Book Description
Decaying values. Sexually transmitted diseases.
Fatherless homes. Rampant drug use.
These aren't just problems for today's inner cities.
It's the plight of all America.
Much has been said about Bill Cosby's incendiary remarks about urban black culture and its "dirty laundry." But in this provocative book, Star Parker, one of today's most controversial commentators, goes even further, proving that urban plight simply reveals a decay that is gnawing its way throughout American society as a whole.
The sexual chaos, values disorientation, and social turmoil we see in our inner cities, Parker argues, is just a magnified reflection of the moral collapse happening all over America: in our schools, our churches, our homes. And this slide toward moral decrepitude is all due to a flagrant dismissal of and assault on America's tried-and-true values.
With startling statistics and disturbing stories about the increasing secularization and criminalization of the middle class, Parker holds a cracked mirror up to suburbia. Taking on tough subjects such as abortion, drug abuse, sexual politics, and religion, she offers a rousing exploration of the raging cultural war-taking you on a wild, eye-opening tour through the White Ghetto.
Star Parker is the founder and president of CURE, the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education, a nonprofit organization that provides national dialogue on issues of race and poverty in the media, inner city neighborhoods, and public policy. Star is a regular commentator on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the BBC, which reaches 300 million homes worldwide. Her articles and quotes have also appeared in major publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and is currently a weekly syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. Star is the author of Pimps, Whores, and Welfare Brats and Uncle Sam's Plantation.
- The Neo-Conservative Ghetto (2)
Regardless of my own personal beliefs, this book is just plain badly written. Parker jumps from one topic to the next in an episodic frenzy, each section marked by tabloid-style headlines that connote glib frivolity. Parker spends most of the 200+ pages of this book generalizing about "Middle America" in long spiels of inert prose, and her sentences are constructed the way young children speak. And no sooner does she raise an interesting point than she moves on to the next point without ever laying down any kind of argument.
I counted exactly eight critical thoughts in this book. Everything else she says is a broad statement with just the bare minimum of evidence cited in support (which she interprets rather unconvincingly a lot of the time). If you are an open-minded individual earnestly seeking out an argument for integrating Liberty, essential Christianity, and self-governance, you will not find it in Parker's voice.
This is very sad, because I liked a lot of Parker's ideas. Her main idea is that without religion we cannot have morals, and that without morals we cannot sustain liberty. But she never comes through with an argument; she just decrees over and over again that we as a country have lost our moral base and that that is how we are losing liberty in this country. I want to agree with her, but she never gives me a reason why I should.
The closest she comes to making her case is with the problems of the black community and her various reasons why the Democratic party has exacerbated their situation with social programs. I would also agree with her that such programs are a means toward Socialism.
But then she gets it all wrong (or at least she never convinces me--indeed, doesn't even *appear* to argue her case) that homosexuals are this great downfall of America and are conspiring to turn children in public schools gay (my response to that would be that if you are so convinced, then vote with your feet and send your children to private school). She also acts like blacks cannot be gay, or that gays cannot be black, and asserts that there is no correlation in the civil rights of gays because, as she implies, homosexuality is a choice. That may or may not be true, but she never gives an argument for it; it's just not immediately clear to me what the incentive would be for a general segment of the population to *choose* to be gay. She also has nothing to say about hispanics, the largest growing segment of our population and facing many of the same problems blacks are facing today. For that matter, how can she call "Middle America" the white ghetto? A ghetto is a concentrated zone occupied by a minority group who live there especially because of social, economic, or legal pressures. Her use of "ghetto" is a fallacy. Depending on her mood, Middle America can be the moral majority, or the atheist majority, or the white majority, or the bourgeois liberal majority. Who knows? She doesn't give any explanation.
These are just some of the many examples of how she doesn't make sense.
I was hoping for restrained, convincing, critical thought. Parker delivers only a humorless cliche. The most intelligent thing she says in this book is, "It makes one wonder if the sacred and secular can share the same country anymore" (P.218). Whatever the answers to that query, Parker has contributed very litte to such a dialogue.
Surely, the liberal academy is not the only place to learn sustained, critical analysis.