Customer Reviews

White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The facts and statistics that Star Parker point out in her book are horrifying. The decline in morals coupled with the continuing failure of government programs has resulted in the decay of life in the inner-city. Although this decay of inner-city life is right in America's face, the same decay is happening in suburban Middle America--it is just hidden under wealth and privilege.

The loss of values and morals mixed with the left's obsession at "adopting" the lives of inner-city Americans is a direct cause of misery for these very Americans. Star Parker does a great job at showing this.

Because I am supportive of gay rights and same sex marriage, I found some of the book's rhetoric aimed at homosexuals a bit harsh. HOWEVER, whether or not you are supportive of same sex marriage, it's undeniable that some of the tactics used by proponents of gay rights are dishonest and manipulative. But this same dishonesty is practiced by liberals, democrats, republicans, libertarians, atheists and so-called civil rights leaders and Star Parker does a great job at exposing them all.

This book will probably shock even the not so average person...it is "enlightening," horrifying, educational and definately a much needed a wakeup call. Many people will not want to to read or agree with such disturbing information and continue to live in denial as to what is happening in our communities, schools and government; hense the continual decline of our moral code in America. There is an agenda and the target is us. In the course of being so busy living our lives and becoming complacent; many of us are just unaware of what is happening around us and the agendas that are being slid under our feet without our knowledge or awarness. If you have a concern for the future welfare of our society, your children and embrace even a moderate to conservative moral code, this is a must read. Thanks Star! I could not put it down and I did not know what I didn't know.

I grew up conservative, but going to college, watching lots of TV and working with teens, I slowly began to wonder if "liberals" could be right in some areas. Isn't helping the poor a good thing, and don't we want to be free to make choices?

Star Parker clearly and boldly shatered the lies that I had begun to believe and has helped me to be more sure than ever of the biblical principles of hard work and Biblical morality. These fondations are the only way for "middle America" to help the poor and at the same time stop our own slide toward imorality and socialism!

Star Parker gets a 5 star for this book. In our pursuit of happiness we have lost our moral base. Good book on what is wrong with this generation and how we got here.

Well written (though a few typos here and there), the value of this book is more as a collection of representative conservative positions on the issues and problems (especially social issues) facing America today than its stated objective of giving the reader insight into the relationships/distinctions between white and black America. If I wanted to give a single book to a young person to educate and persuade him/her about American conservative thought in general, this would be that book. I highly recommend it for that purpose. And for the more mature conservative reader, it serves to encapsulate the contemporary arguments on the issues of today in America for updated review and reference. But it departs from its apparent objective of giving whites insight into black America, and vice-versa, in that conservative positions are given broad-cloth as applying to America as a whole. Suburbia is not a "white ghetto" in any sense that a black inner-city neighborhood has long been characterized by that word, even though America, including white America, faces many social problems. I suspect that the title may be the creation of the publisher for sensationalism to increase sales. Nevertheless, a good conservative primer, but perhaps too pedestrian for an advanced conservative reader.

Regardless of my own personal beliefs, this book is just plain badly written. Parker jumps from one topic to the next in an episodic frenzy, each section marked by tabloid-style headlines that connote glib frivolity. Parker spends most of the 200+ pages of this book generalizing about "Middle America" in long spiels of inert prose, and her sentences are constructed the way young children speak. And no sooner does she raise an interesting point than she moves on to the next point without ever laying down any kind of argument.

I counted exactly eight critical thoughts in this book. Everything else she says is a broad statement with just the bare minimum of evidence cited in support (which she interprets rather unconvincingly a lot of the time). If you are an open-minded individual earnestly seeking out an argument for integrating Liberty, essential Christianity, and self-governance, you will not find it in Parker's voice.

This is very sad, because I liked a lot of Parker's ideas. Her main idea is that without religion we cannot have morals, and that without morals we cannot sustain liberty. But she never comes through with an argument; she just decrees over and over again that we as a country have lost our moral base and that that is how we are losing liberty in this country. I want to agree with her, but she never gives me a reason why I should.

The closest she comes to making her case is with the problems of the black community and her various reasons why the Democratic party has exacerbated their situation with social programs. I would also agree with her that such programs are a means toward Socialism.

