The Great Wells Of Democracy - Hardcover

Marable, Manning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465043933 ISBN 13: 9780465043934

Publisher: Civitas Books, 2002

Synopsis

In his boldest and most accessible book to date, Manning Marable lays out a new way to think about the past and the future of race in America. Building upon a unique framework for understanding black history from slavery to Jim Crow to the modern urban ghetto, Marable charts a new course for racial progress. He looks beyond the impasse of liberal strategies such as affirmative action and proposes a new kind of inclusive democracy.Exploding traditional lines of left and right, Marable stakes out such controversial and seemingly incompatible positions as the re-enfranchisement of felons, state support for faith-based institutions, reparations for slavery that systematically inject capital into the black community, and a reconfiguration of racial identities that accounts for the increasingly multi-racial nature of our society. He exhorts us to construct a new political language and practical public policies to bridge the racial divide--so that we do no less than reinvent the democratic project called America.Combining the breadth of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow with the urgency of Cornel West's Race Matters, Manning Marable offers the most challenging and important book on the politics of race to appear since the heyday of the civil rights movement.

About this title

About the Author

Manning Marable is Professor of History, Political Science and Public Policy, at Columbia University, where he also serves as the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

From Booklist

Marable penetrates the veneer of democracy and exposes the essential role that race and racism play in America's formation. He asserts that without "black" there could be no "white" America, since blacks provide the negative unifying force of white America. Marable compares the integrationist reformers to the more nationalist approach of combating racism, but he also explores the class-based schisms where some blacks have fallen totally out of the formal labor market. Marable's cultural wealth-health analysis exposes disparities between whites and blacks that are reflective of historical factors. The current climate of political leaning toward the Right, including initiatives undertaken during the Clinton administration, is reflected in the race relations and the prison-industrial complex that neglects training and education and increases the probability that offenders will continue lives of crime. Marable advocates community-based organizations that are more issue-centered rather than leadership-centered and more capable of addressing many of the class-based interest conflicts as well as the race-based, state-based conflicts between integrationist and nationalist approaches. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Civitas Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0465043933
• ISBN 13: 9780465043934
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384