American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass

By: Douglas Massey   Nancy Denton  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.

American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to "hypersegregation."

The authors demonstrate that this systematic segregation of African Americans leads inexorably to the creation of underclass communities during periods of economic downturn. Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities. As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society. This book is a sober challenge to those who argue that race is of declining significance in the United States today.

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Separation - American Apartheid gives wonderful analysis, statistics, and arguments in the underclass workers defense. It has strong views, which any book should have if it's trying to be heard. But when you read it (if you do) you will be able to come to your own conclusions. Just remember if you've never experienced how it's like to be one in the underclass/working class, it may be hard for you to relate, so keep an open mind.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
This completed the puzzle for me. - I have looked in to the subject of race relations for quite sometime now. I have taken in to account all the sides from Liberal to Conservative and somehow always felt something was missing. In one short read this book provided me the missing piece that was needed. I may not always agree with the authors' line of thinking but their work is truly groundbreaking even to this day.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A classic analysis of racial inequality in the North - This book describes the process by which blacks and whites ended up living in largely different sections of each major city in the North. It thus fills in a very important part of the story over race relations in America. We all know about Jim Crow in the South, and how legalized segregation worked in he post Civil War pre Civil Rights South. Most of us do not know, however, how the North treated blacks during the same timer period.

This book tells us. The short story is that, while most ethnic groups tend to live by themselves to some degree, out of natural desire, black ghetttos were created by very conscious, very deliberate discrimination over a long period of time. This book tells the whole sorry history of racial covenants, discriminatory lending and the rest of it. A very valuable and important book.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Excellent Book, Should Be Required Reading For Any Educated Person. - I was required to read this book as a freshman in college and I am so glad that I did. Very informative and full of statistical data to back up its claims, this is one of the best books I've ever read on the subject. Any educated or well read person should be able to read this book without any problems.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
TORTURE - This book is more painful to read than Eichmann in Jerusalem, Germinal, or the pornographic The Rehnquist Choice by John Dean. But everyone should try. The book first describes how white Americans have kept their residential neighborhoods white since about 1920. Initially by simply murdering African-Americans trying to move in. Then with widespread restrictive deed covenants. More recently, with loan institution redlining, and low-income public housing under-funding and ripoffs. Most recently, add, with pervasive real estate agent ruses, misdirection, and discouragement. This history needed telling clearly and succinctly. Subsequently, the book defines "apartheid" rigorously and identifies it in sixteen urban areas in the country, urban areas containing a substantial percentage of all African-Americans. The book then looks at the living conditions of the most isolated, homeless and hopeless, drug-and-violence-obsessed African-Americans, and identifies apartheid as a cause, if not the cause, of these conditions.

John Dean's book says that Nixon in the early 1970's required his three Supreme Court appointees, the most important of whom was Chief Justice William Rehnquist, to be "right" on the race-residential question and, essentially, to look with disfavor on federal efforts to enforce the Fair Housing Act with respect to single-family homes. Consequently, American residential neighborhoods -- already less integrated in 1970 than in 1920 -- are less integrated now than in 1970. Between 1920 and 1970 the racial prejudice of individuals probably could be blamed. In the thirty-five years since Rehnquist commenced to "put his stamp" on the United States Supreme Court, it's been the snowballing insanity of our electoral system and its deformed progenies, based on money and gerrymandering undisturbed by Court rulings, that get the credit.

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