| Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Contributor(s): Hilfiker, David (Author), Edelman, Marian Wright (Foreword by) |
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ISBN: 1583226079 ISBN-13: 9781583226070 Publisher: Seven Stories Press OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: September 2003 Annotation: "This accessible, clearly written book . . . may inspire ordinary people to work toward full desegregation of our society."-"Publishers Weekly" Hilfiker explains how, notwithstanding the various myths and legends of black urban poverty, the truth is that our government's social programs operate in such a way as to keep the vast majority of African Americans uneducated, in poor health, and literally separate. Dr. David Hilfiker has lived and worked in medical recovery and housing shelters for the homeless in Washington, D.C., since 1983. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Political Science |
| Dewey: 362.508 |
| LCCN: 2007270213 |
| Physical Information: 0.48" H x 5.52" W x 8.24" (0.45 lbs) 158 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: David Hilfiker has committed his life, both as a writer and a doctor, to people in need, writing about the urban poor with whom he's spent all his days for the last two decades. In Urban Injustice, he explains in beautiful and simple language how the myth that the urban poor siphon off precious government resources is contradicted by the facts, and how most programs help some of the people some of the time but are almost never sufficiently orchestrated to enable people to escape the cycle of urban poverty. Hilfiker is able to present a surprising history of poverty programs since the New Deal, and shows that many of the biggest programs were extremely successful at attaining the goals set out for them. Even so, Hilfiker reveals, most of the best and biggest programs were social insurance programs, like Medicare and Social Security, that primarily assisted the middle class, not the poor. Whereas, public assistance programs, directed specifically towards the poor, were often extremely effective as far as they went, but were instituted with far less ambitious goals. In a book that is short, sweet, and completely without academic verboseness or pretension, Hilfiker makes a clear path through the complex history of societal poverty, the obvious weaknesses and surprising strengths of societal responses to poverty thus far, and offers an analysis of models of assistance from around the world that might perhaps assist us in making a better world for our children once we decide that is what we must do. |