Yo' Mama's Dysfunctional-Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

Noted historian Robin D.G. Kelley s tired of people talking about his mama and folks like her. He's tired of victim-blaming critics and policies that pin most of our scoail ills on the black urban poor.

In Yo' Mamas Disfunktional! Kelley fights back. In this provocative and timely book, he examines how scholars, activists, policy makers, and displaced working people themselves have made sense of the contemporary ghetto. These debates, he argues, are part of the "culture wars" being waged on the poor and poeple of color--wars that spill over the ivy-colored walls of academe into the streets of urban America, into the union halls and workplaces, into legislative assemblies and policy think tanks. His acerbic, often witty prose takes no prisoners; from liberal social scientists to black neoconservatives, the Nation of Islam to white ''neo-Enlightenment" leftists, no one escapes unscathed.

At the same time, Yo Mama's Disfunktional! gives voice to the very urban populations rendered silent by their attackers. Kelley defends black people's humanity, acknowledging the importance of pleasure and laughter in people's lives in everything from double dutch to the "dozens." He asks us to see culture and community as more than responses to, or products of, oppression. And  he insists that we think globally, for globalization has not only transformed black culture, it has dramatically changed the nature of work, employment opportunities, class structure, public space, the cultural marketplace, the criminal justice system, political strategies, even intellectual work.

Ultimately, this is a hopefuly book. Kelley reveals how new multiracial social movements emerging today have the potential of transforming the nation. The hope and future of America and the world exists in the very multicolred working class that for so long has been seen as the problem rather than the solution. But hope alone will not produce a bright future. In the epilogue "Looking B(l)ackward," a futuristic tale written with a not to Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Kelley paints a dark portrain of what might happen if the problem of the color line continues to follow us into the twenty-first century. At the very least, Yo Mama's Disfunktional! challenges all of us to change course as we enter the new millennium.