Customer Reviews

The Color of Our Future : Our Multiracial Future

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The musical "South Pacific" has a line, that while out of context, is good for this book. "Who can explain it, who can tell you why. Fools give you reasons, wise men never try."

While interracial activities are going on the results is anyone's guess. Reading historical documents of the late 19th and early 20th century, Irish,Germans and Italians were not considered part of the majority culture. Now they are.

I expect there will be new realities but considering the higher rate of mixed white-hispanic couples than black-white marriages, etc the result may be different than the author expects.

I really wanted to like this book. Ms. Chideya is very likable and connects to many of the kids in her book. The problem is she dismisses people who don't share her view points out of hand. My biggest problem with her book is that she is adamant that Affirmative Action is the only possible solution to racism, but she fails to provide any proof and dismisses those who think otherwise as racist. With one notes exception she failed to discuss schools in which white students were the minority. (She did discuss the singular white student in an Oakland school, but thats not really multi-racial because one is not a group).

If i could speak with Ms. Chideya, I would suggest that for her next book she studies the relative successes and failures of her multi-ethnic gradutating class and study the benefits of affirmative action on that group. I think that she, and most affirmative action pundits, would be suprised to find out how much more class effects sucess than any factor. I suspect that there will be more commonalities in the demographics of her high-school class than differences because white, black or asian they all come from the same lower-middle class background.

While the ideas have some merit, nothing is really fresh and interesting. The biggist problem is that the writing is so bland and unfocused that the book could not maintain my interest. My impression is that the author needed more time to develop this. As there are many better alternative books available, I simply cannot recommend this.

Farai chideya grapples unsuccesfully about racism in her latest book. She claims that racism is not a black and white issue, however throughout the book she repeatedly comes back to sole black and white issues. She has her concepts right- education and experiencing racism can help rid society of this maggot that is racism- however she does not illustrate these theories in the stories she has gathered from traveling cross country. She does not go in enough depth for any of the mini-biographies from the people she interviews to have any impact. She also writes that teenagers are the future of racism, and that it is up to us to determine what role racism will play in the next century, however she does not offer any realistic ideas and suggestions on how to go about educating people. while the concept of this book is a positive one, the resulting take on the book is negative. The color of our future leaves you with an unpleasant aftertaste in your mind, people are better off reading another UN-BIASED book to educate themselves about racism.

There are so many books that deal with race these days from a purely clinical perspective. And Chideya certainly does her research. The thesis of her book is that in 50 years--according to the best numbers from the U.S. Census--there will be more non-white Americans than whites. That's going to totally flip the script on race relations.

But where she really shines is bringing out the stories of real people. I was totally brought to tears by the story of LaShunda Prescott, a woman who struggled through U.C. Berkeley while she had to help raise the child of her crack-addicted sister. She also shows a suprising amount of understanding for the economic disenfranchisement of white supremacists, though! (You have to this book to understand her point... how these folks take their beefs with America and instead of blaming big corporations and the government blame black folks and immigrants instead.)

This reporter is courageous. Anybody who can hang with Klansmen and gang bangers in order to get the story is really on point.

It's refreshing to see a book like this written by a younger African-American woman, instead of a much-older person far removed from what s/he might be writing about. Ms. Chideya isn't terribly too much older than the young people she interviewed for this book, and coupled with the fact that she's a person of color as well, it must have been doubtless easier for her to have been perceived as "one of them" instead of some stranger who had no clue about their everyday realities. The book's purpose is to stand notions of race on their head, to show, through the eyes of young people, what it's really like to be a member of a certain race, or to be multiracial, and what it's like to live in a community that's very multicultural or self-segregating. It's projected that by the year 2050, white people in America will be a minority, and those of other races (including those of mixed-race heritage) will be in the majority. That scares a lot of people who have lived their entire lives being part of the status quo, confident that their own kind always has been and always will be in the majority. But outside of lily-white insulated communities, the reality is that there's far more interracial mixing and interracial marriages than there ever have been in the past, and this development isn't going to change anytime soon. And as Ms. Chideya points out, the worst racial crisis isn't happening in neighborhoods or cities, but in people's minds. Once people drop the ridiculous notions that America is a "white society" and that race is strictly a black and white issue, they can move forward into the future with open minds and hearts.

Among the topics Ms. Chideya covers are the future of mixed-race identity, schools where whites are the minority for once (in Los Angeles, New York City, and Johannesburg), the heartbreaking defeat of affirmative action, MTV as a cultural common denominator, Native Americans (too often completely ignored in discussions of race), the state of race in America right now, Mexican-American identity, "perfect" diversity in an imperfect world, and the sad story of Bubba and Jaime Johnson, whose newborn daughter Whitney was ordered by an all-white Baptist church to be removed from their cemetery because she was biracial, a story that happened in 1996, a time when people were supposed to be long since past the institutionalised racism of the past. The book ends with a discussion of some possible solutions to these tough complex issues, and a list of ten ways to deal with diversity so we can move towards a more perfect union. Among these suggestions are to demand better media coverage of race, know the facts about America's diversity (it's shocking how surveys show that a lot of Americans are very ignorant about the racial makeup of their own country, and how the other half really lives), follow others' lead to define their own race and community (for example, some Native Americans prefer the old term "Indian," some like the term "First Nations People," and still others like to be known by their tribal names, such as Navajo, Apache, Dakota, or Blackfoot), reward programs making diversity part of learning and work, and foster coalitions between whites and nonwhites. If people come to terms with the multi-faceted reality of race in America today, instead of continuing to hold by severely outdated and just plain inaccurate paradigms, the countdown to a majority-minority will be a breeze, with fear replaced by knowledge.

Youthful exuberance is no substitute for sound analysis and good writing, both of which are blatantly absent from yet another superficial sociological treatise from this legend-in-her-own-mind media "star".

I saw the author during a book signing on television. I saw a young, intelligent, articulate lady who had some very interesting ideas about American culture. I picked up the book to learn more about her and her ideas. Unfortunately, though there is a lot of meat in this book, simply put, I was bored...bored...bored. This is not a subject I take lightly and believe me, I wanted to like this book because I like the author. I have to agree with a lot of the reviewers here. There is a lot of data and no real point. A lousy effort and there are few people more disappointed than me.

Her writing was quite lacking in the story-telling department. The book was quite like reading USA TODAY for 200+ pages. Ms. Chideya's conclusions were grounded in generalities and lacked the development necessary for the reader to find her writing convincing. She never addressed obvious arguements to her ideology and had problems developing examples for her own beliefs (mentioned that Tiger Woods is multiracial on several separate occasions within the first eighty pages). Kept reading on in hope that some great epiphany would come forth from the high-horse that Ms. Chideya so enjoys riding on, but no, her ten suggestions in the final chapter include such heart-stoppers as "Foster Coalitions Between Whites and Nonwhites" and "Don't Stop Dialogue Before It Starts."

I wish this book were required reading in high schools. It is a very insightful look at racial issues in this country, and is written with a nice blend of factual and anecdotal information. I would highly recommend this book to everyone.