But then she gets it all wrong (or at least she never convinces me--indeed, doesn't even *appear* to argue her case) that homosexuals are this great downfall of America and are conspiring to turn children in public schools gay (my response to that would be that if you are so convinced, then vote with your feet and send your children to private school). She also acts like blacks cannot be gay, or that gays cannot be black, and asserts that there is no correlation in the civil rights of gays because, as she implies, homosexuality is a choice. That may or may not be true, but she never gives an argument for it; it's just not immediately clear to me what the incentive would be for a general segment of the population to *choose* to be gay. She also has nothing to say about hispanics, the largest growing segment of our population and facing many of the same problems blacks are facing today. For that matter, how can she call "Middle America" the white ghetto? A ghetto is a concentrated zone occupied by a minority group who live there especially because of social, economic, or legal pressures. Her use of "ghetto" is a fallacy. Depending on her mood, Middle America can be the moral majority, or the atheist majority, or the white majority, or the bourgeois liberal majority. Who knows? She doesn't give any explanation.

These are just some of the many examples of how she doesn't make sense.

I was hoping for restrained, convincing, critical thought. Parker delivers only a humorless cliche. The most intelligent thing she says in this book is, "It makes one wonder if the sacred and secular can share the same country anymore" (P.218). Whatever the answers to that query, Parker has contributed very litte to such a dialogue.

Surely, the liberal academy is not the only place to learn sustained, critical analysis.

The more I read this book, the more LIBERAL I became. She uses extremes to get her points across and often bashes issues without any real reasoning besides "it's against morals" . This book is more of a crazy author's rant than a book that someone can learn from. She puts no reason or fact behind why she believes the way she believes or why the conservative way is the way to go. She even seems racist and is just too old fashion.

Yeah it is kind of all over the place, but her points are none the less excellent.

This is a book with some important ideas, but it is so badly done that I fear it will
not be effective at changing behaviors.

The subtitle is "How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay." Parker claims the
problems of the ghetto, broken families, drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, bad
schools, crime, you name it, are increasing in "middle America" and we can expect the
slide to continue unless we repent and change out ways. She supports her claim with various
statistics. The first problem is "claim". There are no specific sources in the text, but
usually the name of the source of the data. There is a 17 entry bibliography, with no
cross references to the text, but all are on the web, so some might be still available.
There is also no index. The table of contents is fairly detailed, but many of the titles
will not help you find what you are looking for.

I did not try to check any of the claims; some, perhaps most, seemed right but some seemed
wrong. There were enough other mistakes in the book to make me suspect the statistics.
Some mistakes seemed like sloppy word processing, missing words or changing the wording but
not completely eliminating the old wording. Others seemed more serious, mis-attributing a
quote, or getting it wrong. In some cases she got the facts of government wrong. Judges do
not seek search warrants, they authorize them.

Here is more of her analysis. The cause of many of the problems is a victim attitude, a
lack of individual responsibility. That is caused by government and other handouts, such as
admission to schools too tough to succeed in. Along the way she attacks homosexuality,
abortion, liberals, homosexuality, abortion, the Kelo decision, the ACLU, homosexuality,
evolution, abortion, voters (for allowing all this), and homosexuality and abortion. The
cure is religion, preferably Christianity. Late in the book, the possibility of a society
without the problems she deplores, and with a strong sense of individual responsibility,
is dismissed as impossible without religion. The solution is for Christians to
stand up for their real beliefs and not treat tolerance as the greatest good and
judgment as the worst evil.

Other reviewers have noted that the book seems rambling and disjointed. I suspect that some
of the material was originally intended for an opinion column.

There are lots of shades of gray in the world, but there is still black and white. I fear
the good in this book will be ignored because of the weaknesses. I expect that much of the
criticism will be of the form, "How dare a black person think for herself and even be a
conservative."

There is a reason a Brazilian call girl named 'Pacheco' is the 'hero' of middle class women in that country. There is a reason that 10% of all women attending college today from middle class backgrounds will experiment with being a stripper to 'pay for college'. It used to be that those forced into prostitution and stripping and the porn industry were the poor, now it is the daughters of the middle class, those who have the most opportunity choose to throw their lives away in search of 'sexual experimentation'. Liberal America and equality for women has merely created an entire class of women who have no dreams, no interest in partaking in the equality they were granted at birth, there only interest will be anal sex and S&M. The Middle class immoraltiy is tragic and sad, it doesnt beget more middle class people but rather the classic WASP rot of the 1970s.

80% of middle class born people, partitucular women, will end up poor, durg abusing, without families, sort of like Europeans. Luckily the engine of America has always been its poor and its immigrants.

Seth J. Frantzman