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Abstract
Conservatives reject the idea of structural and institutional racism as an intellectual’s way of playing the race card. Liberals attack any emphasis on the dysfunctional culture of the poor as “blaming the victim.”
In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.
The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial redlining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.
Other publications by this author
- Civil Rights and Diminishing Returns: Time for a New Approach to Social Injustice
- Universal Rights Down to Earth
- Why Civil Rights Lawsuits Are Becoming Irrelevant in the Fight For Social Justice
- Why It’s Not Always Best to Treat Education as a Civil Right
- How the Civil Rights Movement Led to a Ban on Ladies' Nights
- Moving Beyond Civil Rights
- Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality
- When We Talk about Race
- Everyday Discrimination
- A State's Right
Author
- Richard Thompson Ford
- Stanford Law School
- rford@stanford.edu
- 650 723.2796