The controversial new thesis of Faces of Inequality is that a state's racial and ethnic composition, more than any other factor, directs its political processes and policies. Social diversity is therefore central to any understanding of state political cultures. Overturning long-established conventional wisdom, Rodney Hero has developed a completely new lens through which to view American politics.

The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the United States. Its athletes receive multi-million dollar contracts and almost endless media attention. The league's most important game, the Super Bowl, is practically a national holiday. Making it to the NFL, however, is not about the promised land of fame and fortune. Robert Turner draws on his personal experience as a former pro and interviews with over 120 current and former NFL players to get behind the bravado and reveal what it means to be an athlete in the NFL and why so many players struggle with life after football. Without guaranteed contracts, the majority of players are forced out of the league after a few seasons. Over three-quarters of retirees experience bankruptcy or financial ruin, two-thirds live with chronic pain, and too many find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Robert Turner argues that the fall from grace of so many players is no accident. The NFL, he contends, is a total institution, powerfully determining their experiences in and out of the league. The labor agreement provides little job insecurity and few health and retirement benefits, and the owners refuse to share power with the players, making change difficult. Even more, the entire process of becoming an elite football player-from high school through the pros-leaves athletes with few marketable skills and little preparation for their first Sunday off the field. With compassion and objectivity, Not for Long reveals the life and mind of the NFL athlete and provides a guide on what reforms and policies might help players transition successfully out of the sport.

This poignant play, written by current and formerly incarcerated authors, uses gripping truths and soulful dialogue to reveal the human cost of America's for-profit justice system. The story follows Omar, pulled back into the prison system after trying to lift his family out of poverty, who struggles to maintain a sense of humanity while fighting to keep his loved ones close. According to NJ.com, "From institutionalized racism to addiction to the prison-industrial complex, this is a play about a great many large, pressing social challenges, but at its core it is a play about one family and its struggles to remain united as their world steadily crumbles. Impactful, warm, and unrelenting, this play that began as an experiment turns out to be an excellent examination of the human cost of a harsh and inhospitable world." All profits from the book will go to a prison re-entry fund run by The Second Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, New Jersey to help the playwrights secure housing and continue their schooling upon release.

Without a doubt, structural and institutionalised racism is still present in Britain and Europe, a factor that social work education and training has been slow to acknowledge. In this timely new book, Lavalette and Penketh reveal that racism towards Britain's minority ethnic groups has undergone a process of change. They affirm the importance of social work to address issues of 'race' and racism in education and training by presenting a critical review of a this demanding aspect of social work practice. Original in its approach, and with diverse perspectives from key practitioners in the field, the authors examine contemporary anti-racism, including racism towards Eastern European migrants, Roma people and asylum seekers. It also considers the implications of contemporary racism for current practice. This is essential reading for anyone academically or professionally interested in social work, and the developments in this field of study post 9/11.

Hikikomori, which literally means "withdrawal," is considered an increasingly prevalent form of social isolation in Japanese society. This issue has been attracting worldwide attention for two decades and is now recognized as a problem for the youth as well as for middle-aged and older adults. Based on interviews with people who have experienced it, Teppei Sekimizu explores what the hikikomori experience is like from a sociological perspective. He also examines the characteristics of four decades of hikikomori discourse by governments, professionals, and mass media; the difficulties faced by parents with hikikomori children; and the social policy which has relegated most provision of welfare for citizens to the private sector. Through these examinations, the author illustrates how the exclusive labor market and familial social policies create masses of family-dependent and isolated individuals in contemporary Japan. The Sociology of the Hikikomori Experience leads the reader to understand the manifold hikikomori phenomenon in a wider social context and also to a deeper understanding of Japanese society itself, which has regarded not the government, but corporations, families, and communities responsible for individual well-being.

