Over 40 years ago the historic Kerner Commission Report declared that America was undergoing an urban crisis whose effects were disproportionately felt by underclass populations. In America's Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind Politics, Curtis Ivery and Joshua Bassett explore the persistence of this crisis today, despite public beliefs that America has become a "post-racial" nation after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Ivery and Bassett combine their own experience in the fields of civil rights and education with the knowledge of more than 20 experts in the field of urban studies to provide an accessible overview of the theories of the urban underclass and how they affect America's urban crisis. This engaging look into the still-present racial politics in America's cities adds significantly to the existing scholarship on the urban underclass by discussing the role of the prison-industrial complex in sustaining the urban crisis as well as the importance of the concept of multiracial democracy to the future of American politics and society. America's Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind Politics encourages the reader not only to be aware of persisting racial inequalities, but to actively engage in efforts to respond to them.
Acknowledgments Foreword by Cornel West Preface Chapter 1: Introduction and Theoretical Overview Chapter 2: Color-blind Ideology and the Urban Crisis "Color-blindness, Racism, and Multiracial Democracy" Michael Omi "Difference,' Emiseration, and America's Urban Crisis" Houston Baker "Sure, We're All Just One Big Happy Family" Benjamin Demott "Immigration, Education, and the Media" Maria Hinojosa "Incarcerated and Disappeared in the Land of the Free" Trinh Minh-Ha Chapter 3: Mass Incarceration and the Urban Crisis "Mass Incarceration, Civil Death, and the New Racial Domain" Manning Marable "Mass Incarceration, Race, and Criminal Justice Policy" Marc Mauer "Racial Profiling and Imprisonment of the Mentally Ill" Bob Herbert "The Case of Jonathan Magbie" Colbert I. King Chapter 4: Segregation and the Urban Crisis "Race and Residential Segregation in Detroit" john powell and John Telford "Health Care as a Civil Rights Issue" Alvin F. Poussaint "A Call for Multicultural Dialogues" James J. Zogby "American Education: Still Separate, Still Unequal" Arthur Levine Chapter 5: Education and the Urban Crisis "Toward a Paradigm Shift in Our Concept of Education" Grace Lee Boggs "Writing and Multiracial Education" Nell Irvin Painter "Police In Schools: Can a Law Enforcement Orientation Be Reconciled With an Educational Mission?" Johanna Wald and Lisa Thurau "Pursuing the Promise of Brown in the 21st Century" Erica Frankenberg Chapter 6: Multiracial Democracy and the Urban Crisis "In Our Lifetime" Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Making Every Vote Count" Lani Guinier "Segregation by Race, Segregation from Opportunity, and the Subversion of Multiracial Democracy in Detroit" Andrew Grant-Thomas "How We Are White" Gary Howard Chapter 7: Conclusion
