For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation’s inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to broad social an… More >>
Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, And The Moral Panic Over The City
For at least the last quarter of a century, American culture has been gripped by a tangible sense of fear and uncertainty about its inner cities.
This perception of the inner city as a dark, depressing and amoral place is not a new phenomenon; think Charles Dickens and Victorian England. More recently, there was a “liberal” period in the early 1950s; books like Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” helped bring about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Aside from that, the end of World War II brought about the beginning of white flight to the suburbs. The difference in income between whites and blacks grew wider and wider.
After the 1960s riots, and especially since the Reagan Administration, conservatives have gone on the offensive, painting the city as some sort of evil, horrible place full of people who don’t think or act like “we” do. Welfare programs cause poverty and dependency. Inner city residents lack a sense of ethics or morality. While federal subsidies to cities were being slashed, that money was used to build more prisons. Minor crimes like vagrancy or graffiti were suddenly being treated much more seriously. Remember how “welfare queens” were supposed to be the cause of America’s problems? Remember the teenage “super-predators” who were supposed to flow into the suburbs like a tidal wave, leading to a huge increase in gated communities and the purchase of home security systems?
Advertising and the movies are just as guilty of giving the perception that the inner cities should be simply walled off and forgotten. Evidently, things like the moving of jobs to the suburbs, police racism, the ending of “welfare as we know it,” and the lack of mass transit to get to those suburban jobs have nothing to do with the present state of America’s cities.
This book does a fine job at showing the latest attempt to find a scapegoat, to blame the poor and downtrodden, for America’s problems. More importantly, this book is quite readable; the author keeps it from sounding like a dry, academic tome. It is very much worth reading.
Rating: 5 / 5
College-level collections strong in urban studies will welcome the survey teacher Steve Macek offers up in URBAN NIGHTMARES: THE MEDIA, THE RIGHT, AND THE MORAL PANIC OVER THE CITY. Its chapters survey issues of urban blight, crime, and hopelessness, drawing links between these conditions and the media, which has validated the right-wing analysis of the urban crisis through news and TV reports. Is the media biased against cities?
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Rating: 5 / 5