In the 1960s, many believed that the civil rights movement's successes would foster a new era of racial equality in America. Four decades later, the degree of racial inequality has barely changed. To understand what went wrong, Patrick Sharkey argues that we have to understand what has happened to African American communities over the last several decades. In Stuck in Place, Sharkey describes how political decisions and social policies have led to severe disinvestment from black n...

On Election Day in 2016, it seemed unthinkable to many Americans that Donald Trump could become president of the United States. But the victories of the Obama administration hid from view fundamental problems deeply rooted in American social institutions and history. The election’s consequences drastically changed how Americans experience their country, especially for those threatened by the public outburst of bigotry and repression. Amid the deluge of tweets and breaking news stories that...

“Admirably connects two stories about the criminal legal system that are usually told separately. One is that the country that Americans live in is safer than it has been for a long time. The other story is that for some citizens, especially African-American men, the country that they live in is not free.” —Paul Butler, New York Times Book ReviewFrom the late ’90s to the mid-2010s, American cities experienced an astonishing drop in violent crime, dramatica...

The core argument of Jean Anyon’s classic Radical Possibilities is deceptively simple: if we do not direct our attention to the ways in which federal and metropolitan policies maintain the poverty that plagues communities in American cities, urban school reform as currently conceived is doomed to fail. With every chapter thoroughly revised and updated, this edition picks up where the 2005 publication left off, including a completely new chapter detailing how three decades of polit...

The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, and at a higher rate than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. What’s more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, it’s become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarcer...

What is the biggest social problem in the news today? Who makes issues newsworthy and important? Why do some issues receive more attention than others? Social issues that are widely recognized in the media′s agenda often demand attention on the public agenda and in turn, slide up the policy agenda, creating policy changes. James W. Dearing and Everett M. Rogers′s research on social issues that hit the top of the media agenda--the war on drugs, drunk driving, the Exxon Valdez, AIDS, and the...

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma.In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African Ame...

How "colorblindness" in policy and personal practice perpetuate racial inequity in the United States today.Following the civil rights movement, race relations in the United States entered a new era.Legal gains were interpreted by some as ensuring equal treatment for all and that "colorblind" policies and programs would be the best way forward. Since then, many voices have called for an end to affirmative action and other color-conscious policies and programs, and e...

"I recommend a book by Professor Williams, it is really worth a read, it's called White Working Class." -- Vice President Joe Biden on Pod Save AmericaAn Amazon Best Business and Leadership book of 2017Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite—journalists, managers, and establishment politicians--are on the outside looking in, left to argue ...

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake ...

Why policymaking in the United States privileges the rich over the poorCan a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy—but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the U...

Race is, and always has been, an explosive issue in the United States. In this timely new book, Tim Wise explores how Barack Obama’s emergence as a political force is taking the race debate to new levels. According to Wise, for many white people, Obama’s rise signifies the end of racism as a pervasive social force; they point to Obama not only as a validation of the American ideology that anyone can make it if they work hard, but also as an example of how institutional barriers against peo...