"A path-breaking analysis of the advent and consequences of deep class stratification in African American society since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Characterized by breadth of vision and reflective realism, Rethinking the American Race Problem is a worthy and welcome successor to Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published almost half a century ago."—Boris I. Bittker, Yale University "Insightful, tightly argued, and deeply felt. . . . This brilliant book will affect the thinking of all who read it."—William A. Fletcher, University of California "Rethinking the American Race Problem challenges the conventional understanding of the problem of race relations in the United States."—Gerrald Torres, University of Minnesota "Offers a fresh and intellectually provocative perspective on the relationship between race and public policy in today's America."—Martin Kilson, Harvard University

A generation removed from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power explosion of the 1960s, the pursuit of racial equality and social justice for African-Americans seems more elusive than ever. The realities of contemporary black America capture the nature of the crisis: life expectancy for black males is now below retirement age; median black income is less than 60 per cent that of whites; over 600,000 African-Americans are incarcerated in the US penal system; 23 per cent of all black males between the ages of eighteen and 29 are either in jail, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial. At the same time, affirmative action programs and civil rights reforms are being challenged by white conservatism. Confronted with a renascent right and the continuing burden of grotesque inequality, Manning Marable argues that the black struggle must move beyond previous strategies for social change. The politics of black nationalism, which advocates the building of separate black institutions, is an insufficient response. The politics of integration, characterized by traditional middle-class organizations like the NAACP and Urban League, seeks only representation without genuine power. Instead, a transformationist approach is required, one that can embrace the unique cultural identity of African-Americans while restructuring power and privilege in American society. Only a strategy of radical democracy can ultimately deconstruct race as a social force. Beyond Black and White brilliantly dissects the politics of race and class in the US of the 1990s. Topics include: the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy; the factors behind the rise and fall of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition: Benjamin Chavis and the conflicts within the NAAPC; and the national debate over affirmative action. Marable outlines the current debates in the black community between liberals, 'Afrocentrists', and the advocates of social transformation. He advances a political vision capable of drawing together minorities into a majority which can throw open the portals of power and govern in its own name.

In the years preceding the modern civil rights era, cultural critics profoundly affected American letters through psychologically informed explorations of racial ideology and segregationist practice. Jay Garcia’s probing look at how and why these critiques arose and the changes they wrought demonstrates the central role Richard Wright and his contemporaries played in devising modern antiracist cultural analysis. Departing from the largely accepted existence of a “Negro Problem,” Wright and such literary luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Lillian Smith, and James Baldwin described and challenged a racist social order whose psychological undercurrents implicated all Americans and had yet to be adequately studied. Motivated by the elastic possibilities of clinical and academic inquiry, writers and critics undertook a rethinking of "race" and assessed the value of psychotherapy and psychological theory as antiracist strategies. Garcia examines how this new criticism brought together black and white writers and became a common idiom through fiction and nonfiction that attracted wide readerships. An illuminating picture of mid-twentieth-century American literary culture and learned life, Psychology Comes to Harlem reveals the critical and intellectual innovation of literary artists who bridged psychology and antiracism to challenge segregation.

What does it mean to "act black" or "act white"? Is race merely a matter of phenotype, or does it come from the inflection of a person's speech, the clothes in her closet, how she chooses to spend her time and with whom she chooses to spend it? What does it mean to be "really" black, and who gets to make that judgment? In Acting White?, leading scholars of race and the law Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that, in spite of decades of racial progress and the pervasiveness of multicultural rhetoric, racial judgments are often based not just on skin color, but on how a person conforms to behavior stereotypically associated with a certain race. Specifically, racial minorities are judged on how they "perform" their race. This performance pervades every aspect of their daily life, whether it's the clothes they wear, the way they style their hair, the institutions with which they affiliate, their racial politics, the people they befriend, date or marry, where they live, how they speak, and their outward mannerisms and demeanor. Employing these cues, decision-makers decide not simply whether a person is black but the degree to which she or he is so. Relying on numerous examples from the workplace, higher education, and police interactions, the authors demonstrate that, for African Americans, the costs of "acting black" are high, and so are the pressures to "act white." But, as the authors point out, "acting white" has costs as well. Provocative yet never doctrinaire, Acting White? will boldly challenge your assumptions and make you think about racial prejudice from a fresh vantage point.

