About this item
Why do American ghettos persist? Decades after Moynihan's report on the black family and the Kerner Commission's investigations of urban disorders, deeply disadvantaged black communities remain a disturbing reality. Scholars and commentators today often identify some factor -- such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime -- as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to "fix" ghettos or "help" their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor as moral agents responding to injustice.Drawing on liberal-egalitarian philosophy and informed by leading social science research, Dark Ghettos examines the thorny questions of political morality raised by ghettos.
About the Author
Tommie Shelby is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African & African American Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2000. He is the author of Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (2016) and We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (2005) . He is the coeditor of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2018) and of Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (2005) . His writings take up questions of racial, economic, and criminal justice and examine the history of black political thought. His articles have appeared in such journals as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, Political Theory, Critical Inquiry, Du Bois Review, Journal of Social Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Daedalus.
