Urban Racial State

Noel A. Cazenave is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of the book Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs and co-author of Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor.

In this pathbreaking study, Noel Cazenave introduces a revelatory concept—the urban racial state—which brings to light the pivotal role that the state plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities. Instead of devising policies to address such fundamental problems as ghettoization, poverty, and labor market discrimination, mayors and heads of governmental agencies see their function as one of managing race relations, which they do by appeasing protest groups with minor reforms or co-opting their leaders. The end result is pacification rather than social justice and, tragically, maintenance of the racial status quo.

• List of IllustrationsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Urban Racial State: An OverviewChapter 1: Understanding the Urban Racial StateChapter 2: Programming Race Relations through Community ActionChapter 3: The Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and Conflict over the Use of Community Action to Support African American InsurgencyChapter 4.:Maximum Feasible Participation Meets Black Power and the White Backlash: The Struggle over Community Action in SyracuseChapter 5.:Black Rebellion, White Repression, and the Transformation of Community Progress, Inc. and Urban Politics in New HavenChapter 6: Recent Examples of the Urban Racial StateConclusion: Summaries of Findings, Lessons Learned for Understanding Today's Urban Racial State, and What We Still Need to KnowNotesIndexAbout the Author