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Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984, $12.95). Pp. xiii, 163. ISBN 0 292 79801 6.

of urban and suburban school districts. The bad news is that popular participation and control, whether by whites or blacks, is either ineffective or positively damaging to the process of school desegregation. Hochschild, who teaches politics at Princeton, deliberately minimizes anecdotal evidence regarding desegregation and bases her contentions on an analysis of her own and other survey data on the subject. Thus her book has a certain dry quality to it and makes for slow going in places. But New American Dilemma is a blockbuster of sorts, one which challenges most of our cherished preconceptions. Specifically, Hochschild seriously questions the Myrdalian assumption that white racism is "anomalous" in rather than "symbiotic" on American liberal democracy, that "incrementalism" (i.e. piecemeal reform), is the best way to desegregate and that popular participation is necessary or beneficial. On the contrary, she reads her evidence to show that racism is deeply rooted in the American political culture, that radical reform (not revolution, which is simply not on the cards) is the best means of desegregation, that elite leadership works better than popular control and that desegregation finally is the best way to achieve a non-racist society. Put in theoretical terms: liberalism's emphasis upon "rights" should take precedence over the presumption toward democratic participation, and the liberal value of "freedom of movement" should supersede the value of "diversity" of various ethnic, religious and racial communities. Space does not allow a complete assessment of this disturbing work. But two caveats should be entered. First, by slighting historical context and concentrating so much on survey data, Hochschild fails to convey the "feel" of the process of school desegregation. In a work claiming that massive school desegregation is our best hope for eradicating racism, a psychological as well as institutional phenomenon, a greater attempt to understand the experience would have been welcome. (I could find no reference, for instance, to William Chafe's fascinating study of desegregation in Greensboro, Civilities and Civil Rights.) Second, Hochschild fails sufficiently to emphasize the necessity of national mood or momentum in pressuring the elites to carry desegregation further. She does stress the importance of national consensus in reference to the accomplishments of the 1960s, but is largely silent on it -when it comes to the 1980s. So the question remains: how to create a sense of common interest transcending the racial and class interests of the white majority? Still, The New American Dilemma challenges almost all positions cherished by liberals and leftists, blacks and whites, including gradualism, democratic participation and ethnic solidarity. Because of that alone, The New American Dilemma is invaluable.