Urban Injustice - How Ghettos Happen

Decaying values. Sexually transmitted diseases.

Fatherless homes. Rampant drug use.

These aren't just problems for today's inner cities.

It's the plight of all America.

Much has been said about Bill Cosby's incendiary remarks about urban black culture and its "dirty laundry." But in this provocative book, Star Parker, one of today's most controversial commentators, goes even further, proving that urban plight simply reveals a decay that is gnawing its way throughout American society as a whole.

The sexual chaos, values disorientation, and social turmoil we see in our inner cities, Parker argues, is just a magnified reflection of the moral collapse happening all over America: in our schools, our churches, our homes. And this slide toward moral decrepitude is all due to a flagrant dismissal of and assault on America's tried-and-true values.

With startling statistics and disturbing stories about the increasing secularization and criminalization of the middle class, Parker holds a cracked mirror up to suburbia. Taking on tough subjects such as abortion, drug abuse, sexual politics, and religion, she offers a rousing exploration of the raging cultural war-taking you on a wild, eye-opening tour through the White Ghetto.

Star Parker is the founder and president of CURE, the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education, a nonprofit organization that provides national dialogue on issues of race and poverty in the media, inner city neighborhoods, and public policy. Star is a regular commentator on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the BBC, which reaches 300 million homes worldwide. Her articles and quotes have also appeared in major publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and is currently a weekly syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. Star is the author of Pimps, Whores, and Welfare Brats and Uncle Sam's Plantation.

Record unemployment and rampant corporate avarice, empty houses but homeless families, dwindling opportunities in an increasingly paralyzed nationthese are the realities of 21st-century America, land of the free and home of the new middle class poor. Award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, one of the nations leading democratic intellectuals, co-hosts of Public Radios Smiley & West, now take on the P wordpoverty.

The Rich and the Rest of Us is the next step in the journey that began with The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience. Smiley and Wests 18-city bus tour gave voice to the plight of impoverished Americans of all races, colors, and creeds. With 150 million Americans persistently poor or near poor, the highest numbers in over five decades, Smiley and West argue that now is the time to confront the underlying conditions of systemic poverty in America before its too late.

By placing the eradication of poverty in the context of the nations greatest moments of social transformation such as the abolition of slavery, womans suffrage, and the labor and civil rights movementsending poverty is sure to emerge as Americas 21st century civil rights struggle.

As the middle class disappears and the safety net is shredded, Smiley and West, building on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., ask us to confront our fear and complacency with 12 poverty changing ideas. They challenge us to re-examine our assumptions about poverty in Americawhat it really is and how to eliminate it now.

Freed from their ghettos, Jews ushered in a second renaissance. Within a century Marx, Freud, and Einstein created revolutions in politics, human science, and physics that continue to shape our world. Proust, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Kafka redefined artistic expression.