Summary: A history of race and politics since the civil rights era.
I am a big fan of Great Courses-styled audiobooks. They often are helpful in summarizing complex issues, but one of the weaknesses, which is present here, is that they can be oriented more toward summary than laying out detailed evidence for those new to a subject. My main complaint about the course/audiobook is that it is too short.
The negative reviews on Audible are overwhelmingly calling this book “woke” or “leftist propaganda.” Only one of the negative reviews had any specifics about what they thought was wrong, which was a misunderstanding of Candis Smith’s point. Many negative reviews complained that it was only talking to people who already agreed with her, and I am unsure how to evaluate this point; in some sense, the complaint is valid. If the course were designed primarily to convince people who deny that racism continues to play a role in politics, it would be a very different course. The course focuses on an overview of how race and politics have shifted since the end of the civil rights era, not on convincing white people of the changes.
The course opens with a discussion of the Kerner Commission. I am going to quote from Wikipedia about the report, but these points were in the course:
The report’s best-known passage warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report was a strong indictment of white America: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”[11]
Its results suggested that one main cause of urban violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for black rioting and rebellion.
The Kerner Commission report was released in February 1968 and sold over 2 million copies. It was widely read. But the main focus of the report’s conclusions was largely ignored. The Kerner Commission, King’s assassination, and the 1968 Civil Rights Act are largely seen as the end of the main civil rights era and a shift to the post-civil rights era. The civil rights era was predominantly focused on changing the laws around segregation. Once those laws were changed, many thought cultural changes would naturally result. But as Smith points out, the legal changes were a prerequisite but did not change the systemic realities.
At one point, Candis Smith directly says that her work in the course is not rooted in Critical Race Theory. But that is exactly what many will suggest her work is rooted in. Part of the course is looking back at the pre-1968 rhetoric to see that the civil rights era was also calling for systemic change and that there was not a pre-1968 understanding of racism as solely interpersonal racial animus and a post-1968 understanding of racism as solely systemic oppression. But that both before and after 1968, both understandings are linked. Critical Race Theory was developed in the late 1980s legal theory. Smith is a political scientist and is also looking at systems, but that systemic approach to understanding racism arose long before 1968 or Critical Race Theory.
One of the focuses of the course is that Republicans and Democrats have enforced systemic racial oppression. The GOP may be more overt in vocally calling for fewer non-white immigrants or using racial dog whistles to encourage fear among white voters, but the Democratic political leadership also has used neoliberal and technocratic policy initiatives in ways that also resulted in systemic racial impact. Smith walks through education, criminal justice, housing, voting, and other areas where legal changes were made to stop overt segregation, but policies and systems were not changed to deal with the historical disparities. The result is that over and over, the post-1968 color-blind policies, which started with white advantage, continued in ways that either snowballed or at least did not work to reduce disparity.
One commonly understood example is that housing was allowed to be legally segregated before 1968, and many white families were given low-interest loans through the GI Bill or other housing initiatives that Black and other minority households were not given in post-1968. So Black and other minority families both did not get pre-68 assistance. Housing prices had increased, and segregated communities did not change their racial makeup quickly. Today homes in predominately white communities are more highly valued than very similar homes in predominately non-white communities. And even homes that non-white families own are appraised at lower values than homes owned by white families.
In education, schooling is largely residentially oriented and funded. White communities’ home values are higher, meaning white schools are funded more than non-white schools. This impacts the educational results of non-white students, who both have less wealth and less family educational background than white students due to historical discrimination, and these factors result in minority students being less prepared for college, needing to take more loans to pay for college, and due to racial discrimination in hiring and pay, mean that those who do graduate have a lower return on investment of a college degree than their white counterparts.
Again, there is a significant amount of data that could be linked, and the audiobook mentions data to support these types of conclusions, but many who are primed to distrust this type of data, will not accept the book’s conclusions because they will not trust the presentation. That does not mean the course is bad; I recommend it. But it will likely not change very many minds, not because of the content, but because prior background before starting the course will have to be overcome for some in ways others will not need.
The History of Race and Politics in the US Since 1968 by Candis Watts Smith (Great Courses) Purchase Links: Audible.com Audiobook