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Stephen Steinberg offers a bold challenge to prevailing thought on race and ethnicity in American society. In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution. On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of "race relations" obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a "white sociology" that reflects white interests and viewpoints. What happens, he asks, when we foreground the interests and viewpoints of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of racial oppression? On ethnicity, Steinberg turns the tables and shows that the early sociologists who predicted ultimate assimilation have been vindicated by history. The evidence is overwhelming that the new immigrants, including Asians and most Latinos, are following in the footsteps of past immigrants-footsteps leading into the melting pot. But even today, there is the black exception. The end result is a dual melting pot-one for peoples of African descent and the other for everybody else. Race Relations: A Critique cuts through layers of academic jargon to reveal unsettling truths that call into question the nature and future of American nationality.
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Reviews
"A compelling critique of the development of the sociology of race. The book makes clear that we still have much to learn, not only about the structural foundations of racism, but also about how careerism can subtly twist our perspectives so that we fail to rise to the intellectual and moral challenges of the sociological project. Steinberg has done us a great service."
Frances Fox Piven
"...this book is an impressive achievement, an essay in radical racial theory by a recognized authority who is committed to the revitalization of our field and, more broadly, to the racial and social justice the United States has yet to achieve."
Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara
"...a passionate, personal, and devastating critique of the race relations paradigm, and perhaps more important, of sociology, the academic discipline that foisted that conceptual mystification upon American society By demolishing the race relations paradigm, Stephen Steinberg has made a seminal contribution to the study of race and racial oppression in the United States."
Sundiata Cha-Jua, Vice President of the National Council for Black Studies