Race Politics And Economic Development

In April 1992, the world witnessed a renewal in South Central Los Angeles of the urban violence that exploded over a quarter of a century earlier. As in 1965, the spark that ignited the firestorm was Black rage over police brutality. But in both eras the tinder was prepared by decades of social neglect and political disenfranchisement that have left the predominantly non-white urban poor trapped and virtually without hope. Race, Politics, and Economic Development strips away the veneer of mass-media images to examine the underlying causes of Black urban poverty and to recommend means to escape the seemingly endless cycle of retributive violence that it spawns. The book brings together Black activists and scholars, including two former mayors of American cities, to analyse the theoretical and practical problems currently facing the Black community in the United States. The essays collected here are dominated by three key themes: that political influence, power, and wealth are major factors in determining social welfare policies directed at Blacks, the poor and the working class; that both liberal and conservative policies over the last fifty years are no longer effective in alleviating a growing human service crisis among Blacks; and that the political mobilization of impoverished sectors of the Black community is absolutely critical in resolving the problem of poverty in urban America. Drawing on new work in the social sciences, political theory, and economics, and also on the contributors' activist experiences, these essays represent a pathbreaking new agenda for the participation of grassroots Black leaders in developing and implementing urban policy. Contributors: Jeremiah Cotton, Julianne Malveaux, Mack H. Jones, Charles P. Henry, Walter Stafford, William Fletcher Jr., Eugene Newport, Sheila Ards, Jacqueline Pope, Keith Jennings, Lloyd Hogan, Richard Hatcher.

As U.S. cities compete for economic resources, many city leaders adopt business-friendly policies, which boost opportunities for big businesses and institutions in their area. This progrowth strategy proposes to generate jobs for residents and higher tax revenues for local government. As a result, according to the logic of progrowth, economic benefits will trickle down to improve the living conditions in working-class and impoverished neighborhoods. In spite of this strategy, poverty rates among urban Latinos and Blacks is staggering, even in cities that have pursued neoliberal policies. These progrowth strategies seem to have had little or no impact on resolving problems like poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and the alienation of youth from communities of color. Community development has been and continues to be a response to these kinds of problems. But local political struggles can determine the direction of community development towards neighborhood empowerment and representation of neighborhood interests, versus, community development on behalf of progrowth policies. This issue of the ANNALS examines the interplay between progrowth politics, community development, and race. It goes well beyond a broad brushstroke of the topic and examines several specific cities and how they have implemented these strategies - and their impact on impoverished populations and race relations. By using concrete examples, the authors discuss how community development fits - or does not fit - within the framework of progrowth policies and politics. The volume covers several important themes: · Community development is not politically neutral and must be discussed within a broad political, economic, and even global context. · Local politics play a major role in determining the direction, nature, and possibilities of community development. · A high level and sustained community participation is crucial for the representation of low-income urban neighborhoods in cities pursing progrowth policies. · Race remains a fundamental issue I city politics and influences the political interplay between progrowth strategies and community development. Utilizing information and analysis across several disciplines, this issue offers important research for students, scholars, and practitioners in areas of political science, economics, sociology, urban studies, and race relations.

This book delves into Trinidad and Tobago's development with a fresh lens. It stands as the inaugural empirical exploration of the country's unique attributes, including its diversity, ex-British colony status, small-state categorization by population size, and its dependence on hydrocarbons. Through meticulous empirical analysis, this book scrutinizes the nation's economic, social, and political outcomes within the context of these four distinctive parameters, offering fresh insights into the country's development trajectory. What sets this book apart is its unwavering commitment to a data-driven approach. Drawing upon a vast array of databases from both international and national sources, it provides a thorough examination of development indicators, household welfare metrics, firm-level performance, and individual perspectives on a wide range of political, economic, and social issues. For scholars, policymakers, and anyone with an interest in understanding how unique contextual factors shape a Trinidad and Tobago's development, this book offers an enlightening and data-rich perspective on the nation's journey towards progress and prosperity.

This sequel to "Race, Politics and Economic Development" assembles case studies of cities, such as Atlanta and Chicago, with practical discussions of programmes designed to establish a more effective black politics. It draws comparisons between racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lectures on racial conflict, economic conditions - economic development, economic growth, income distribution, affirmative action, racial discrimination in employment, social mobility, unemployment, entrepreneurs, colonialism, independence. References.

Essays that examine globalization’s effects with an emphasis on the interplay of race and rurality as it occurs across diverse geographies and peoples. Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral “politics of place” and “space” have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economysuggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new “savage sorting”; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization’s political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of “white fragility” in the context of the historical power of globalization’s raced effects.