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.: āLet 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 securityā (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 āEnduring Shameā – Triple Ghettoā and āTriple Evilsā– āHow You Gonna Export Something You Ain’t Got at Home?ā– Post Civil Rights Wisdom: āAll the Corrections Have Been Madeā– Framing Katrina: Rediscovering and Re-forgetting America’s āEnduring Shameā– Living Racism and Racial Apartheid as Persistent and Deepened Social Barriers for Black Amerixcans– Why Chicago?– History, Sentimentality, Progress, and the āMyth of Timeā– Structure
2. Whitewashing āGlobal Chicagoā: 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: āChicago’s Only Real Ghettoā and the Binding Power of Whiteness – āBronzeville’s Lower Depthsā and the Fordist Production of a Proto-Underclass -Toward the Not So Golden Age
4. The Second, āGolden Ageā Ghetto (1945-1970)– Making the Second Ghetto – āA Whole Constellation of Institutionsā: The Structures and Ideology of āGolden Ageā 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 āAmerican Millstoneā: The Tribune Weighs In on the Sheer Horror of the āPermanentā 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 āClass, Not Raceā?– 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 āEconomic Vitalityā and Deindustrialization; "Hypersegmentedā 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– āA Community That Is Slowly Dyingā: A Walk Through Englewood– Evils That Are Interrelated: Viciously Circular Connections– āProgress?ā
8. What’s āRacismā 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 āa Police Problem" – Apartheid Schooling – The āGlobal Economic Sectorā and the Racial Basis of the New Daley Regime – The Glories of Globalization: It āDepends on Who You Are and Where You Liveā– Class over Race?– Race, Welfare Myths, and āThe Color of Opportunityā– Race, Class, and Personal Responsibility
9. Contesting Corporate Urban Neoliberal Racism – āThey Have No Alternativesā– "There Is No Alternativeā – Looking Forward: Toward an Urban Civil Rights and social Justice Agenda for the 21st Century
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