"An excellent book. Takagi takes a very complex and sensitive subject-racial politics-and shows, through a careful analysis . . . that changes in the discourse about Asian American admissions have facilitated a 'retreat from race' in the area of affirmative action. . . . This book will appeal to an audience significantly wider than a typical academic one."- David Karen, Bryn Mawr College Charges by Asian Americans that the top universities in the United States used quotas to limit the enrollment of Asian-American students developed into one of the most controversial public controversies in higher education since the Bakke case. In Retreat from Race, Dana Takagi follows the debates over Asian-American admissions at Berkeley, UCLA, Brown, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. She explains important developments in the politics of race: changes in ethnic coalitions, reconstruction of the debate over affirmative action, and the conservative challenge to the civil rights agenda of the 1960s. Takagi examines the history and significance of the Asian American admissions controversy on American race relations both inside and outside higher education. Takagi's central argument is that the Asian-American admissions controversy facilitated a subtle but important shift in affirmative action policy away from racial preferences toward class preferences. She calls this development a retreat from race. Takagi suggests that the retreat signals not only an actual policy shift but also the increasing reluctance on the part of intellectuals, politicans, and policy analysts to identify and address social problems as explicitly racial problems. Moving beyond the university setting, Takagi explores the political significance of the retreat from race by linking Asian-American admissions to other controversies in higher education and in American politics, including the debates over political correctness and multiculturalism. In her assessment, the retreat from race is likely to fail at its promise of easing racial tension and promoting racial equality.

Anti-black racism is a stark presence in Chicago, a fact illustrated by significant racial inequality in and around contemporary "global" city. Drawing his work as a civil rights advocate and investigator in Chicago, Street explains this neo-liberal apartheid and its resulting disparity in terms of persistently and deeply racist societal and institutional practices and policies. Racial Oppression in the Black Metropolis uses the highly relevant historical and sociological laboratory that is Chicago in order to explain the racist societal and institutional practices and policies which still typify the United States. Street challenges dominant neoconservative explanations of the black urban crisis that emphasize personal irresponsibility and cultural failure. Looking to the other side of the ideological isle, he criticizes liberal and social democratic approaches that elevate class over race and challenges many observers' sharp distinction between present and so-called past racism. In questioning the supposedly inevitable reign of urban-neoliberaism, Street also investigates the real, racial politics of the United States and finds that parties and ideologies matter little on matters of race. This innovative work in urban history and cultural criticism will inform contemporary social science and policy debates for years to come.

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.

How is race defined and perceived in America today, and how do these definitions and perceptions compare to attitudes 100 years ago... or 200 years ago? This four-volume set is the definitive source for every topic related to race in the United States. In the 21st century, it is easy for some students and readers to believe that racism is a thing of the past; in reality, old wounds have yet to heal, and new forms of racism are taking shape. Racism has played a role in American society since the founding of the nation, in spite of the words "all men are created equal" within the Declaration of Independence. This set is the largest and most complete of its kind, covering every facet of race relations in the United States while providing information in a user-friendly format that allows easy cross-referencing of related topics for efficient research and learning. The work serves as an accessible tool for high school researchers, provides important material for undergraduate students enrolled in a variety of humanities and social sciences courses, and is an outstanding ready reference for race scholars. The entries provide readers with comprehensive content supplemented by historical backgrounds, relevant examples from primary documents, and first-hand accounts. Information is presented to interest and appeal to readers but also to support critical inquiry and understanding. A fourth volume of related primary documents supplies additional reading and resources for research.

In Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity, Barry Checkoway describes the work of a specific university-community partnership program: Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Metropolitan Detroit. Including an analysis of the program's origins and objectives, activities and accomplishments, facilitating and limiting factors, and lessons learned from practice, Checkoway provides an unprecedented example of young people working together across segregated boundaries to transform their lives and communities. He also examines youth dialogues as a process, young people as change agents, adults as allies and partners, and the anchor institutions that support this work.

Since the eighteenth century when natural historians created the idea of distinct racial categories, scientific findings on race have been a double-edged sword. For some antiracists, science holds the promise of one day providing indisputable evidence to help eradicate racism. On the other hand, science has been enlisted to promote racist beliefs ranging from a justification of slavery in the eighteenth century to the infamous twentieth-century book, The Bell Curve, whose authors argued that racial differences in intelligence resulted in lower test scores for African Americans. This well-organized, readable textbook takes the reader through a chronological account of how and why racial categories were created and how the study of "race" evolved in multiple academic disciplines, including genetics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. In a bibliographic essay at the conclusion of each of the book's seven sections, the authors recommend primary texts that will further the reader's understanding of each topic. Heavily illustrated and enlivened with sidebar biographies, this text is ideal for classroom use.

"Since the highly acclaimed Courageous Conversations About Race offered educators a frame work and tools for promoting racial equity, many schools have implemented the Courageous Conversations Protocol. Now ... in a book that's rich with anecdote, Singleton celebrates the successes, outlines the difficulties, and provides specific strategies for moving Courageous Conversations from racial equity theory to practice at every level, from the classroom to the school superintendent's office"--Back cover.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. How has the meaning of blackness changed in the twenty-first century? Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art. Leader-Picone defines these terms as significant facets of a larger post era, linking them with the social and political context of Barack Obama’s presidency. Analyzing claims of progress associated with Obama’s election and post-era thinking, he examines the contours of black aesthetics in the new century. To do so, he sifts through post-era African American fiction, considering both celebrations and rejections of an early twenty-first-century rhetoric of progress. In addition, he maps the subsequent implications of these concepts for rearticulating racial identities. Through the works of Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward, Leader-Picone tracks how recent fiction manifests the tension between the embrace of post–civil rights era gains and the recognition of persistent structural racism. Ultimately far less triumphal than the prefix post would imply, these authors address the Black Arts Movement and revise double consciousness and other key themes from the African American literary tradition. They interrogate their relevance in an era encompassing not only the election of the nation’s first black president, but also the government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the expansion of class divisions within the black community, mass incarceration, and ongoing police violence.

On Class, Race, and Educational Reform provokes new dialogue between Marxists, critical race theory scholars, and other race-inspired educational theorists with the aim of countering racism and class inequalities. The book opens with a lead chapter by Howard Ryan, a doctoral student with a background in teaching and labor organizing, that substantively engages questions of class, race, and educational reform. In response to the opening chapter, educational theorists from Germany, South Africa, the UK, and the USA, provide insightful and penetrating responses highlighting the differences and similarities in perspectives. The responses show how educators can overcome theoretical differences to create international collaborations and educational campaigns of solidarity that counter the treacherous impact of racism and class inequalities in the classroom and beyond. The book includes a Foreword by Stephen Brookfield (University of St Thomas, USA) and an Afterword by Cheryl Matias (University of Kentucky, USA).

Race has been present at every critical moment in American political development, shaping political institutions, political discourse, public policy, and its denizens’ political identities. But because of the nature of race—its evolving and dynamic status as a structure of inequality, a political organizing principle, an ideology, and a system of power—we must study the politics of race historically, institutionally, and discursively. Covering more than three hundred years of American political history from the founding to the contemporary moment, the contributors in this volume make this extended argument. Together, they provide an understanding of American politics that challenges our conventional disciplinary tools of studying politics and our conservative political moment’s dominant narrative of racial progress. This volume, the first to collect essays on the role of race in American political history and development, resituates race in American politics as an issue for sustained and broadened critical attention.