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Marcellus Andrews

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The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition in America Kindle Edition

by Marcellus William Andrews (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Popular liberal writing on race has relied on appeals to the value of "diversity" and the fading memory of the Civil Rights movement to counter the aggressive conservative assault on liberal racial reform generally, and on black well-being, in particular. Yet appeals to fairness and justice, no matter how heartfelt, are bound to fail, Marcellus Andrews argues, since the economic foundations of the Civil Rights movement have been destroyed by the combined forces of globalization, technology, and tight government budgets.
The Political Economy of Hope and Fear fills an important intellectual gap in writing on race by developing a hard-nosed economic analysis of the links between competitive capitalism, racial hostility, and persistent racial inequality in post-Civil Rights America. Andrews speaks to the anger and frustration that blacks feel in the face of the nation's abandonment of racial equality as a worthy objective by showing how the considerable difficulties that black Americans face are related to fundamental changes in the economic fortunes of the U.S.
The Political Economy of Hope and Fear is an economist's plea for unsentimental thinking on matters of race to replace the mixture of liberal hand wringing and conservative mythmaking that currently passes for serious analysis about the nation's racial predicament.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Andrews, a professor at Wellesley College, provides an economic audit of the civil rights movement and concludes that as a force for racial justice in the U.S., it was destroyed by free markets and technology-driven capitalism worldwide rather than by racism per se. We learn that even without racism, most poor blacks would be exactly where they are today in the absence of government policy to address issues of poverty and economic inequality across color lines. He believes that social problems are associated with low wages, sporadic employment, and the lure of illegal activity to supplement income. In addition to recommending the raising of incomes of poorly educated people so that legal work is worthwhile, he also suggests improving access to quality schooling and making drugs legal, which he contends would encourage young black men, particularly, to become taxpayers rather than criminals. Andrews' aim is to paint an intellectually defensible and decidedly anticonservative picture of the complicated tie between race and economic well-being. Mary Whaley

Review

"Andrews' aim is to paint an intellectually defensible and decidedly anti-conservative picture of the complicated tie between race and economic wellbeing." ― Booklist

"Deserves the close attention of both academic experts and the lay public alike. Marcellus Andrews's rare and wonderful achievement is to combine the compassion and intensity of the engaged social critic with the analytical detachment and discipline of the social scientist. His argumentfor which the stake is nothing less than the soul of our nation—will unsettle the reader, and that is exactly as it should be." -- Glenn C. Loury,Boston University

"Andrews does a superb job in offering solutions to familiar problems for African Americans. Complete with charts, graphs, facts and figures, the author provides readers with a vivid display of how the scales of equality, wealth and power are tipped against people of color." ― Upscale

"Marcellus Andrews has written a fascinating and theoretically grounded account of the relationship between America's market economy and the prospects faced by African Americans." ― The Journal of Economic Issues

"Fiery, passionate, and provocative, but also unflinchingly rigorous in its argument. It is rare for an economist to write with such fire bolstered by such a commitment to logical reasoning." -- William A. Darity Jr.