From Publishers Weekly
Robinson, a freelance writer, here offers a derivative synthesis of black dissenting views on racial issues. After quoting such writers as Glenn Loury and Shelby Steele on the dangers of claiming victimization, he draws on William Julius Wilson's analysis that deindustrialization helped create the ghetto underclass. Robinson also reprises Wilson's argument that entitlement programs should benefit all the poor, not just blacks. He suggests that blacks should emulate the unity of Latinos and Asians to rise up the economic ladder, and he endorses workfare proposals, noting that in his youth, blacks disdained those on the dole. More interestingly, he observes that the push for all-black male schools signifies black middle-class distrust of integration, and he suggests that whites can't grasp the notion of institutional racism. His main recommendations: blacks must build institutions to spur black social and economic development, and blacks must be less adversarial in dealing with white America. A probing look at hitherto intractable problems.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Good things come in threes once again: witness the third May book expressing the black conservative perspective. But while Foster's What's Right for America is a grassroots manifesto and Loury's One by One from the Inside Out is the deliberations of a prominent intellectual, Robinson's book is a work of synthesis. In nine chapters, he takes up as many topics, sketching their history and surveying black conservative opinion about them. The topics treated include blacks' racial attitudes, the differential impacts of race and class on blacks' social status, affirmative action, crime, relations with other ethnic minorities, welfare, integration, black empowerment, and finally Robinson's own idea, racial healing, which consists in realizing "that all things in life are not determined by race" and in "letting go of race as a defining concept." Although Robinson insists that blacks must better themselves by themselves, he is no hard-hearted rugged individualist, and his book is no common conservative credo. Indeed, compassionate and lucid (despite a few rough spots), it's a fine primer on black conservatism. Ray Olson
