Looking Backward at Us

A journalist's wise views on some of America's thorniest issues. William Raspberry's syndicated columns give the voice of sanity to addressing some of the most controversial problems in America. Few Americans have tepid feelings about the multitude of subjects he assesses in his column in the Washington Post-among them, education, poverty, drugs, racism, and parenting. Because they are among our greatest concerns and because we are so deeply involved with them, we too often lack accurate perspective. But in thirty-five or forty years, perhaps we will have put many of these issues into sharper focus and will wonder why they raged during our times as our fiercest controversies. Perhaps in the retrospective view, some of our attitudes will appear dated. In this collection of more than fifty columns, Raspberry faces a variety of the seemingly intractable problems that are the daily concerns of most Americans. He confronts them not with force but with reason. Included are subjects that are loaded with discord and heated opinion, columns about people and programs, justice and injustice, race and gender. To these Raspberry gives objectivity and balance, clarifying his own judgments and carrying the reader, sometimes step-by-step, to logical conclusions. William Raspberry (1935-2012) described his philosophy as neither liberal nor conservative. For his coverage of the Watts riots in 1965, the Capital Press Club named him Journalist of the Year, and he went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1994. He was a native of Okolona, Mississippi, and was a writer at the Washington Post from 1966 until his retirement in 2005.