- ISBN13: 9780393067057
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma. In this provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, the newest book of the Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Julius Wilson applies an e… More >>
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
Well balanced ideas, theories, and studies that are researched and fully foot-noted, but very repetitive.
Rating: 2 / 5
I was so disappointed with this book. It’s very poorly edited; taking paragraph after paragraph to make a point that could have been made with 4 or 5 concise sentences. Distilled down to its essence, I believe there is enough material in the book to make an adequate, though unoriginal, essay.
Rating: 1 / 5
The author presents a well written, carefully reasoned and well-documented discussion of the research about the causes of the gap in educational performance between the races.
Rating: 4 / 5
Wilson’s focus is on understanding the causes of African American inner city chronic unemployment and family fragmentation. For sources he looks to many academic studies of both culture and structural causes of chronic poverty in the inner city, stating that structural causes “should be given more weight”. It appears there is an underlying message in this book that chronically poor blacks are not responsible for fixing anything that is “structural” until these barriers are removed by someone else. ie. politicians or racial discriminators. Since Wilson feels nearly all of the causes are “structural” social scientists could just focus on studying these causes forever, rather than propose ways the barriers can be removed and the black community can take some responsibility to attend school, avoid having children without committment by fathers, report neighborhood crime, etc.
Rating: 3 / 5
Wilson’s pithy volume, part of Henry Louis Gates’s Issues of Our Time series with Norton, presents a critical synopsis of the great debates in urban sociology over the past fifty years. *More than Just Race* considers how sociologists from Elliot Liebow to Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh have tarried with the question of urban poverty. In reflecting on these different perspectives, Wilson presents an illuminating narrative about one of the most charged areas of American public policy.
One of the book’s notable strengths is the extraordinary breadth of sociological knowledge Wilson displays in his writing. Wilson’s survey of urban sociology bespeaks years of research and work in the field, though his prose remains accessible and engaging. Further, by organizing the book into three interrelated chapters — on how poverty affects 1) urban space; 2) young black men; and 3) black families/single black mothers — Wilson presents the sociological literature in a clear, theme-oriented manner. His chapter on black families and the Moynihan Report is especially well-composed.
The book’s other great virtue is that it condenses the longstanding debate scholars and policy-makers have had in determining the role structural inequalities and cultural variables play in the persistence of urban poverty. Seeing the merits of both sides of the debate, Wilson believes the problem is best understood as an amalgam of institutional and cultural factors. Although Wilson makes this particular point in a somewhat repetitive fashion, the overall effect of his argument is edifying: it moves beyond putatively “liberal” and “conservative” positions in the urban poverty debate to outline a synthetic view of the everyday realities of inner-city life.
Rating: 4 / 5