Crossing the Racial Divide

Crossing the Racial Divide
Author: Kathleen Korgen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2002-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313014167

In interviews in cities and towns across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles, and from Madison to Dallas, members of 40 black and white pairs of friends reflect on how they became friends, how racial issues are addressed, and how their friendships have influenced their views and, in some cases, their actions. Utilizing a sociological framework to examine the friendships, Korgen offers readers a rare glimpse into an even rarer phenomenon and sheds light on important aspects of race relations in America. How do close friendships between blacks and whites develop? Why are cross-racial friendships so rare? How do these friendships navigate the issue of race? Crossing the Racial Divide answers these questions through a lively discussion of the problems and issues and through the voices of members of cross-racial friendships. In interviews in cities and towns across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles, and from Madison to Dallas, members of 40 black and white pairs of friends reflect on how they became friends, how racial issues are addressed, and how their friendships have influenced their views and, in some cases, their actions. Utilizing a sociological framework to examine the friendships, Korgen offers readers a rare glimpse into an even rarer phenomenon and sheds light on important aspects of race relations in America. Challenging both the traditional notion that blacks and whites are opposites and the increasingly popular notion of colorblindness, the author reveals that, while close black/white friendships follow the concept of homophily, we cannot just wish away the tensions and disparities that exist between most white and black Americans. Cross-racial friendships provide a unique perspective that makes racism and racial separation both more visible and more vulnerable. Put into sociological context, the stories revealed in this book make evident the institutional barriers existing between most black and white Americans and offer insight into the means to dismantle them.

Letters Across the Divide

Letters Across the Divide
Author: David Anderson
Publisher: Baker Books
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2001-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0801063434

A black minister and a white businessman candidly discuss the obstacles, stereotypes, and sins that inhibit interracial reconciliation. Provocative and honest.

The Lines Between Us

The Lines Between Us
Author: Lawrence Lanahan
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1620973456

A masterful narrative—with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law—that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating—Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb—it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way. In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists—in the courts and in the streets—struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and communities: Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity? The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore's hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out. This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.

Crossing Racial Boundaries

Crossing Racial Boundaries
Author: Kenneth Myambo
Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2018-08-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1640039619

The book recounts my struggles and suffering under colonial oppression in Southern Africa (Rhodesia). It exposes a vicious cycle of racial hatred perpetrated against black people by white supremacists on my homeland and abroad. I was discriminated and deprived of individual rights because of the color of my skin. In education, I was segregated and confronted with conflicting irreconcilable cultural and social values from the West. I was denied equal justice and access to education with restricted freedoms to choose where to live, assemble, or who to marry and associate with. Through a series of unfortunate political events and circumstances, I took up arms and fought for freedom in my homeland. I was imprisoned and persecuted for sedition and was accused of political treason without due process. During this period, I found sanctuary in my American and Canadian teachers, who catapulted me to study science at American universities in California. Even then, I continued to suffer the horrors of racism implicitly imbedded in white America. Remarkably, I would also find love and support across racial lines, and I was blessed with two beautiful biracial children born in America. With the passage of time, I came to terms with my difficult past and began to heal from the indelible wounds of racism. With renewed hope for freedom in America, I harnessed the healing power of love and forgiveness across racial barriers. Sadly, my dreams were unpredictably shattered by the death of my twenty-seven-year-old daughter in an auto accident, leading me to question the meaning and purpose of life on this cosmic journey of existence.

Crossing the Hall

Crossing the Hall
Author: Lori Wojtowicz
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-06-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1546248862

Having graduated from a small, private, and predominantly white college in 1977, I thought I was highly educated. After all, I had graduated magna cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa had taught me the secret handshake. I began teaching, confident in my knowledge. For the first few years of my thirty-five-year career, I taught higher level English courses composed mostly of white students. Even though there was a great diversity in my high school, I never questioned why there were so very few black students in my class. Where were they? Then my schedule changed, and I crossed the hall to teach African American Literature. My new students were all black. I am all white. My true education began with those steps across a hall.

Roots of Division

Roots of Division
Author: Curtis Chesney
Publisher:
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-10-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9781735770413

Do you notice racial inequalities (in education, income, housing, incarcerations) and feel the related tensions (in politics, social media, church, friendships) and even know some of the history (supremacy, slavery, segregation) but struggle to grasp why race continues to divide America? Curtis Chesney wrestled with that question for years. As a skeptic, he wanted concrete answers. And as a White man, he needed to face disturbing truths, including slavery on his ancestors' farm--injustice committed by Chesney men. So he dug through the parallel histories of his family and his nation, uncovering roots of today's racial division across several centuries of inequity in America. Chesney's findings forever changed his perspective on our past, deepened his understanding of our present, and clarified his hopes for our future.

The Bridge Over the Racial Divide

The Bridge Over the Racial Divide
Author: William J. Wilson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 1999
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780520229297

Studies the rising inequality in American society and addresses the need for a progressive, multiracial political coalition to combat that inequality.

Merge Left

Merge Left
Author: Ian Haney López
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620975653

From the acclaimed author of Dog Whistle Politics, an essential road map to neutralizing the role of racism as a divide-and-conquer political weapon and to building a broad multiracial progressive future "Ian Haney López has broken the code on the racial politics of the last fifty years."—Bill Moyers In 2014, Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century—and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now the country is heading into what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever, with the Right gearing up to exploit racial fear-mongering to divide and distract, and the Left splintered over the next step forward. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach—race-forward or colorblind—build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country's direction? For the past two years, Haney López has been collaborating with a research team of union activists, racial justice leaders, communications specialists, and pollsters. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward. By merging the fights for racial justice and for shared economic prosperity, they were able to build greater enthusiasm for both goals—and for the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections. What does this mean? It means that neutralizing the Right's political strategy of racial division is possible, today. And that's the key to everything progressives want to achieve. A work of deep research, nuanced argument, and urgent insight, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America is an indispensable tool for the upcoming political season and in the larger fight to build racial justice and shared economic prosperity for all of us.

Don't Shoot

Don't Shoot
Author: David M. Kennedy
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2011-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1408828898

The remarkable story of David Kennedy's crusade to combat America's plague of gang- and drug-related violence - with methods that have been astonishingly effective across the country. 'If you want to read a book on urban gangs and find out why they exist and why they kill each other, read this ... this is a sociology book, but it's like immersing yourself in The Wire ... When Kennedy says something, you believe him' Scotsman Gang- and drug-related inner-city violence, with its attendant epidemic of incarceration, is the defining crime problem in our country. In some neighborhoods in America, one out of every two hundred young black men is shot to death every year, and few initiatives of government and law enforcement have made much difference. But when David Kennedy, a self-taught and then-unknown criminologist, engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the mid-1990s, he pointed the way toward what few had imagined: a solution. Don't Shoot tells the story of Kennedy's long journey. Riding with beat cops, hanging with gang members, and stoop-sitting with grandmothers, Kennedy found that all parties misunderstood each other, caught in a spiral of racialized anger and distrust. He envisioned an approach in which everyone-gang members, cops, and community members-comes together in what is essentially a huge intervention. Offenders are told that the violence must stop, that even the cops want them to stay alive and out of prison, and that even their families support swift law enforcement if the violence continues. In city after city, the same miracle has followed: violence plummets, drug markets dry up, and the relationship between the police and the community is reset. This is a landmark book, chronicling a paradigm shift in how we address one of America's most shameful social problems. A riveting, page-turning read, it combines the street vérité of The Wire, the social science of Gang Leader for a Day, and the moral urgency and personal journey of Fist Stick Knife Gun. But unlike anybody else, Kennedy shows that there could be an end in sight.