{"id":11219,"date":"2011-01-03T02:34:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-03T02:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11219"},"modified":"2011-01-03T02:36:56","modified_gmt":"2011-01-03T02:36:56","slug":"the-great-unraveling-book-review-of-%e2%80%9cdisintegration-the-splintering-of-black-america%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11219","title":{"rendered":"The Great Unraveling [Book Review of \u201cDisintegration: The Splintering of Black America\u201d]"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Great Unraveling [Book Review of \u201cDisintegration: The Splintering of Black America\u201d]<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2010-12-29<\/p>\n

Raymond Arsenault<\/strong><\/a>, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London<\/em>
\nand John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida<\/em><\/p>\n

Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America<\/em><\/a> (New York: Doubleday, 2010).<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police, \u201cYou don\u2019t know who you\u2019re messing with,\u201d he was speaking truth to power, albeit in a manner more akin to arrogance than erudition. The big shock here, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson<\/a>, is not that a Harvard professor misused the subjective case (\u201cwho\u201d for \u201cwhom\u201d) and inelegantly ended a sentence with a preposition; it is, rather, that Gates belongs to an elite enclave beyond the sergeant\u2019s experience or imagination. Gates\u2019s life as an academic superstar places him among a select group of black Americans aptly labeled \u201cTranscendent\u201d by Robinson. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Beyonc\u00e9, Kobe Bryant, Vernon Jordan and Richard Parsons, the retired chief executive of Time Warner…<\/p>\n

…These Transcendent men and women, Robinson tells us at the outset, live and work in a privileged world of wealth and power. Despite the color of their skin, they do not belong to the black community.<\/p>\n

Fair enough, but Robinson does not stop there. Over the next 200 pages, he demonstrates rather convincingly that no<\/em> one belongs to the black community anymore…<\/p>\n

…During the past four decades, Robinson persuasively argues, black America has splintered into four subgroups: the Transcendent elite; the Mainstream middle class, which now accounts for a majority of black Americans; an Emergent community made up of mixed-race families and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean;<\/strong> and the Abandoned, a large and growing underclass concentrated in the inner cities and depressed pockets of the rural South…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Great Unraveling [Book Review of \u201cDisintegration: The Splintering of Black America\u201d] The New York Times 2010-12-29 Raymond Arsenault, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010). When Henry Louis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,6,20],"tags":[5013,5012,2327],"class_list":["post-11219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-new-media","category-usa","tag-eugene-robinson","tag-raymond-arsenault","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}