America's Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-Blind Politics: Education, Incarceration, Segregation, and the Future of the U.S. Multiracial Democracy

Ivery and Bassett have pulled together a superb collection of essays by many of America’s most influential commentators and scholars on race. Together, their essays dismantle the premises of colorblindness and offer a compelling analysis of the ways that racial differences persist in this ostensibly post-racial era. Students, general readers, and policy makers alike will benefit from the rich and eye-opening insights in these pages. — Thomas J. Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

A state of the art collection on an historically important issue in American society in a time when the forces of the New Right want to declare the battle for human rights and dignity over and won. — Philip M. Anderson, The City University of New York

This collection stands as an important commentary on how color-blind politics have sustained decades of racial and economic inequalities throughout America’s urban areas. In doing so, the book offers key insights on how we may move forward in addressing some of our greatest challenges as a nation. — Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

This book situates the ideology of color-blindness within a broader context of structures and ways of talking that reproduce racial inequality―all the while focusing our attention on the crisis in American cities. This is a timely book. It is a sounding of the alarm – a call to action. I pray that we all answer. — Eddie Glaude Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Princeton University

Too many conversations about race in this region have morphed into cocktail-party chatter — or bus tours by wide-eyed suburbanites — fueled by the fantasy that if we all just got to know each other a little better, everything would be all right. A new book by Detroit’s own Curtis L. Ivery, America’s Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind Politics, won’t let us off that easy. Ivery, chancellor of the Wayne County Community College District, and Joshua Bassett, a WCCCD faculty member, collected and edited more than 20 essays by some of America’s leading social thinkers, including Ivery’s friends Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the late Manning Marable and Grace Lee Boggs. Race and class are implicit throughout, but this is not just another rap on race. America’s Urban Crisis represents a clear-eyed, historical look at the economic and social policies, supported by color-blind politics, that have gutted and segregated Detroit and other U.S. cities, relegating millions of their residents to generational poverty, failing schools and an insidious prison industry. It’s a hopeful message from a hopeful man who has given us a hopeful book — and a good place to start a real conversation on race and the region. ― Detroit Free Press