With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history. An elegant account of the roiling environment that witnessed the shift from the multiplicity of white races to the arrival of biracialism, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age: Daniel Cohalan, the Irish-American nationalist, Tammany Hall man, and ruthless politician; Madison Grant, the patrician eugenicist and noisy white supremacist; W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American social scientist and advocate of social justice; and Jean Toomer, the American pluralist and novelist of the interior life. Race, politics, and classification were their intense and troubling preoccupations in a world they did not create, would not accept, and tried to change.

"Every chapter of Race in America examines how racism intersects with other forms of social division-those based on gender, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationhood-as well as how whiteness surrounds us in unnamed ways that produce and reproduce a multitude of privileges for white people. In the revised second edition, students will find relevant examples drawn from the headlines and from their own experiences. Each chapter is updated to include references to recent social movements and popular culture, making the book a more helpful tool for navigating society's critical conversations about race, racism, ethnicity, and white privilege. And throughout the book, students will find updated scholarship and data figures, reflecting the most cutting-edge sociological research"--

Racism is an issue that is older than the United States itself. Before the 13 colonies became united, there was a wide chasm between the races. From the very beginning, Whites primarily have been treated better than Blacks, strictly because of the color of their skin. Most, if not all, of our founding fathers owned slaves, and it was an accepted practice. Even after the end of the Civil War, which ended slavery strictly from a legal standpoint, Blacks had a difficult time finding opportunity to improve their status. Although Blacks no longer could be owned, for the most part they had no education or marketable skills. The only thing they knew was how to pick cotton and work menial jobs. Whites had little interest in relinquishing their superior status, and Blacks had no recourse. Within a couple of decades after the Civil War, legislation was passed that made the common attitude of White superiority legally accepted. Treating Blacks as less than human was accepted and expected. The problem was worse in the former slave states in the South, but pigmentation often was the most determining factor regarding opportunity for a vast majority of Americans. The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1900s helped make great progress, including fully giving Blacks the right to vote in 1965, but the problems were not solved. If anything, the attitudes that created the divide became even more entrenched. This is not just a history lesson. Racism still exists today. You can't turn on the news without seeing stories of racial turmoil, most often in our inner-cities. It might be better than it was 350 years ago. It might be better than it was 150 years ago. It might even be better than it was 50 years ago. But it's still very real. It's not a skin-color issue. It's not an economic issue. It's not a geographic issue. A lot of those things may enter into the equation, but they're not the root of the problem. The urban versus suburban divide may be caused by racism, but it doesn't cause r

This sweeping work traces the idea of race for more than three centuries to show that 'race' is not a product of science but a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Updated throughout, the fourth edition of this renowned text includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and its implications for the meaning of race in America and the future of our racial ideology.

Reckoning with Race confronts America's most intractable problem—race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America's exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos which still plague America. Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no adequate structures—family, community or church—to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty. The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? What are the differences and similarities between the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and today? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity? R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intellectuals like Daniel Peterson, James McCune Smith, Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Martin Delany engaged this cultural mythology to theorize and practice Black internationalism. He uncovers how their strategies for challenging Manifest Destiny's white nationalist ideology and expansionist political agenda constituted a form of disidentification—a deconstructing and reassembling of this discourse that marshals Black experiences as racialized subjects to imagine novel geopolitical mythologies and projects to compete with Manifest Destiny. Employing Black internationalist, hemispheric, and diasporic frameworks to examine the emigrationist and solidarity projects that African Americans proposed as alternatives to Manifest Destiny, Boutelle attends to sites integral to US aspirations of hemispheric dominion: Liberia, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. In doing so, Boutelle offers a searing history of how internalized fantasies of American exceptionalism burdened the Black geopolitical imagination that encouraged settler-colonial and imperialist projects in the Americas and West Africa.

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

“Graves’ integration of science and objective analysis with popular biological assumptions of race makes this an enlightening and provocative work.”—Booklist DOES RACE AS WE KNOW IT REALLY EXIST? Preeminent evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves proves once and for all that it doesn’t. Through accessible and compelling language, he makes the provocative argument that science cannot account for the radical categories used to classify people, and debunks ancient race-related fallacies that are still held as fact, from damaging medical profiles to misconceptions about sports. He explains why defining race according to skin tone or eye shape is woefully inaccurate, and how making assumptions based on these false categories regarding IQ, behavior, or predisposition to disease has devastating effects. Demonstrating that racial distinctions are in fact social inventions, not biological truths, The Race Myth brings much-needed, sound science to one of America’s most emotionally charged debates.

Solving The Race Issue In America is a historical, spiritual and psychological treatment of Race in America-its causes, evolution and possibilities for the future. It's goal is to educate all Americans to the facts of racism to better understand each other and work together to resolve the race issue.

Race. The mere mention of the R-word is a surefire conversation-stopper. In this book about AmericaÆs most divisive social issue, Dominic J. Pulera offers a compelling roadmap to our future. This accessible and penetrating analysis is the first to include detailed coverage of AmericaÆs five "racial" groups: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. The author contends that race will matter to Americans during the twenty-first century because of visible differences, and that differences in physical appearance separating the races are the single most important factor shaping intergroup relations, in conjunction with the social, cultural, economic, and political ramifications that accompany them. Pulera shows how, why, when, and where race matters in the United States and who is affected by it. He explains the ongoing demographic transition of America from a predominantly white country to one where nonwhites are increasingly numerous and consequently more visible. The advent of a multiracial consciousness has tremendous implications for AmericaÆs future, because the racial significance of almost every part of the American experience is increasing as a result. The author concludes on a note of cautious optimism as he explores whether the visible differences dividing Americans are reconcilable.