Like Race Matters and Playing in the Dark, The House That Race Built is a cutting-edge work that confronts, honestly and passionately, the most critical issues facing American culture today along the fissure of race. In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today's most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society.

The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms. They urge us to recognize this fact and to work toward destroying the old, destructive patterns of racial dominion forever.