Race, Culture, and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle.

Race, Culture, and City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle, by Stephen Nathan Haymes. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 167 pp. 12. 95, paper. Reviewed by Larry L. Rowley, University of Virginia. As part of SUNY Press series entitled Teacher Empowerment and School Reform, this important book brings to light various aspects of critical social theory to create a theoretical framework for analysis of physical, social, and economic factors affecting Black urban communities. Haymes, a professor in Social and Historical Foundations Program at DePaul University School of Education, is uniquely qualified to give a multidisciplinary assessment of Black urban struggle. According to his stated purpose, book argues for necessity of developing a of black urban. . . in relation to a 'pedagogy of place' (p. 1). As he further asserts, pedagogy must be linked to how individuals and collectivities make and take up culture in production of public spaces in city, with particular emphasis on how they use and assign meaning to public spaces within unequal relations of power (p. 3). This viewpoint provides reader a clearer understanding of how Black urban communities are culturally defined and socially constructed and how these factors in turn impact economic, political and ethical realities of those communities. The composition of Race, Culture, and City is relatively straightforward. It begins with a preface that briefly explains relevance of study and helps reader to contextualize material. This is followed by an introductory overview by series editors Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux. The actual text of book consists of four chapters, first of which is an introduction to major components of Haymes's analysis (i. e. , pedagogy, urban space, social construction of city, and Black urban struggle). Chapter 2 analyzes cultural aspects of Black urban communities as they relate to White consumer culture. The third chapter is an evaluation of how Black urban communities are politicized through interactions between Black civil society, urban planners, investors, gentrifiers, and others with a vested economic interest in those public spaces. Finally, in Chapter 4, Haymes attempts to tie these factors together to create a praxis and for Black urban struggle by examining urban problems utilizing critical theory and spatial analysis. The text is supplemented with two indexes, one listing authors cited and another listing subjects covered. The major achievements of this work are twofold. First, it provides an intellectually accessible assessment of Black urban communities. Race, Culture, and City makes a valuable theoretical companion for some of more policy-oriented and empirical analyses provided by other urban scholars such as Henry Cisneros, (1996), James Johnson (1997), Jay MacLeod (1987/1995), and William Julius Wilson, (1996). To illustrate, take Wilson's assertion that the dramatic retreat from using public policy as a means to fight social has effectively discouraged calls for bold new social programs (p. 208). If this is true, it then becomes necessary for policymakers, activists, and educators to understand Haymes's discussion of how Blacks have historically constructed transformative notions of blackness that recall memories of how blacks have used their living spaces to create communities of resistance (p. 143). Such a pairing of findings of empirical research and theoretical analysis will help to broaden strategies of those committed to ameliorating conditions for African Americans in inner city. The book's second notable achievement is its commitment to a multidisciplinary approach for theorizing about and researching problems of Black urban communities. As Johnson (1997) has recently argued, a weakness of much scholarship has been its preoccupation with single focus explanations of urban inequality (p. …