Two New Books on Race

Despite all the talk of a post-racial America, two new books show that race is still a hot topic. William Julius Wilson’s More Than Just Race aims to provoke new discussion by explaining inner-city behavior as something people perceive in their society. “Heard this one before?” asks a Slate reviewer about the topic. Another book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America by Beryl Satter, is a historical account from a personal perspective, as the author is the daughter of Mark Satter, prominent civil-rights pioneer in the segregated Chicago real-estate wars. But Satter is more a historian than a memoirist in this book, which the New York Times calls “something close to an instant classic.” Read it at The New York Times.