Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 349 pages, ISBN 0-520-23706-4, $27.50.

Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 192 pages, ISBN 0-691-09261-3, $24.95.

These two texts represent a somewhat unlikely pairing. What could an empirically detailed but wide-ranging, really indignant indictment of new right-wing homilies about racial politics—that's Whitewashing Race—have in common with what inquiring minds want to know about Black Pride and Black Prejudice, a carefully stepping report of results mostly from a 1997 survey, posing and answering such questions as whether African Americans share the “larger culture's” values, succumb to conspiratorial thinking, or are anti-Semitic? At the level of pure geography trivia, it so happens that all of the authors involved in generating these new books have some claim to Northern California roots or associations. But beyond that, do they have anything in common?