I admire Eugene Robinson. He's a lucid writer, a voice of reason, and one of the only syndicated columnists I read in our local paper. And although he doesn't come right out and write it, he probably falls into the transcendent group of African-Americans who wield power in the era of Oprah and Obama.

Still, I was a bit disappointed in Disintegration, because I couldn't quite figure out its purpose. Which doesn't mean that I'm not discussing it with kith and kin, so maybe that's purpose enough. In his introduction, Robinson says that African-Americans today have less in common with each other now than in the past, that the African-American middle class has different goals and values than the group he calls "the abandoned," the people who got left behind in public housing and segregated neighborhoods and schools as their better equipped neighbors moved out and up the socio-economic ladder.

Here's what I didn't find out. Just how do the different goals and aspirations of mainstream Black Americans preclude them speaking for the abandoned? And are those values so obvious that they don't need elucidating? Does the splintering of African America dilute its political power? What the heck are we going to do about it?

Robinson's chapter on emergent African-Americans interested me most, perhaps because I read his book right after finishing My Antonia, which also dealt with immigrants. Robinson's emergents are recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, who, although better educated than any other class of immigrants today, share some of the traits common to immigrants throughout U.S. history--hard work, the drive to succeed, and strong families. Also classed as emergents are biracial Americans who may identify themselves as Black--or not.

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