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The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Race
The Trouble With Friendship Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Race Author:Benjamin DeMott In this lively book, well-known social critic Benjamin DeMott shows how black and white neoconservatism, the rise of the black middle class, and the imagery and rhetoric of racial amity promulgated by contemporary media are coalescing into a whole new orthodoxy -- one that obscures continuing racial inequity and threatens to halt the further pro... more »gress of African Americans.
Examining a range of contemporary cultural evidence, the author lays bare the thrust and assumptions of these new attitudes, which maintain that racial problems can be solved simply by blacks and whites working together, one on one, to reconcile differences. He argues that such an appealing perspective is dangerous because it is so blatantly a historical, turns a blind eye to entrenched poverty, and ignores the racism still alive in the land. It distorts the public debate and absolves the body politic from the hard work that the civil rights movement began and that remains unfinished.
Setting the discussion squarely in the turbulent currents of recent history and giving aspects of this new thought the validity they are due, DeMott refocuses the debate on race in America to an agenda that is based on reality and that will serve all.« less