From: "Rodney Coates" To: "revs@csf.colorado.edu" Date: Thu, 26 Sep 96 12:42:03 +0 Reply-To: "Rodney Coates" Subject: Feagon's New Book: A must read I am not one for high praise, but the new book written by Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera and Nikitah Imani titled "The Agony of Education: Black Students at White Colleges and Universities" is one where such is certainly due. This book looks at how the rhetoric of equality and openess is not matched by the calousness and what I would call the insanity of the Reality that black students face. The authors demonstrate the barriers (structurally, in terms of hostile white peers and instructors, and recruitment). The problems are many, not least of which the fact that we in academia refuse to acknowledge that we are part of institutions which have perserved separate but equal, have help to ghetorize, issolate and ignore blacks (both student and professors)m and that we lack the will to change. This is a must read for those who still look at these situations through 'glass darklies..rose colored glasses'' or simply refuse to believe that we in America and especially the academe have a serious race problem. And the problem is not with, I might conclude, the black students but with the broader white oriented establishement. Well done and praise to you Joe Feagon and your collegues..for this brilliant piece of sociological research. Now the question before us is..do we care? umoja Only when lions have historians will hunters cease being heroes. African Proverb Without struggle there is no progress. Frederick Douglass The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Steven Biko yours in the struggle Rodney D. Coates Director of Black World Studies Associate Professor of Sociology Miami University Oxford, Ohio 45056 513 529-1235 email: coatesrd@casmail.muohio.edu