Overview
What explains the continuing hardship of so many black Americans? A distinguished group of scholars analyzes the long, complex structural and environmental causes of discrimination and their effects on African-Americans. The authors examine the impact of poverty, poor health, poor schools, poor housing, poor neighborhoods, and few job opportunities—and demonstrate how multiple causes reinforce each other and condemn African-Americans to positions of inferiority and poverty. Some of the contributors examine policies designed to correct problems, while others look at the changing racial and ethnic composition in America and its implications for African-Americans, as other minorities surpass them in numbers and claim political, economic, and social attention. The late James Tobin has contributed a foreword to this important collection.Author Biography: C. Michael Henry is visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford.
The Yale ISPS Series
Synopsis
Henry (St. Anthony's College, Oxford, UK) collects 26 papers coming out of the interdisciplinary faculty seminars on racial inequality, poverty, and antipoverty policy in the United States conducted at Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies over the course of the 1990s. Papers consider connections between income inequality and economic inequality, measurement issues of inequality and poverty, structural causes of African American poverty, differential impact of skills on earnings, crime and poverty in inner cities, factors militating against progress for African Americans, welfare and familial hardship, and economic community development policies. Many of the papers are prescriptive in nature, while others explore policy experiences and impacts from the 1960s to 2000. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR