"A persuasive message here is that understanding Los Angeles provides important insights into the future of the American metropolis. Charles offers the most compre hensive study yet of racial attitudes, how these attitudes influence housing preferences, and how these preferences shape the racial comprehension of neighborhoods."
-CITY & COMMUNITY

"Won't You Be My Neighbor?, featuring a survey of a large multiracial sample of Los Angeles County residents, is an important contribution to the literatyre on race and ethnic relations. With thoughtful theoretical arguments and a careful analysis of an impressive empirical data set, Camille Zubrinsky Charles has provided one of the most sophisticated studies of how race and class affect the process of residential decisionmaking."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

"Nearly four decades after the Fair Housing Act, racial residential segregation persists at high levels in American cities. In Won't You Be My Neighbor? Camille Zubrinsky Charles systematically demolishes the white lies that Americans like to tell themselves as they cling to the myth of a 'race-blind society.' ... Segregation is alive and well in urban America and it is all about race."
-DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

"Won't You Be My Neighbor? is sociology at its best. The book is as theoretically rich as it is analytically rigorous. Charles has given us the most carefully argued and compelling assessment of why race still matters since Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton's American Apartheid. This book is a genuine must read for any one concerned with understanding the future of our increasingly diverse major urban centers."
-LAWRENCE D. BOBO, Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor and director, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Program in African and African American Studies, Stanford University

Los Angeles is a city of delicate racial and ethnic balance. As evidenced by the 1965 Watts violence, the 1992 Rodney King riots, and this year’s award-winning film Crash, the city’s myriad racial groups coexist uneasily together, often on the brink of confrontation. In fact, Los Angeles is highly segregated, with racial and ethnic groups clustered in homogeneous neighborhoods. These residential groupings have profound effects on the economic well-being and quality of life of residents, dictating which jobs they can access, which social networks they can tap in to, and which schools they attend. In Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, sociologist Camille Zubrinsky Charles explores how modern racial attitudes shape and are shaped by the places in which people live.

Using in-depth survey data and information from focus groups with members of L.A.’s largest racial and ethnic groups, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? explores why Los Angeles remains a segregated city. Charles finds that people of all backgrounds prefer both racial integration and a critical mass of same-race neighbors. When asked to reveal their preferred level of racial integration, people of all races show a clear and consistent order of preference, with whites considered the most highly desired neighbors and blacks the least desirable. This is even true among recent immigrants who have little experience with American race relations. Charles finds that these preferences, which are driven primarily by racial prejudice and minority-group fears of white hostility, taken together with financial considerations, strongly affect people’s decisions about where they live. Still, Charles offers reasons for optimism: over time and with increased exposure to other racial and ethnic groups, people show an increased willingness to live with neighbors of other races.

In a racially and ethnically diverse city, segregated neighborhoods can foster distrust, reinforce stereotypes, and agitate inter-group tensions. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? zeroes in on segregated neighborhoods to provide a compelling examination of the way contemporary racial attitudes shape, and are shaped by, the places where we live.

CAMILLE ZUBRINSKY CHARLES is associate professor of sociology and faculty associate director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The role of women in higher education, as in many other settings, has undergone dramatic changes during the past two decades. This significant period of progress and transition is definitively assessed in the landmark volume, Women in Academe.

Crowded out by returning veterans and pressed by social expectations to marry early and raise children, women in the 1940s and 1950s lost many of the educational gains they had made in previous decades. In the 1960s women began to catch up, and by the 1970s women were taking rapid strides in academic life. As documented in this comprehensive study, the combined impact of the women’s movement and increased legislative attention to issues of equality enabled women to make significant advances as students and, to a lesser extent, in teaching and academic administration. Women in Academe traces the phenomenal growth of women’s studies programs, the notable gains of women in non-traditional fields, the emergence of campus women’s centers and research institutes, and the increasing presence of minority and re-entry women. Also examined are the uncertain future of women’s colleges and the disappointingly slow movement of women into faculty and administrative positions.

This authoritative volume provides more current and extensive data on its subject than any other study now available. Clearly and objectively, it tells an impressive story of progress achieved—and of important work still to be done.

MARIAM K. CHAMBERLAIN is founding president of the National Council for Research on Women.

CONTRIBUTORS: Helen S. Astin,  Jean W. Campbell, Mary Ellen S. Capek,  Maren Lockwood Carden,  Mariam K. Chamberlain,  Carol Frances,  Jane Gould,  Lilli S. Hornig,  Florence Howe,  Marjorie Lightman,  Virginia Davis Nordin,  Patricia Ann Palmieri, Bernice R. Sandler,  Cynthia Secor,  Donna Shavlik,  Margaret C. Simms.