americans, who still today are a mysterious and distant people to most white folks.