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Based on his years of reporting and observation of changes in black America, journalist Robinson finds that the black community has evolved to the point where it has disintegrated into distinct sectors: the mainstreamers, or black middle-class majority, who have made tremendous but often understated progress; the abandoned minority with little hope of escaping poverty; transcendental elites of such wealth and power that whites can't deny; and an emergent group of biracial blacks and recent black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean who are challenging an essentially native black American experience. In the age of Obama, Robinson notes the advancement of the black elites, with wealth and power, into full ownership stake in the U.S., distancing them economically from the middle and lower classes. The emergent group identifies with a different notion of the black experience, making them ideologically and politically unreliable. All are in strong contrast to the abandoned, who are at the center of the black disintegration. Readers don't have to agree with Robinson's observations to appreciate the undeniable differences within black America and to maybe want further analysis.--Ford, Vernon Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"Black America, as we knew it, is history."So writes Pulitzer PrizewinningWashington Postcolumnist Robinson (Last Dance in Havana, 2004, etc.) at the beginning of this provocative polemic. Black America has not disappeared, he adds, and America is by no means in some "post-racist" idyll, as the hopeful would have it. Instead, Black America has calved into separate realms that are sometimes at odds with one another. At one extreme is the world of the"Abandoned," about one in four black Americans or 15 percent of black households, the latter of which subsist on less than $10,000 annually. By contrast, the Mainstreamthe capital letters are Robinson'sis flourishing, relative to the days when Martin Luther King was on the march. In 1967, he writes, one in ten black households earned the equivalent of $50,000 a year, whereas the number is three in ten today. As for the Transcendentthe rich and powerfultheir numbers are growing too. Some of them, such as Oprah Winfrey and perhaps Barack Obama, may think of themselves hopefully as post-racial beings, but then there's always the case of Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge cops to bring things back to racial reality. Robinson, capably working his categories, writes interestingly of that event: Gates "didn't fully appreciate the noblesse oblige requirements of his Transcendent status" and instead adopted the aggrieved stance of the Abandoned. Add to this mix new, aspiring immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and there are clearly multiple Black Americas, all of which share with segments of the other Americas certain assumptionssuch as the moral inferiority of the very poorbut are subject to tensions and stresses all their own.Robinson's parsing of the current situation is better journalism than sociology, but it makes for a highly readable, insightful take on race in America.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal
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In the Jim Crow era, the vast majority of African Americans were racially segregated and impoverished. But they were united in their opposition to racial discrimination and support of programs that would foster greater racial and economic equality. Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, maintains that racial solidarity among blacks has disintegrated. He identifies four distinct groups-the black economic elite, new immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, the urban underclass, and the large black working class-all of which have different ideas, outlooks, and agendas on such issues as affirmative action, government programs for the poor, and education policy. Robinson is nostalgic for the age of racial solidarity but also celebrates the economic and educational progress that has produced diversity in the black community. He calls for all African Americans to come together once again to solve the problems of those blacks who have been abandoned by the greater society. VERDICT This book will have great appeal to African Americans and others concerned about issues of race and equality.-Robert Bruce Slater, Stroudsburg, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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In this clear-eyed and compassionate study, Robinson (Coal to Cream), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, marshals persuasive evidence that the African-American population has splintered into four distinct and increasingly disconnected entities: a small elite with enormous influence, a mainstream middle-class majority, a newly emergent group of recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and an abandoned minority "with less hope of escaping poverty than at any time since Reconstruction's end." Drawing on census records, polling data, sociological studies, and his own experiences growing up in a segregated South Carolina college town during the 1950s, Robinson explores 140 years of black history in America, focusing on how the civil rights movement, desegregation, and affirmative action contributed to the fragmentation. Of particular interest is the discussion of how immigrants from Africa, the "best-educated group [now] coming to live in the United States," are changing what being black means. Robinson notes that despite the enormous strides African-Americans have made in the past 40 years, the problems of poor blacks remain more intractable than ever, though his solution-"a domestic Marshall Plan aimed at black America"-seems implausible in this era of cash-strapped state and local governments. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved