Winning the race : beyond the crisis in Black America / John McWhorter.

Bibliogr.

[Pt. 1]: Tracing it. The birth of the inner city : the conventional wisdom ; The birth of the inner city, part one : Indianapolis ; The birth of the inner city, part two : the saga ; Why are you talking about blacks on welfare? -- [Pt. 2]: Facing it. The meme of therapeutic alienation : defined by deviance ; What about black middle-class rage? ; What about the view from the ivory tower? -- [Pt. 3]: Erasing it. Therapeutic alienation meets hitting the books : "acting white" and Affirmative Action revisited ; The "hip-hop revolution" : therapeutic alienation on a rhythm track ; Therapeutic alienation as a plan of action? : New black leadership for New Negroes.

Four decades after the great victories of the Civil Rights Movement secured equal rights for African-Americans, black America is in crisis. Indeed, by most measurable standards, conditions for many blacks have grown worse since 1965: desperate poverty, incarceration rates, teenage pregnancy and out-of- wedlock births, and educational failures. For years, pundits have blamed these problems on forces outside the black community. But now, in a broad-ranging re-envisioning of the post-Civil Rights black American experience, author McWhorter argues that black America's current problems began with an unintended byproduct of the Civil Rights revolution, a crippling mindset of "therapeutic alienation." This wary stance toward mainstream American culture, although it is a legacy of racism in the past, continues to hold blacks back, and McWhorter traces the poisonous effects of this defeatist attitude. McWhorter puts forth a new vision of black leadership, arguing that both blacks and whites must abolish the culture of victimhood.--From publisher description.