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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and
why such resistance was so remarkable. Most popular accounts of the
Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why
didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging
armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied
Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the
dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and
shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral
testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and
other written materials produced both by survivors and those who
perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the
ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz reached decisions about
resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology,
Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews'
assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically,
armed resistance took place only once activists reached the
critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than
ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this
powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they
resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced
almost certain death.
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels,
that is texts by African American writers focused almost
exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth
century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright,
Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous
texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s,
these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges
they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American
literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects
aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about
the nature of African American literature and the unique
expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced
readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the
forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies.
Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage
Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of
African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how
whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's
abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this
particular racial construction is freighted with social power and
narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a
set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By
describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life
novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans.
Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in
the White also provides important historical context to understand
how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly
integrated nation.
Crime and gentrification are hot button issues that easily polarize
racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and
politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight
crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing
visions of neighborhood change necessarily divide activists into
racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex
alliances and divisions? In Us versus Them, Jan Doering answers
these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago
neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic
fieldwork, Doering examines how activists and community leaders
clashed and collaborated as they launched new initiatives, built
coalitions, appeased critics, and discredited opponents. At the
heart of these political maneuvers, he uncovers a ceaseless battle
over racial meanings that unfolded as residents strove to make
local initiatives and urban change appear racially benign or
malignant. A thoughtful and clear-eyed contribution to the field,
Us versus Them reveals the deep impact that competing racial
meanings have on the fabric of community and the direction of
neighborhood change.
This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the
Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing,
freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern
Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a
cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and
enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of
Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic
world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of
history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have
taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the
contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish
Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law.
The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within
current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history.
The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how
legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the
intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the
period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from
six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the
colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at
an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general
rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native
peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and
husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new
law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented
legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at
precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined
them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the
Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of
the modern West.
While most research on inequality focuses on impoverished
communities, it often ignores how powerful communities and elites
monopolize resources at the top of the social hierarchy. In
Privilege at Play, Hugo Ceron-Anaya offers an intersectional
analysis of Mexican elites to examine the ways affluent groups
perpetuate dynamics of domination and subordination. Using
ethnographic research conducted inside three exclusive golf clubs
and in-depth interviews with upper-middle and upper-class golfers,
as well as working-class employees, Ceron-Anaya focuses on the
class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege in
contemporary Mexico. His detailed analysis of social life and the
organization of physical space further considers how the legacy of
imperialism continues to determine practices of exclusion and how
social hierarchies are subtlety reproduced through distinctions
such as fashion and humor, in addition to the traditional
indicators of wealth and class. Adding another dimension to the
complex nature of social exclusion, Privilege at Play shows how
elite social relations and spaces allow for the resource hoarding
and monopolization that helps create and maintain poverty.
Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of
conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip hop-often regarded
as politically radioactive-in his presidential campaigns. Just as
important was the extent to which hip hop artists and activists
embraced him in return. This new relationship fundamentally altered
the dynamics between popular culture, race, youth, and national
politics. But what does this relationship look like now, and what
will it look like in the decades to come? The Hip Hop & Obama
Reader attempts to answer these questions by offering the first
systematic analysis of hip hop and politics in the Obama era and
beyond. Over the course of 14 chapters, leading scholars and
activists offer new perspectives on hip hop's role in political
mobilization, grassroots organizing, campaign branding, and voter
turnout, as well as the ever-changing linguistic, cultural, racial,
and gendered dimensions of hip hop in the U.S. and abroad. Inviting
readers to reassess how Obama's presidency continues to be shaped
by the voice of hip hop and, conversely, how hip hop music and
politics have been shaped by Obama, The Hip Hop & Obama Reader
critically examines hip hop's potential to effect social change in
the 21st century. This volume is essential reading for scholars and
fans of hip hop, as well as those interested in the shifting
relationship between democracy and popular culture. Foreword:
Tricia Rose, Brown University Afterword: Cathy Cohen, University of
Chicago
Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos,
feature films, festivals, and concerts has presented the music of
Balkan Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted
them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman
notes, "Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people." In
this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures
who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis
of how Romani musicians address the challenges of discrimination.
Focusing on southeastern Europe then moving to the diaspora, her
book examines the music within Romani communities, the lives and
careers of outstanding musicians, and the marketing of music in the
electronic media and "world music" concert circuit. Silverman
touches on the way that the Roma exemplify many qualities-
adaptability, cultural hybridity, transnationalism-that are taken
to characterize late modern experience. Rather than just
celebrating these qualities, she presents the musicians as
complicated, pragmatic individuals who work creatively within the
many constraints that inform their lives. As both a performer and
presenter on the world music circuit, Silverman has worked
extensively with Romani communities for more than two decades both
in their home countries and in the diaspora. At a time when the
political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity
of their music are objects of international attention, Silverman's
book is incredibly timely.
Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed
attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries,
the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In
this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse
of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the
representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place
included such varied works as topographical histories, literary
anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel
literature, and maps.
By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that
their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities,
and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious
and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of
the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped
to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world,
reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping
tradition in the Islamic world.
Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate
the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of
religion and family to notions of community and belonging among
Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.
In 2005, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath starkly revealed the
continued racial polarization of America. Disproportionately
impacted by the ravages of the storm, displaced black victims were
often characterized by the media as "refugees." The
characterization was wrong-headed, and yet deeply revealing.
Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire traces the long history of
this and related terms, like alien and foreign, a rhetorical
shorthand that has shortchanged black America for over 250 years.
In tracing the language and politics that have informed debates
about African American citizenship, Sanctuary in effect illustrates
the historical paradox of African American subjecthood: while
frequently the target of legislation (slave law, the Black Codes,
and Jim Crow), blacks seldom benefited from the actions of the
state. Blackness helped to define social, cultural, and legal
aspects of American citizenship in a manner that excluded black
people themselves. They have been treated, rather, as foreigners in
their home country. African American civil rights efforts worked to
change this. Activists and intellectuals demanded equality, but
they were often fighting for something even more fundamental: the
recognition that blacks were in fact human beings. As citizenship
forced acknowledgement of the humanity of African Americans, it
thus became a gateway to both civil and human rights.
Waligora-Davis shows how artists like Langston Hughes underscored
the power of language to define political realities, how critics
like W.E.B. Du Bois imagined democratic political strategies, and
how they and other public figures have used their writing as a
forum to challenge the bankruptcy of a social economy in which the
value of human life is predicated on race and civil identity.
In Genocide Denials and the Law, Ludovic Hennebel and Thomas
Hochmann offer a thorough study of the relationship between law and
genocide denial from the perspectives of specialists from six
countries. This controversial topic provokes strong international
reactions involving emotion caused by denial along with concerns
about freedom of speech.
The authors offer an in-depth study of the various legal issues
raised by the denial of crimes against humanity, presenting
arguments both in favor of and in opposition to prohibition of this
expression. They do not adopt a pro or contra position, but include
chapters written by proponents and opponents of a legal prohibition
on genocide denial.
Hennebel and Hochmann fill a void in academic publications by
comparatively examining this issue with a collection of original
essays. They tackle this diverse topic comprehensively, addressing
not only the theoretical and philosophical aspects of denial, but
also the specific problems faced by judges who implement
anti-denial laws. Genocide Denials and the Law will provoke
discussion of many theoretical questions regarding free speech,
including the relationship between freedom of expression and truth,
hate, memory, and history.
The white nationalist movement in the United States is nothing new.
Yet, prior to the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia, many Americans assumed that it existed only on the
fringes of our political system, a dark cultural relic pushed out
of the mainstream by the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
The events in Charlottesville made clear that we had underestimated
the scale of the white nationalist movement; Donald Trump's
reaction to it brought home the reality that the movement had
gained political clout in the White House. Yet, as this book
argues, the mainstreaming of white nationalism did not begin with
Trump, but began during the Obama era. Hard White explains how the
mainstreaming of white nationalism occurred, pointing to two major
shifts in the movement. First, Barack Obama's presidential tenure,
along with increases in minority representation, fostered white
anxiety about Muslims, Latinx immigrants, and black Americans.
While anti-Semitic sentiments remained somewhat on the fringes,
hostility toward Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans bubbled up
into mainstream conservative views. At the same time, white
nationalist leaders shifted their focus and resources from protest
to electoral politics, and the book traces the evolution of the
movement's political forays from David Duke to the American Freedom
Party, the Tea Party, and, finally, the emergence of the Alt-Right.
Interestingly it also shows that white hostility peaked in 2012-not
2016. Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram also show that the
key to Trump's win was not persuading economically anxious voters
to become racially conservative. Rather, Trump mobilized racially
hostile voters in the key swing states that flipped from blue to
red in 2016. In fact, the authors show that voter turnout among
white racial conservatives in the six states that Trump flipped was
significantly higher in 2016 compared to 2012. They also show that
white racial conservatives were far more likely to participate in
the election beyond voting in 2016. However, the rise of white
nationalism has also mobilized racial progressives. While the book
argues that white extremism will have enduring effects on American
electoral politics for some time to come, it suggests that the way
forward is to refocus the conversation on social solidarity,
concluding with ideas for how to build this solidarity.
