American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass

I have looked in to the subject of race relations for quite sometime now. I have taken in to account all the sides from Liberal to Conservative and somehow always felt something was missing. In one short read this book provided me the missing piece that was needed. I may not always agree with the authors' line of thinking but their work is truly groundbreaking even to this day.

This book describes the process by which blacks and whites ended up living in largely different sections of each major city in the North. It thus fills in a very important part of the story over race relations in America. We all know about Jim Crow in the South, and how legalized segregation worked in he post Civil War pre Civil Rights South. Most of us do not know, however, how the North treated blacks during the same timer period. This book tells us. The short story is that, while most ethnic groups tend to live by themselves to some degree, out of natural desire, black ghetttos were created by very conscious, very deliberate discrimination over a long period of time. This book tells the whole sorry history of racial covenants, discriminatory lending and the rest of it. A very valuable and important book.

I was required to read this book as a freshman in college and I am so glad that I did. Very informative and full of statistical data to back up its claims, this is one of the best books I've ever read on the subject. Any educated or well read person should be able to read this book without any problems.

This is the most important book explaining the causes of African-American disadvantage in the U.S. today. Packed with data and argumentation, it documents the devastating impact of residential segregation on African-American socioeconomic prospects. One of the best features of the book is the way it subsumes other prominant explanations of African-American disadvantage--for example, William J. Wilson's spatial-mismatch hypothesis, and "culture of poverty"/"black cultural pathology" theories--within its theoretical framework.

I, too, read this for an ethnicity class. I found it to be very informative and repeatedly found that I was saying to myself "Wow, I never noticed that, that's right!" Granted, it's fairly academic writing but I don't think it's written beyond the level of an average reader. If you're interested in the topic it raises some ideas that aren't talked about in a lot of places.