San Antonio College Library

Discusses America's retreat from the cities, back to Thomas Jeferson's vision of an agrarian utopia, and the economic and social consequences at the beginning of a new millennium.

Why do American ghettos persist? Scholars and commentators often identify some factor - such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime - as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to 'fix' ghettos or 'help' their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor as moral agents responding to injustice.

"In No Shame in My Game, anthropologist Katherine Newman presents a view of inner-city poverty radically different from that commonly accepted. The all-too-prevalent picture we get of the poor today - in the media, in the political sphere, and in scholarly studies - is of alienated minorities living in big-city ghettos, lacking in values and family structure, criminally inclined, and permanently dependent on government handouts." "What Newman reveals,...

"On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto--a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place...

"Inner city drug use behavior shifts and changes, leaving past drug treatment programs, drug prevention efforts, health care provisions for drug users, and social service practice unprepared to effectively respond. New Drugs on the Street: Changing Inner City Patterns of Illicit Consumption tackles this problem by presenting the latest ethnographic and epidemiological studies of emerging and changing drug use behaviors in the inner city."--Jacket

Branded a troublemaker due to his anger over everything from being bullied to his sister's death a year before, Marcus begins to control himself and cope with his problems at home and at his inner-city school when an unlikely mentor teaches him to play chess.

Four decades after the great victories of the Civil Rights Movement secured equal rights for African-Americans, black America is in crisis. Indeed, by most measurable standards, conditions for many blacks have grown worse since 1965: desperate poverty, incarceration rates, teenage pregnancy and out-of- wedlock births, and educational failures. For years, pundits have blamed these problems on forces outside the black community. But now, in a broad-ranging...