Review of The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Hardcover)

Make no mistake about it.The snide comment by Washington Post reviewer Michael Hout above indicates a fundamental inability to comprehend what Shapiro is saying.Why would Hout choose to write this in his review?:

"Families and generations are at the core of Shapiro's analysis. So I was surprised that he did not directly address how marriage and family structure fit into the cycles of accumulation, inheritance and investment. Married couples accumulate more wealth than single parents do, according to other researchers. That suggests to me that African-American family issues must play a role in the wealth gap."

Hout obviously is attempting to make a point about the high rate of single parent families within Black America, and is implying that if only Black women chose to marry the fathers of their babies that they would not suffer many of the consequences Shapiro lays out in his book.There is but one problem:Shapiro addresses this lame-ass "culture of poverty" nonsense repeatedly in his book, and convincingly shows that even if Black marriage rates were equal to white rates that African-Americans would STILL have less wealth, educational opportunities, and transformative assets.Moreover, Shapiro does a good job of pointing out the motivations behind WHY whites like Mr. Houst consistenly resort to the same trite culturalist arguments of Black pathology when confronted with the troubling facts:they can't bring themselves to admit that their white privilege was constructed and is maintained at the expense of people of color, especially Blacks, because it shatters their deep-seated need to believe that they "earned" everything that they have instead of having been bequeathed it as a result of generations of racial prejudice and institutional racism.

Perhaps the sublety of Mr. Shapiro's argument was a tad too much for Mr. Houst and his editors at the Washington Post.

If anything, Shapiro's argument can be argued from a left perspective to be an insufficient "liberal" formulation that refuses to engage and critique the structural inequalities of capitalism head-on, substituting a Ford Foundation-esque "asset accumulation" prescription for maladies that require far more radical measures.As authors such as Manning Marable have noted for years, much of American capitalism was structurally DESIGNED to UNDERDEVELOP Black America and continues to operate in this fashion.Thus arguing that Blacks simply need "more" wealth in order to achieve racial parity overlooks many sociological and anthropological insights about race developed over the past thirty years, as well as many Marxian insights about race that have been floating around for years as well.

Still, even as a half-measure, this is a highly enlightening and challenging read.It is sure to make many white families uncomfortable because they will probably see themselves in much of what Shapiro writes.Which is the point.



Click Here to see more reviews about: The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Hardcover)