Cities and Race: America New Black Ghettos

This fascinating book examines the 1990s rise of a new black ghetto in rust belt America, 'the global ghetto'. It uses the emergent perspective of 'racial economy' to delineate a fundamental proposition; historically neglected and marginalized black ghettos, in a 1990s era of societal boom and bust, have become more impoverished, more stigmatized, and functionally ambiguous as areas.

As these ghettos grow in size and become more stigmatized entities in contemporary society, our understanding of them in relation to evolving cities and society has not kept pace. This book looks to the heart of this misunderstanding, to find out how race and political economy in cities dynamically connect in new ways ('racial economy') to deepen deprivation in these areas. This book is an essential read for students of geography, urban studies and sociology.

Today, in the shadows of gleaming downtown skyscrapers and showy gentrified neighborhoods, conditions in many impoverished black ghettos in America's Rust Belt have substantially worsened. Leaders and residents in these communities struggle to acquire the resources to upgrade their communities, but contest a formidable obstacle: the accelerated push to make and protect downtown revitalized landscapes of consumption, pleasure, and affluent residency.

Cities and Race comprehensively explores this new black ghetto reality and discusses and explains:
· The rise of a new kind of black ghetto termed "the glocal ghetto
· The reality of a new third wave of black ghetto marginalizing since 1945 in public policy and popular discourse in America
· A new political-economic force that triggers the production of this new ghetto, "the global trope
· The ascendant characteristics of this new ghetto: a deepened poverty of its residents, a new denigrating pattern of representation assigned to residents and these communities, and a continued connection of this space to the prison-industrial complex in America
· The bolstered role that local politics plays in producing these new ghetto spaces.

Cities and Race concludes, in rich and original detail, that America has now spawned a new kind of ghetto that has become more impoverished and more impugned as the now crystallized zone of human discard in "the global era."