In the past few decades, and across disparate geographical
contexts, states have adopted policies and initiatives aimed at
institutionalizing relationships with "their" diasporas. These
practices, which range from creating new ministries to granting
dual citizenship, are aimed at integrating diasporas as part of a
larger "global" nation that is connected to, and has claims on the
institutional structures of the home state. Although links, both
formal and informal, between diasporas and their presumptive
homelands have existed in the past, the recent developments
constitute a far more widespread and qualitatively different
phenomenon.
In this book, Latha Varadarajan theorizes this novel and largely
overlooked trend by introducing the concept of the "domestic
abroad." Varadarajan demonstrates that the remapping of the
imagined boundaries of the nation, the visible surface of the
phenomenon, is intrinsically connected to the political-economic
transformation of the state that is typically characterized as
"neoliberalism." The domestic abroad must therefore be understood
as the product of two simultaneous, on-going processes: the
diasporic re-imagining of the nation and the neoliberal
restructuring of the state.
The argument unfolds through a historically nuanced study of the
production of the domestic abroad in India. The book traces the
complex history and explains the political logic of the remarkable
transition from the Indian state's guarded indifference toward its
diaspora in the period after independence, to its current
celebrations of the "global Indian nation." In doing so, The
Domestic Abroad reveals the manner in which the boundaries of the
nation and the extent of the authority of the state, in India and
elsewhere, are dynamically shaped by the development of capitalist
social relations on both global and national scales.
Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's
peoples-the world's social majority-quietly live in non-modern,
non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of
the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human
world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both,
continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In
this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work
with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her
argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such
traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other
words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other
beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual
intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and
communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating,
creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind
the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use.
Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are
appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in
the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate
objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature-she is, in the
final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging
and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic
perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and
poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the
''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of
development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other
social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of
common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes
with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its
shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the
development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle
community between humans as well as between humans and the
other-than-human world.
While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book,"
American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as
a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle
with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine
new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews.
Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that
Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to
American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also
played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in
the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the
struggle between Jewish identification and integration into
American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to
show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are
formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and
choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers
evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of
embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty
images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a
wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David
Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson,
Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin
Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for
interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in
which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal
and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them
apart.
Klezmer in Europe has been a controversial topic ever since this
traditional Jewish wedding music made it to the concert halls and
discos of Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. Played mostly by
non-Jews and for non-Jews, it was hailed as "fakelore," "Jewish
Disneyland" and even "cultural necrophilia." Klezmer's Afterlife is
the first book to investigate this fascinating music scene in
Central Europe, giving voice to the musicians, producers and
consumers of the resuscitated klezmer. Contesting common hypotheses
about the klezmer revival in Germany and Poland stemming merely
from feelings of guilt which emerged in the years following the
Holocaust, author Magdalena Waligorska investigates the
consequences of the klezmer boom on the people who staged it and
places where it occurred. Offering not only a documentation of the
klezmer revival in two of its European headquarters (Krakow and
Berlin), but also an analysis of the Jewish / non-Jewish encounter
it generates, Waligorska demonstrates how the klezmer revival
replicates and reinvents the image of the Jew in Polish and German
popular culture, how it becomes a soundtrack to Holocaust
commemoration and how it is used as a shining example of successful
cultural policy by local officials. Drawing on a variety of fields
including musicology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and
cultural studies, Klezmer's Afterlife will appeal to a wide range
scholars and students studying Jewish culture, and cultural
relations in post-Holocaust central Europe, as well as general
readers interested in klezmer music and music revivals more
generally.
This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the
moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth
century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New
Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The
story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well
known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a
relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how
indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not
only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory
using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law
that applies between peoples - a kind of law of nations, comparable
to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this
volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments,
European justifications of colonization should be understood not as
an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part,
as a form of counter-claim.
Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings
together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary
scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton,
Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes
this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue
in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies
and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa.
There is no other book that examines the issue of European
dispossession of native peoples in such a way.
