White Rage, White Liberals, and the Making of the Second Ghetto

Abstract

This article offers comment on the legacy of Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto. First, it explores the debate over agency that emerged after the book’s publication, defending Hirsch’s decision to focus on white actors rather than black ones. Second, it argues that Hirsch’s book in many ways anticipated Carol Anderson’s “white rage” thesis in its documentation of white efforts, subtle and explicit, to resist integration and racial succession. Third, it examines Hirsch’s condemnation of white liberals for their complicity in the second ghetto’s creation and contextualizes the book’s 1983 publication against the backdrop of the Harold Washington political revolution in Chicago that same year. And finally, it reflects upon the value of Hirsch’s willingness to name names when it came to the making of the second ghetto.