Book excerpt: "Written mostly by African-American scholars, the chapters in this book describe the challenges facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions as they seek to address continuing and emerging patterns of racial polarization in the twenty-first century. The book clearly shows that the United States entered the new millennium as one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on Earth. Yet amid this prosperity, our nation is faced with some of the same challenges that confronted it at the beginning of the twentieth century, including rising inequality in income, wealth, and opportunity; economic restructuring; immigration pressures and ethnic tension; and a widening gap between "haves" and "have nots.""--BOOK JACKET.