George Lipsitz

Luke Charles Harris

Kimberle Crenshaw

Written by a trio of celebrated scholars, The Race Track is a twenty-first-century road map to how race operates in America today. From its covert and psychological dimensions to how race plays a key role in allocating assets to some while denying them to others and a “whiteness protection program” that keeps race-based advantages intact, this landmark new book challenges some of society’s most cherished notions— about merit, markets, and choice, and about the causes and consequences of unequal racial outcomes. As leaders of a cutting-edge think-tank, the authors have crafted an essential guide to contemporary racism based on years of looking beyond the ivory tower and talking to ordinary people from all walks of life. Amid all the “post-racial” rhetoric, The Race Track boldly claims that it is not racist to talk about race while structural racism is alive and well. Asserting that color-bound problems cannot be remedied with colorblind solutions, this courageous new work lays out what the full range of responses must be if we are truly interested in achieving justice for all people.

Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism

The Race Track

Daniel Martinez HoSang

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines’ research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.

Luke Charles Harris

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