Black Male Deviance. by Anthony J. LemelleReview by: Darnell F. HawkinsSocial Forces, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Sep., 1996), pp. 372-373Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580796 .

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372 / Social Forces 75:1, September 1996

Programs, employment and housing initiatives, the Nixon Administration's abortive Family Assistance Program and child care initiatives, and the expansion of Social Security. Much of this research is based on careful analyses of evidence housed at the National Archives.

Quadagno's provocative arguments and thesis will doubtless blaze a trail for other inquiries into U.S. social policy. More important, her historical work advances our understanding of key policy episodes in the 1960s. She also overturns received wisdom by showing that universalism does not equal political salvation for social programs and that wage earning as a criterion for program eligibility often introduces inequalities into the system. And beyond this, she offers an excellent guide to current policy debates.

That said, not all of Quadagno's contentions are plausible. Her thesis - that New Deal policy contradicted American ideology and subsequently engendered the War on Poverty - is difficult to substantiate, and her case studies often proceed with indistinct analytical purposes. Perhaps as a result, she sometimes relies on arguments not expressly part of her thesis. For instance, Quadagno sees an important but nontheorized linkage between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. It seems doubtful, however, that the movement was a direct response to race-based inequalities in New Deal social policies or to American ideology, the main forces behind policy change according to her argument. And American ideals no doubt mattered less in prompting the War on Poverty than an increasingly powerful Democratic regime combined with black voting power in the North and political organization in the South.

Moreover, in her depiction of the policy regimes of the 1930s and 1960s, Quadagno may have the story backward. New Deal social policy was designed to aid industrial workers, the poor, the aged, and the unemployed everywhere. Because of the power of the South in national politics, as Quadagno rightly notes, southern African Americans in agricultural and domestic work were dealt a raw deal by the Social Security Act. Nevertheless, because they were geared to those with low incomes, New Deal social policies did aid black people in the North - more than they did white people in the South. Hence the exodus of African- American voters from the party of Lincoln. By contrast, many War on Poverty programs had race in mind at their conception.

All the same, The Color of Welfare is essential reading for serious students of social policy. Indeed, I recommend it for anyone hoping to better understand the current American predicament.

Black Male Deviance. By Anthony J. Lemelle Jr. Praeger, 1995. 190 pp. Cloth, $52.95.

Reviewer: DARNELL F. HAwKiN. University of Illinois at Chticago

Black males in the U.S. recently have been described in terms ranging from "an endangered species" to "a menace to society." In response to such labels and to the popular images they provoke, Anthony Lemelle provides a postmodernist/ existentialist and quasi-Marxist critique of the social standing and antisocial behavior of black American males. In Black Male Deviance he combines insights from the social sciences as well as literature. For example, he begins the book with

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Book Reviews / 373

a depiction of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist in Richard Wright's novel Native Son, as a classic example of black American maleness. He grounds other accounts in a historical context.

Lemelle criticizes and seeks to avoid what he sees as conceptual and analytic inaccuracies in earlier scholarly discussions of black male deviance. He eschews views sometimes found in these works, which tend to treat such deviance as a purely subjective or definitional matter, and he opposes some of the extreme, label- and conflict-oriented perspectives that hold that crime becomes crime simply because agents of social control define it as such. In his view, black male deviance is a real phenomenon with devastating consequences for deviants, their victims, and American society. At the same time, Lemelle attempts to discount the arguments of those who see such deviance as the irrational behaviors of a cultureless people (or pathological culture). Indeed, he concludes by arguing that black Americans represent a cultural force in a struggle for real democracy in the U.S. and that black male deviance is a consequence both of black males' oppression and of their fight against it.

Lemelle has written a timely and informative book. Black male crime and deviance have become something of a national obsession in the U.S., to which the public's abiding fascination with the O.J. Simpson case and the recent spate of incidents involving whites who have accused black males of their own crimes attest. Lemelle is not always successful in mediating the tensions among the often seemingly irreconcilable views of black male deviance that have appeared in scholarly and popular discourse in the U.S. Some critics will argue that his depictions of black male deviance in early chapters represent a form of victim blame. At times, descriptions of historical and contemporary deviance come uncomfortably close to being restatements of popular stereotypes. More conservative critics, on the other hand, will view his sometimes jargon-laden defense of the integrity of black culture and the role of black male deviance as largely grounded in speculation. Despite these likely perceptions, Lemelle has written a bold, courageous, sociologically grounded analysis of a topic that is too often the target of divisive public rhetoric and scholarly inattention.

Race and Ethnicity in America: Meeting the Challenge in the Twenty-first Centuxy. Edited by Gail E. Thomas. Taylor & Francis, 1995. 349 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Reviewer: ADALBERTO AGUIRRE JP, University of California at Riverside

Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of white Americans believe that racial and ethnic inequality was eliminated with the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, many of them believe that such inequality is a personal problem, not a social structural one. The authors of this collection argue that racial and ethnic inequality is a persistent feature in U.S. society and that it is indeed an issue of social structure. More important, they assert that dialogue over the issue is not over, especially in a society where inequality is increasing.

Although focused on the four major racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., this work is "concemed about all forms of educational, social, and economic underrepresentation across racial/ethnic, social, and gender groups." Who are the

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