"A path-breaking analysis of the advent and consequences of deep class stratification in African American society since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Characterized by breadth of vision and reflective realism, Rethinking the American Race Problem is a worthy and welcome successor to Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published almost half a century ago."—Boris I. Bittker, Yale University "Insightful, tightly argued, and deeply felt. . . . This brilliant book will affect the thinking of all who read it."—William A. Fletcher, University of California "Rethinking the American Race Problem challenges the conventional understanding of the problem of race relations in the United States."—Gerrald Torres, University of Minnesota "Offers a fresh and intellectually provocative perspective on the relationship between race and public policy in today's America."—Martin Kilson, Harvard University

A collection for an undergraduate course, providing a theoretical framework and analytical tools and discussing the meaning of race and ethnicity as a social construction. The readings are designed to require students to negotiate between individual agency and the constraints of social structure, an

In this thought-provoking reexamination of the history of "racial science" Vernon J. Williams argues that all current theories of race and race relations can be understood as extensions of or reactions to the theories formulated during the first half of the twentieth century. Williams explores these theories in a carefully crafted analysis of Franz Boas and his influence upon his contemporaries, especially W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, George W. Ellis, and Robert E. Park. Historians have long recognized the monumental role Franz Boas played in eviscerating the racist worldview that prevailed in the American social sciences. Williams reconsiders the standard portrait of Boas and offers a new understanding of a man who never fully escaped the racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology but nevertheless successfully argued that African Americans could assimiliate into American society and that the chief obstacle facing them was not heredity but the prejudice of white America.

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, and his words have proven sadly prophetic. As we enter the twenty-first century, the problem remains--and yet it, and the line that defines it, have shifted in subtle but significant ways. This brief book speaks powerfully to the question of how the circumstances of race and racism have changed in our time--and how these changes will affect our future. Foremost among the book's concerns are the contradictions and incoherence of a system that idealizes black celebrities in politics, popular culture, and sports even as it diminishes the average African-American citizen. The world of the assembly line, boxer Jack Johnson's career, and The Birth of a Nation come under Holt's scrutiny as he relates the malign progress of race and racism to the loss of industrial jobs and the rise of our modern consumer society. Understanding race as ideology, he describes the processes of consumerism and commodification that have transformed, but not necessarily improved, the place of black citizens in our society. As disturbing as it is enlightening, this timely work reveals the radical nature of change as it relates to race and its cultural phenomena. It offers conceptual tools and a new way to think and talk about racism as social reality.

Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

There are wide racial disparities in virtually every sphere of economic life. African American workers earn less than whites. They are more likely to be denied loans than whites. Minority-owned businesses are less likely to win lucrative bids on state and federal contracts than are white male owned businesses. Black children are more likely than whites to be reported to child protective services for neglect or abuse. There are even huge disparities in downing rates between blacks and whites. What to do about these disparities? There is a fundamental disagreement about the appropriate remedies to these varied indicators of racial inequality. Part of the disagreement stems from differences in public perceptions about the underlying causes of the inequality. But, another form of disagreement relates to the opposition to the remedy of choice during much of the 1970s and 1980s: Affirmative Action. Race conscious remedies -- like affirmative action policies in hiring, college admissions, and business contracting -- suffer from legal and constitutional challenges, compounded by hostility from the majority of Americans. The alternative – race-neutral remedies – attempt to address racial disparities without directly targeting benefits exclusively to racial minority group members. In doing so, race-neutral remedies putatively help minorities without hurting majority group members. The authors of Race Neutrality: Rationalizing Remedies to Racial Inequality make the case that policy analysts should shift from a focus on whether a remedy is race-conscious or not to a focus on the underlying problem that the alternative remedies is attempting to resolve. This type of rethinking of the problem of racial inequality will reveal that sometimes race-neutral remedies hold great promise in reducing disparities. Often, however, race-neutral remedies fail to do what they are intended to do. The authors challenge the reader to think about why race-neutral remedies—while desireable on their face—might fail to resolve protracted and persistent patterns of racial inequality in market and non-market contexts.