The contributors to this original volume provide a new and nuanced approach to studying how discourses of religion shape public domains in sites of political contestation and "broken solidarities." Our public discourse is saturated with intractable debates about religion, race, gender, and nationalism. Examples range from Muslim women and headscarves to Palestine/Israel and to global anti-Black racism, along with other pertinent issues. We need fresh thinking to navigate the questions that these debates raise for social justice and solidarity across lines of difference. In Religion and Broken Solidarities, the contributors provide powerful reflections and wisdom to guide how we can approach these questions with deep ethical commitments, intersectional sensibilities, and intellectual rigor. Religion and Broken Solidarities traces the role of religious discourse in unrealized moments of solidarity between marginalized groups who ostensibly share similar aims. Religion, the contributors contend, cannot be separated from national, racial, gendered, and other ways of belonging. These modes of belonging make it difficult for different minoritized groups to see how their struggles might benefit from engagement with one another. The four chapters, which interpret historical and contemporary events with a sharp and critical lens, examine accusations of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism in the Women's March in Washington, DC; the failure of feminists in Iran and Turkey to realize a common cause because of nationalist discourse concerning religiosity and secularity; Black Catholics seeking to overcome the problems of modernity in the West; and the disjunction between the Palestinian and Mizrahi cause in Palestine/Israel. Together these analyses show that overcoming constraints to solidarity requires alternative imaginaries to that of the modern nation-state. Contributors: Atalia Omer, Joshua Lupo, Perin E. Gurel, Juliane Hammer, Ruth Carmi, Brenna Moore, and Melani McAlister.

Britain is now permanently a multiracial and multicultural society, with a race relations legislative framework. This is an analysis of the contribution made by this legislation to the development of British race relations. The politics of the Race Relations Act 1976, the issues regarding law enforcement and the impact of legislation in British race relations are examined. Contextualising Britain, the book puts the situation in this country within the European Union framework and compares it with the United States. It also looks to the future and makes relevant suggestions to improve the current legislation.

This timely book investigates Black-Jewish estrangement and the erosion of Black support for Israel. Topics such as the response of Afro-Americans to the early Zionist movement; the emergence of the Jewish state in the Middle East; the attitudes of such Black luminaries as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Edward Wilmot Blyden; and Black reactions to the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 are chronicled and analyzed. The normalization of relations between Israel and the Republic of South Africa in recent years is examined along with Israel's ties with Black African countries, links between Arab and African nations and South Africa, and alleged Israeli military and nuclear collaboration with the apartheid regime. Another chapter looks at the friction between the Israeli government and a sect of Black Hebrew Israelites from the United States who settled in the Negev and at Black American involvement in the matter. The considerable effect that clashes over domestic questions, most notably affirmative action, have had on Black perceptions is also considered, as is the controversy between Jesse Jackson and the Jewish community.

The Protestant white majority in the nineteenth century was convinced that Mormonism represented a racial-not merely religious-departure from the mainstream and they spent considerable effort attempting to deny Mormon whiteness. Being white equalled access to political, social, and economic power, all aspects of citizenship in which outsiders sought to limit or prevent Mormon participation. At least a part of those efforts came through persistent attacks on the collective Mormon body, ways in which outsiders suggested that Mormons were physically different, racially more similar to marginalized groups than they were white. Medical doctors went so far as to suggest that Mormon polygamy was spawning a new race. Mormons responded with aspirations toward whiteness. It was a back and forth struggle between what outsiders imagined and what Mormons believed. Mormons ultimately emerged triumphant, but not unscathed. At least a portion of the cost of their struggle came at the expense of their own black converts. Mormon leaders moved away from universalistic ideals toward segregated priesthood and temples, policies firmly in place by the early twentieth century. So successful were they at claiming whiteness for themselves, that by the time Mormon Mitt Romney sought the White House in 2012, he was labelled "the whitest white man to run for office in recent memory. " Mormons once again found themselves on the wrong side of white.

This book argues that it is the fluidity of women's identities that enables them to bridge the gender divides and roles ascribed to them by society and culture with those that they have chosen for themselves whilst retaining a sense of their self.

The impact of St. Mark's Community Center and United Methodist Church on the city of New Orleans is immense. Their stories are dramatic reflections of the times. But these stories are more than mere reflections because St. Mark's changed the picture, leading the way into different understandings of what urban diversity could and should mean. This book looks at the contributions of St. Mark's, in particular the important role played by women (especially deaconesses) as the church confronted social issues through the rise of the social gospel movement and into the modern civil rights era.
Ellen Blue uses St. Mark's as a microcosm to tell a larger, overlooked story about women in the Methodist Church and the sources of reform. One of the few volumes on women's history within the church, this book challenges the dominant narrative of the social gospel movement and its past.
"St. Mark's and the Social Gospel" begins by examining the period between 1895 and World War I, chronicling the center's development from its early beginnings as a settlement house that served immigrants and documenting the early social gospel activities of Methodist women in New Orleans. Part II explores the efforts of subsequent generations of women to further gender and racial equality between the 1920s and 1960. Major topics addressed in this section include an examination of the deaconesses' training in Christian Socialist economic theory and the church's response to the Brown decision. The third part focuses on the church's direct involvement in the school desegregation crisis of 1960, including an account of the pastor who broke the white boycott of a desegregated elementary school by taking his daughter back to class there. Part IV offers a brief look at the history of St. Mark's since 1965.
Shedding new light on an often neglected subject, "St. Mark's and the Social Gospel" will be welcomed by scholars of religious history, local history, social history, and women's studies.

