Ellis Cose's Cab Driver Problem

A BOOK WHOSE argument is that young black people, living amid less racism than their parents, see racism as less of an obstacle, is likely to seem unremarkable and even tautological. But if it is written by Ellis Cose, one might anticipate a rather more interesting read. Cose is best known for his The Rage of a Privileged Class, which appeared in 1993 and depicted the lives of even educated blacks as an endless succession of racist slights, glass ceilings, wary salesclerks, shifty realtors, and bigoted cab drivers. One might suppose that in The End of Anger, Cose would paint young blacks’ optimism as the naïveté of cosseted people unaware that the rest of America still sees them as inferiors.