In the book Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!, Robin D.G. Kelly says that he is writing about the ongoing cultural wars regarding blacks in American society and "inner city" social problems. Kelly notes how people believe that the obstacles to black success have all been removed and that racism is a thing of the past, yet in spite of this, the position of black Americans in the inner cities continues to deteriorate. Rather than offering the complex explanations many use to try to explain this, Kelly shows that racism is not dead and that it still has force against numerous groups in society, with anti-immigrant fervor just another example of racist attitudes and their effect. Kelly offers some historical analysis on the development of racism and on different manifestations of racism leading to a consideration of how racism operates today and what its effects are in the present.
Kelly notes that the idea of culture has never disappeared from the sociological debate about the underclass, and many have claimed to know what the true black culture is really like and how it has affected that community. He cites John Langston Gwaltney as one who understands that there really is a core black cultural identity and that it is marked by a "deep-rooted sense of community, common history, and collective recognition that there is an African American culture and a 'black' way of doing things regardless of the origins of a particular recipe, or the roots of a particular religion or Christian denomination, the cook and the congregation having no problem identifying these distinct practices and institutions as 'black'" (22).
At the same time, inherent in much of what Kelly says is the reality that human beings are much the same beneath their culture, their skin color, and other means used to separate them. He analyzes the roots of racism and finds that racism developed during the Enlightenment based on a move in eighteenth century science "toward ...