Volume XXII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary
Jewry explores the major and rapid changes experienced by a
population known variously as "Sephardim," "Oriental" Jews and
"Mizrahim" over the last fifty years. Although Sephardim are
popularly believed to have originated in Spain or Portugal, the
majority of Mizrahi Jews today are actually the descendants of Jews
from Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East, North Africa,
and Asia. They constitute a growing proportion of Israeli Jewry and
continue to revitalize Jewish culture in places as varied as
France, Latin America, and the United States.
Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews offers a collection of new
scholarship on the issues of self-definition and identity facing
Sephardic Jewry. The essays draw on a variety of
disciplines--demography, history, political science, sociology,
religious and gender studies, anthropology, and literature.
Contributors explore the issues surrounding the emergence and
increasingly wide usage of "Mizrahi" in place of "Sephardic," as
well as the invigoration of Sephardic Judaism. They look at the
evolution of Sephardic politics in Israel through the dramatic rise
and continuing influence of the Shas political party and its
spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Other contributors examine
the variegated nature of Mizrahi immigration to Israel, fictional
portraits of female Mizrahi immigrants to Israel in the 1940s and
1950s, contemporary Mizrahi Israel feminism, modern Arab
historiography's portrayal of Jews of Muslim lands, and the
changing Sephardic halakhic tradition.
Across the world, governments design and implement policies with
the explicit goal of promoting social justice. But can such
institutions change entrenched social norms? And what effects
should we expect from differently designed policies? Francesca R.
Jensenius' Social Justice through Inclusion is an empirically rich
study of one of the most extensive electoral quota systems in the
world: the reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former
"untouchables") in India's legislative assemblies. Combining
evidence from quantitative datasets from the period 1969-2012,
archival work, and in-depth interviews with politicians, civil
servants, and voters across India, the book explores the long-term
effects of electoral quotas for the political elite and the general
population. It shows that the quota system has played an important
role in reducing caste-based discrimination, particularly at the
elite level. Interestingly, this is not because the system has led
to more group representation - SC politicians working specifically
for SC interests - but because it has made possible the creation
and empowerment of a new SC elite who have gradually become
integrated into mainstream politics. This is a study of India, but
the findings and discussions have broader implications. Policies
such as quotas are usually supported with arguments about various
assumed positive long-term consequences. The nuanced discussions in
this book shed light on how electoral quotas for SCs have shaped
the incentives for politicians, parties, and voters, and indicate
the trade-offs inherent in how such policies of group inclusion are
designed.
In late July 1910, a shocking number of African Americans in Texas
were slaughtered by white mobs in the Slocum area of Anderson
County and the Percilla-Augusta region of neighboring Houston
County. The number of dead surpassed the casualties of the Rosewood
Massacre in Florida and rivaled those of the Tulsa Riots in
Oklahoma, but the incident--one of the largest mass murders of
blacks in American history--is now largely forgotten. Investigate
the facts behind this harrowing act of genocide in E.R. Bills's
compelling inquiry into the Slocum Massacre.
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial
Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American
nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this
centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of
American national identity and the projection of American power,
Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been
integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics,
and historiography that African American cultural production has
more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided
a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American
elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the
vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers,
artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of
classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to
an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If
the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture
have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an
"empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it
has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather
another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland
Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving
into an "empire of ruin."
The racial injustice that continues to plague the United States
couldn't be a clearer challenge to the country's idea of itself as
a liberal and democratic society, where all citizens have a chance
at a decent life. Moreover, it raises deep questions about the
adequacy of our political ideas, particularly liberal political
theory, to guide us out of the quagmire of inequality. So what does
justice demand in response? What must a liberal society do to
address the legacies of its past, and how should we aim to
reconceive liberalism in order to do so? In this book, Andrew Valls
considers two solutions, one posed from the political right and one
from the left. From the right is the idea that norms of equal
treatment require that race be treated as irrelevant-in other
words, that public policy and political institutions be race-blind.
From the left is the idea that race-conscious policies are
temporary, and are justifiable insofar as they promote diversity.
This book takes issue with both of these sets of views, and
therefore with the constricted ways in which racial justice is
debated in the United States today. Valls argues that liberal
theory permits, and in some cases requires, race-conscious policies
and institutional arrangements in the pursuit of racial equality.
In doing so, he aims to do two things: first, to reorient the terms
of racial justice and, secondly, to make liberal theory confront
its tendency to ignore race in favor of an underspecified
commitment to multiculturalism. He argues that the insistence that
race-conscious policies be temporary is harmful to the cause of
racial justice, defends black-dominated institutions and
communities as a viable alternative to integration, and argues
against the tendency to subsume claims for racial justice,
particularly as they regard African Americans, under more general
arguments for diversity.
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