My book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) is out. I posted the study’s introduction and table of contents on ZNet today. Objectively racist "Global Chicago" has some issues its power "elite" needs to be compelled to deal with instead of pursuing its "multi-million dollar mission" to host the 2016 Olympics, something that will likely only exacerbate its severe racial and social inequalities while advancing the authoritarian and regressive (urban corporate neoliberal) "global city" agenda. It could start by moving financial resources from narcissistic Olympics promotion to attacking socioeconomic misery in the 15 city neighborhoods where more than a quarter of the children were reported (in the latest census) to be living in what poverty research now call "deep poverty" – at less than half of the nation’s notoriously inadequate (far too low) poverty level. Fourteen of these neighborhoods are located in predominantly black stretches of persistently hyper-segregated Chicago’s South and West Sides and 12 of them were 94 percent or more black in the 2000 Census. The book is preceded by the following comment from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering ram of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security” (1967). You can hear me talk about race, corporate power and politics and Chicago during an interview last spring – podcast available here (scroll down to March 10, 2007)
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Part I: Forgotten People, Invisible Oppression
1. It’ll Take More Than a Hurricane: Race, Place, Chicago, and America’s “Enduring Shame” – Triple Ghetto” and “Triple Evils”– “How You Gonna Export Something You Ain’t Got at Home?”– Post Civil Rights Wisdom: “All the Corrections Have Been Made”– Framing Katrina: Rediscovering and Re-forgetting America’s “Enduring Shame”– Living Racism and Racial Apartheid as Persistent and Deepened Social Barriers for Black Amerixcans– Why Chicago?– History, Sentimentality, Progress, and the “Myth of Time”– Structure
2. Whitewashing “Global Chicago”: Racial Invisibility in the Neoliberal Era – A Sixties Memoir– Neoliberal Racism and the Post-Civil Rights Era– Deleting Race Altogether – Race Without Racism – Not in Our Modern, Northern, and Global Metropolitan Backyard
Part II: History: The Not-So Good Old Ghetto
3. The First and Only True Ghetto (1900-1944) – Two White Supremacist World Fairs – Explaining Blacks’ Relative Absence before the Great War – When Work Discriminates: Labor Market Apartheid through the Interwar Years – Residential Apartheid: “Chicago’s Only Real Ghetto” and the Binding Power of Whiteness – “Bronzeville’s Lower Depths” and the Fordist Production of a Proto-Underclass -Toward the Not So Golden Age
4. The Second, “Golden Age” Ghetto (1945-1970)– Making the Second Ghetto – “A Whole Constellation of Institutions”: The Structures and Ideology of “Golden Age” Inequality – The Big Chicago Chill: The End of the Sixties and the Great Migration
5. The Nadir: The Third and Apocalyptic Ghetto and the Retreat from Race (1970-1992) – The Kerner Commission’s Belated Nightmare Come to Life– The Retreat from Race: The Cry No Longer Heard– The “American Millstone”: The Tribune Weighs In on the Sheer Horror of the “Permanent” Black Urban Poor
Part III: Still Separate and Unequal: The Ugly Details of Recent Racial Domination
6. Metropolitan Apartheid – Physical Segregation and Racial Ignorance– Shifting Color Lines– Dark Continuities– Still Segregated Schools– Is Racial Segregation about “Class, Not Race”?– Why Separatism Matters
7. Savage Inequalities: The Cold Facts – An Expanding Black Bourgeoisie– The Deeper, Darker Reality: Income/Poverty; Labor Force; Race, Place, and the Color of Job Growth; Housing; The Color of “Economic Vitality” and Deindustrialization; "Hypersegmented” Finance; Education Attainment and Test-Score Gaps; The Color of Campaign Finance; The Color of the Executive Suite; Black Business Enterprise; Incarceration and Felony Marking; Health; The Limits of Black Middle-Class Escape– “A Community That Is Slowly Dying”: A Walk Through Englewood– Evils That Are Interrelated: Viciously Circular Connections– “Progress?”
8. What’s “Racism” Got to Do with It? – Policy and Housing Opportunity – Labor Market Racism: The Smoking Gun and Beyond – Racist Mass Criminal Marking and Warehousing – Media Racism: The Black Inner City as “a Police Problem" – Apartheid Schooling – The “Global Economic Sector” and the Racial Basis of the New Daley Regime – The Glories of Globalization: It “Depends on Who You Are and Where You Live”– Class over Race?– Race, Welfare Myths, and “The Color of Opportunity”– Race, Class, and Personal Responsibility
9. Contesting Corporate Urban Neoliberal Racism – “They Have No Alternatives”– "There Is No Alternative” – Looking Forward: Toward an Urban Civil Rights and social Justice Agenda for the 21st Century
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