Race and Morality - How Good Intentions Undermine Social Justice and Perpetuate Inequality (Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice)

Rating:
Summary: A Tired Argument--Retread
Review: Race and Morality continues an argument first rolled out during slavery, recast during Jim Crow, and reinvigorated to combat the Civil Rights movement. The argument? African-Americans inhabit the social and economic place they do in American society largely by their own fault. Fein,in the tradition of Shockley, Murray and D'Souza, attibutes much that ails the African-American community to the recalcitrance of the Black underclass in their refusal to live according to middle-class standards. My questions are why is a whole people judged by the most disadvantaged in their midst? And, why does the behavior of some people within a community relieve the larger society of its responsibility to creating a just and equitable nation? Fein does not answer these question, but apologists for this old argument rarely do. It is easier to absolve oneself, and one's privilege, than to be confused by annoying facts about persistent institutional bias and it effects on the prospects of many within our society.