Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
1995
Abstract
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid argues that housing integration has inappropriately disappeared from the national agenda and is critical to remedying the problems of the so-called "underclass." Reviewer Olati Johnson praises the authors' refusal to dichotomize race and class and the roles both play in creating and maintaining housing segregation. However, she argues, Massey and Denton fail to examine critically either the concept of the underclass or the integration ideology they espouse. Specifically, she contends, the authors fail to confront the limits of integration strategies in providing affordable housing or combating the problem of tokenism. Massey and Denton also fail to explain why, given the intractability of racism, they believe integration is more likely to be successful or politically viable than economic investment in inner cities. Ms. Johnson concludes that the book's proposals would not aid most poor African Americans.
Disciplines
Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Race
Recommended Citation
Olatunde C. Johnson,
Integrating the "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid,
47
Stan. L. Rev.
787
(1995).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2207
Comments
America's Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993, 292 pp., $14.95.