Still Whitewashing Racism: Joe Feagin
Still Whitewashing Racism: Joe Feagin
Still Whitewashing Racism: Joe Feagin
book reviews
er-density, lower-quality housing. In both North and South, of color can access good housing (the major source of wealth
suburbanization increased racial isolation, as white employers for U.S. families). Government should also provide an expand-
and developers moved new jobs and housing to all-white sub- ed “social wage,” including government-guaranteed health
urbs. Without public transportation to suburbs, many care for all workers.
Americans of color were increasingly isolated from better jobs For nearly four centuries, racial oppression in this society
and good-quality housing. Today, the problem for many has been much more than a matter of white prejudice and
African Americans and other Americans of color is isolation in individual discrimination; it has been deeply embedded in the
central-city residential areas, a pattern for which powerful social institutions as they evolved. Today this institutionalized,
white decision makers are largely responsible. systemic racial oppression continues as a kind of slavery that
In assessing solutions for institutional racism, the authors will not die. If it ever happens, eradication of this ingrained
call for a significant expansion of public investments. The goal racial oppression will likely involve large-scale organization by
should be to reverse “long-standing patterns of disinvestment concerned Americans from all backgrounds who finally insist
in minority communities with investment in those communi- on the full implementation of the old ideals of “liberty and jus-
ties.” Government should make much greater public invest- tice for all.”
ments in schools, jobs, and community services. These new
efforts should also include strategies to increase wealth in Joe Feagin, a past president of the American Sociological Association,
communities of color, such as providing a tax-supported trust has written and edited 47 books, most concerning racial and gender prej-
fund for every child to guarantee an adequate education and udice and discrimination, especially institutionalized discrimination.
The Minds of Marginalized Black Men and behaviors, as most studies of poor blacks in urban neigh-
by Alford A. Young borhoods do, he examines their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas,
Princeton University Press, 2004, 266 pages including their views on work, stratification in American soci-
ety, and social inequality. Young also looks at how they think
The Near West Side of Chicago is about the impact of race on their own experiences and on
one of the most destitute urban their prospects for moving up in the world, reaching for the
regions in the United States. The American Dream. His interviews of 26 men between the ages
neighborhood is geographically and of 20 and 25 develop a picture of how poor black men make
socially isolated from downtown sense of their lives in the face of difficult conditions, helping
Chicago and suburban areas, and us understand how and why they act as they do.
virtually all its residents are African Young makes the effects of social isolation on these young
American, living either in or near men strikingly clear through his discussion of their relation-
large housing projects. The men in ships. Less than a third have social contact of any kind with
this neighborhood have more expe- non African Americans, and more than half do not know or
rience with the penal system than with employment, and gang regularly interact with a single person with a college degree.
activity and drug dealing are widespread. Most of their contacts are with African Americans who are
The Minds of Marginalized Black Men is based on Alford unemployed and did not finish high school. They have little
Young’s extensive interviews of poor black men from the Near experience with steady work; only one of the men Young
West Side. Rather than concentrating on their norms, values, talked with had ever held a job for more than a few months.