More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City »

William Julius Wilson is a University Professor at Harvard University, president emeritus of the American Sociological Association, and the author of numerous books, including the award-winning The Declining Significance of Race and When Work Disappears. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Ph.D. Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race (with Cornel West); Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans. He is general editor (with the late Nellie Y. McKay) of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; editor-in-chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (online); editor of The African-American Century (with Cornel West); Encarta Africana (with Kwame Anthony Appiah); and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Craft; African American National Biography (with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham) and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (with Hollis Robbins). For PBS, Professor Gates has written and produced several documentaries, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma.

The New York Times - Richard Thompson Ford

More Than Just Race is somewhat ponderous and academic in style; too often the book details an important and fascinating question only to end inconclusively, with a call for "further research." But this is more than made up for by its considerable substantive virtues: it is straightforward, accessible and sensible, free of the ideological cant and posturing that often mar even serious academic studies of racial issues.

Ch. 1 Structural and cultural forces that contribute to racial inequality 1

Ch. 2 The forces shaping concentrated poverty 25

Ch. 3 The economic plight of inner-city black males 62

Ch. 4 The fragmentation of the poor black family 95

Ch. 5 Framing the issues : uniting structure and culture 133

Notes 156

Index 177