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Black Males Left Behind edited by Ronald Mincy (2006)
A collection of think-tank policy papers by the Urban Institute? Wonder why this one didn’t exactly get around? Yet it is one of the most valuable books I have ever read. It’s one thing to say that things aren’t easy for uneducated young black men. But to just say it implies, via omission, that nothing can be done short of transforming how America operates and thinks—which will never happen. The articles in this book, in accessible language, outline what we can do to help, here in the real world. What are the jobs a man without a college degree can seek? What helps a man from the streets keep a job once he has one? Just read, say, one of Mincy’s essays a day—and afterwards, you’ll feel like almost anything the typical race man-type says is fundamentally incomplete.
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle (2004)
Few people seem to get that the reform of welfare administration into a five-year program in 1996 was a signpost development in black history. The liberal take on it, today, is that erstwhile welfare moms are still poor—and they are. The conservative take is that they are less poor than they once were—which they are. DeParle’s book gave us the closest thing I can imagine to a truth we can use. He resisted his visceral distrust of the Republican-led policy, followed three black women grappling with its effects and gave us the facts. His conclusion: Welfare reform has created no utopia at all—but is better than the old days. The moms doing without it will never be middle-class, but, he argues, they are happier making it so that their kids might be one day. The book would make for a great dramatized miniseries, in fact—Mo’Nique, in my mind, is the lead character.
Come On, People: On The Path From Victims to Victors by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint (2007)
This book hasn’t taken the place it should have, partly because the year before, Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings, a shorter and jollier advice book on making the best of the worst, had flown off the shelves. But if it were up to me, Cosby and Poussaint’s book would be required reading for all HBCU freshmen and an audiobook version would be provided for free to every black family in the United States. A particularly useful lesson: The idea that four years of college is the only way to a middle-class life is a myth. Cosby and Poussaint lay out how to make use of community colleges and vocational schools to make for a comfortable existence—those not up for the policy papers in Black Males Left Behind would get much of the same thing from this book.
Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”: Searching For the Color-Blind Ideal by Larry Purdy (2008)
This one was published by a small press, is far from P.C. and was written by a white guy. You’ll never see it at the front of a bookstore. However, it’s one of the best books on affirmative action ever written. Purdy, a lawyer, calmly and without rancor, dismantles the typical defenses of racial-preference policies on the basis of diversity (as opposed to disadvantage) and shows how all would be better off if we got back down to specific cases. Purdy has no irritated conservative rancor against “the blacks”—he just doesn’t see coherence in how racial preferences started being defended in the ’80s. The book is especially good on the University of Michigan Supreme Court cases. During which, you may recall, black studies pioneer John Hope Franklin, when informed of affirmative action policies based on lowered test score and grade cutoffs for black students, was appalled.
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle For Civil Rights In The North by Thomas Sugrue (2008)
Sugrue is best known for his chronicle of what led to the riots in Detroit, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race And Inequality in Postwar Detroit, now established as a go-to source on black urban history and often assigned in college courses. Sweet Land Of Liberty will never occupy that kind of place: It doesn’t have the advantage of a single-line narrative thrust. Yet it is well worth a look. We know about Montgomery, Atlanta and Selma. But how often do we learn about the desegregation of schools in Westchester County, or moves to integrate Levittowns? This book shows what a serious kick-butt organization the NAACP used to be, and also teaches us that the black “militant” mood didn’t begin in 1966, but was very much in the air—just minus the Afros—as early as the late ‘40s. Lots of important stories here about ordinary people who worked just as hard as the rock stars down South.
John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Lecturer at Columbia University, and a blogger for The New Republic.
Comments
"How the Irish became White" belongs on ANY superior list where folks are genuinely trying to get at the root of "race" and history; as well as Orlando Patterson's phenomenal "Rituals of Blood," Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno's eye-opening "Are Italians White?", and Jane Landers' "Black Society in Spanish Florida". Of course, these are only the tip of the iceberg but since information is power, I wouldn't expect any talk show host to bring them to the public's attention.
McWhorter's review of Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice by Ethan Brown is dead on.
The war on drugs is doing to the black and poverty oppressed communities of America precisely what it was designed to do: entice under-employed and disadvantaged people into crime, drug abuse and disaffection using easy access to tax free economic opportunity.
"[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." H.R. Haldeman's diary according to former Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Baum in his book "Smoke and Mirrors".
The War on Drugs was then and still is today that "system".
This is how Nixon and the Dixie-crats of 1970 re-invigorated Jim Crow after the 1965 Voting Rights Act disabled it.
Jim Crow stood on two legs. 1.) Direct denial of access to polling and elections. 2.) mass criminal disenfranchisement through trumped up morals laws including drug laws.
The VRA kicked the first leg out from under Jim Crow. The War on Drugs was the crutch that enabled the other leg to stand and grow stronger than ever.
Hi Boredwell,
I agree quoting Woodrow Wilson was a bad decision. He was one of our most racist presidents. But don't let that stop you from reading The Arc of Justice. It's excellent!
“History written with lightning,” Woodrow Wilson called D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation. Same with this book. These two lines were used to summarize the blurb on ARC OF JUSTICE. Indeed!? BIRTH glorified the KKK and depicted black men as rapists! So I take exception that Wilson's appraisal was used as a benediction. Was this appended posthaste? Where are your editors?!
What about Black Boy by Richard Wright? I know it's more of a narrative, but it sure opened my eyes. I will never forget it.
The "race" book that blew my mind was "How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev. He takes a look at the way in which Irish immigrants in Boston and Philadelphia squandered the opportunity to forge unity with African Americans in order to enter "whiteness." It is a disturbing read.
I hardly think that McWhorter is qualified to present this list, given his own simplistic (almost apologising) views on race and minorities. His book, Losing the Race, is naive--and outright offensive--in the extent to which it rejects the existence of structural racism in the US.
I love that man, I think he has a unique talent of intertwining race and economics!
When Is he going to run for senate or something? We need men like him.
I so want to read the books
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