The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after. Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republication and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what was previously a weak federal system. Later administrations from Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more. Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil right-physical safety-eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom. The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America

This book is the first sociological and feminist critique of multicultural theory and practice. Using empirical research, it answers the question: is multiculturalism bad for women? arguing that it is not only bad for (minority ethnic) women, but for minority and majority communities, and for society as a whole.

Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race is an interdisciplinary, supplemental textbook for undergraduate students that challenges students to see race as everyone's issue. By beginning with an understanding of privilege and power, the text engages all students as raced human beings, thus better preparing students to explore discrimination. Drawing on sociology, psychology, history, and economics, it provides an introduction to the concepts of white privilege and social power while helping to break down some of the resistance students feel in discussing race. Seeing White makes issues of race accessible and challenges all students to think critically.

Cyberhate: The Far-Right in the Digital Age explores how right-wing extremists operate in cyberspace by examining their propaganda, funding, subcultures, movements, and ideologies, as well as the legal and cultural responses offline far-right violence. Scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines provide extensive analysis of how the far-right operates on the internet and why this particular type of hate often progresses to extreme violence. Specific topics include far-right propaganda, bitcoin funding, online subcultures such as the manosphere, theories that explain why some take the path of violence, and specific movements including the alt-right and the terroristic Atomwaffen Division. Relying on manifestos and other correspondence posted online by recent perpetrators of mass murder, this book focuses on specific groups, individuals, and acts of violence to explain how concepts like "white genocide" and incel ideology have motivated recent deadly violence. This book would be of interest to anyone studying criminal justice, criminology, psychology, cybersecurity, religion, law, education, or terrorism studies.

This is a study of how ethnic diversity is represented in public institutions in India, and of the politics and policy solutions devised to manage ethnic inequalities. With new data on representational patterns in parliament and cabinet, it provides an account of representation that encompasses the diversity of caste, tribe and religion. Emphasising the overlapping nature of social and economic inequalities in India, it seeks to place the issue of material disadvantage at the very heart of the debate on ethnic and cultural inequality.

Bulter, Kozmetsky, and their contributors examine how immigrants and American minorities develop enterprises and create different degrees of economic stability. Top scholars in the field of immigrant and minority entrepreneurship discuss data that concentrates on new venture development and the ways immigrants incubate their enterprises. Groups analyzed include Chinese, Vietnamese, African-Americans, and Women. This book is about the ways Americans develop business enterprise for community and individual economic stability. The emphasis is on immigrant and minority entrepreneurship, and it provides rich historical research as well as recent analyses of these issues. We learn that an analysis of the 1910 data reveal that black Americans were more liekly than white Americans to be employers, and almost as likely as whites to be self-employed. We also learn that the immigrant experience includes unauthorized aliens, poverty, and the rise of vibrant business communities. While all immigrant groups contain those who are self-employed, when they do, the rate exceeds twice the figure for the domestic population and three times that of native-born minorities. Within the context of America becoming more entrepreneurial during the last decades of the 20th century, the number of women-owned enterprises increased more than 57 percent between, for example, 1982 and 1987. Top scholars in the field of immigrant and minority entrepreneurship discuss data that concentrates on new venture development and how immigrants incubate their enterprises. Groups included are Chinese, Vietnamese, African-Americans, and Women.

