Reckoning with Race
America's Perpetual Dilemma
Reckoning with Race confronts America’s most intractable problem – race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America’s exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos, which still plague America.
Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no structures – family, community or church – to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty
The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?
Cotton and Race in the Making of America
The Human Costs of Economic Power
Cotton and Race in the Making of America begins at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. When confronted with the choice of creating a nation with slavery or no nation without slavery, the delegates enshrined slavery in the Constitution. They did so before cotton appeared on the American scene. Six years later, the invention of the cotton gin, combined with the British advances in textile manufacturing, created an ever-increasing appetite for cotton — and the slave labor that cultivated this white gold. Rather than wither, slavery survived and expanded to satiate the national commercial interest in one crop: cotton. Known as the "indispensible product," cotton swept quickly across the American landscape — prolonging slavery and stimulating economic growth in the young nation. Its primary social byproduct, the subordination of black men and women to the economy, shaped the plight of African Americans.