It is communion Sunday at a mixed-race church. A black pastor and white head elder stand before the sanctuary as lay leaders pass out the host. An African-American woman sings a gospel song as a woman of Asian descent plays the piano. Then a black woman in the congregation throws her hands up and yells, over and over, "Thank you Lawd!" A few other African-Americans in the pews say "Amen," while white parishioners sit stone-faced. The befuddled white head elder reads aloud from the Bible, his soft voice drowned out by the shouts of praise. Even in this proudly interracial church, America's racial divide is a constant presence.
In The Elusive Dream, Korie L. Edwards presents the surprising results of an in-depth study of interracial churches: they help perpetuate the very racial inequality they aim to abolish. To arrive at this conclusion, she combines a nuanced analysis of national survey data with an in-depth examination of one particular church. She shows that mixed-race churches adhere strongly to white norms. African Americans in multiracial settings adapt their behavior to make white congregants comfortable. Behavior that white worshipers perceive as out of bounds is felt by blacks as too limiting. Yet to make interracial churches work, blacks must adjust their behavior to accommodate the predilections of whites. They conform to white expectations in church just as they do elsewhere.
Thorough, incisive, and surprising, The Elusive Dream raises provocative questions about the ongoing problem of race in the national culture.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first- person and third-person--the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.

In less than four months, beginning with a staff of five, an obscure office buried deep within the federal bureaucracy transformed the nation's hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. These powerful private institutions, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, began equally caring for all on the basis of need. The book draws the reader into the struggles of the unsung heroes of the transformation, black medical leaders whose stubborn courage helped shape the larger civil rights movement. They demanded an end to federal subsidization of discrimination in the form of Medicare payments to hospitals that embraced the ""separate but equal"" creed that shaped American life during the Jim Crow era. Faced with this pressure, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations tried to play a cautious chess game, but that game led to perhaps the biggest gamble in the history of domestic policy. Leaders secretly recruited volunteer federal employees to serve as inspectors and an invisible army of hospital workers and civil rights activists to work as agents, making it impossible for hospitals to get Medicare dollars with mere paper compliance. These triumphs did not come without casualties, yet the story offers lessons and hope for realizing this transformational dream.

Does the term "Latino"--a construct of the U.S. government--successfully encompass the wide variety of Spanish-speaking people in this country? This introductory topic begins an overview of 10 major controversies that have embroiled U.S. Latinos, including Puerto Ricans, in recent years. Latinos have one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States today, making these issues front-page news across the country.

Issues include:

Race Classification

Assimilation

Bilingual Education

Open Borders

Affirmative Action

Interracial Dating and Marriage

Funding Education and Health Care for Undocumented Immigrant

Amnesty Program

U.S. Military and Political Presence in Cuba

U.S. Military Bases in Puerto Rico

Each topic is presented with a background, pro and con positions, and questions for the purpose of student debate and papers."

The 1960s and 1970s was a time of repression and a time of freedom, a time of ferment rarely seen before in this country. People marched-in, sat-in, loved-in. The will of the people persuaded one president not to run for reelection, forced another president to resign, and ended an iniquitous war. Social and political revolutions took place: Civil rights, women's liberation, protests against the irrelevancies of education and social norms, a counter-culture revolution on the part of young people. The keys to both protest and change were communications and education. Dr. Robert L. Hilliard not only observed, but participated in and affected America's counter-culture revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, from the vantage point of several key federal government positions in Washington. Based on his papers and speeches from that period, with current commentary added, this is a revealing look at media and education's lost and found opportunities during that period, and what must be done so that they serve America's needs adequately in the new millennium.

In times of heightened national security, scholars and activists from the communities under suspicion often attempt to alert the public to the more complex stories behind the headlines. But when they raise questions about the government, military and police policy, these individuals are routinely shut down and accused of being terrorist sympathisers or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is immense pressure to condemn what society at large fears. This collection explains how the expectation to condemn has emerged, tracking it against the normalisation of racism, and explores how writers manage to subvert expectations as part of their commitment to anti-racism. -- .

Within the Middle East there are a wide range of minority groups outside the mainstream religious and ethnic culture. This book provides a detailed examination of their rights as minorities within this region, and their changing status throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rights of minorities in the Middle East are subject to a range of legal frameworks, having developed in part from Islamic law, and in recent years subject to international human rights law and institutional frameworks. The book examines the context in which minority rights operate within this conflicted region, investigating how minorities engage with (or are excluded from) various sites of power and how state practice in dealing with minorities (often ostensibly based on Islamic authority) intersects with and informs modern constitutionalism and international law. The book identifies who exactly can be classed as a minority group, analysing in detail the different religious and ethnic minorities across the region. The book also pays special attention to the plight of minorities who are spread between various states, often as the result of conflict. It assesses the applicable domestic legislative instruments within the three countries investigated as case studies: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and highlights key domestic remedies that could serve as models for ensuring greater social cohesion and greater inclusion of minorities in the political life of these countries.

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law? In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today. Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.