Full Description
This collection is a contribution to the ongoing examination of race and its relation to class and gender. The essays in the volume start with the premise that although race, like class and gender, is socially constructed, all three categories have been shaped profoundly by their context in a capitalist society. Race, in other words, is a historical category that develops not only in dialectical relation to class and gender but also in relation to the material conditions in which all three are forged. These assumptions underlie the organization of the volume, which is divided into three parts: "Racial Structures," which explores the problem of how race has historically been structured in modern capitalist societies; "Racial Ideology and Identity," which tackles diverse but interrelated questions regarding the representation of race and racism in dominant ideologies and discourses; and "Struggle," which builds on the insight that resistance to structures and ideologies of racial oppression is always situated in a particular time and place.
In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa.
Contributors are Pedro CabÁn, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Tola Olu Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.
Contents
Introduction vii
Part 1. Racial Structures 1
PART 1 READING QUESTIONS 6
1. The Changing Same: Black Racial Formation and Transformation as a Theory of the African American Experience 9
Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua
CHAPTER 1 READING QUESTIONS 39
2. Capitalism, Race, and Evolution in Imperial Britain, 1850-1900 48
Theodore Koditschek
CHAPTER 2 READING QUESTIONS 72
3. Globalization and the Cycle of Violence in Africa 80
Tola Olu Pearce
CHAPTER 3 READING QUESTIONS 95
4. White without End? The Abolition of Whiteness; or, The Rearticulation of Race 98
David Roediger
CHAPTER 4 READING QUESTIONS 108
Part 2. Racial Ideology and Identity 111
PART 2 READING QUESTIONS 114
5. Rationalizing the Racial Order: Racial Color-Blindness as a Legitimizing Ideology 115
Helen A. Neville
CHAPTER 5 READING QUESTIONS 134
6. Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project 138
Minkah Makalani
CHAPTER 6 READING QUESTIONS 153
7. Sociopsychological Processes in Racial Formation: A-Case Study of the Autobiographies of Former Black Panther Party Members 158
Monica M. White
CHAPTER 7 READING QUESTIONS 177
8. Benjamin Brawley and the Aesthetics of Racial Uplift 179
Jeffrey Williams
CHAPTER 8 READING QUESTIONS 200
Part 3. Struggle 205
PART 3 READING QUESTIONS 210
9. Organizing from the Margins: Japanese American Communists in Los Angeles during the Great Depression 211
Scott Kurashige
CHAPTER 9 READING QUESTIONS 227
10. Between Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Mason-Dixon Line: A Case Study of Black Freedom Movement Militancy in the Gateway City 231
Clarence Lang
CHAPTER 10 READING QUESTIONS 255
11. Common Legacies, Similar Futures: African American and Latino Studies 260
Pedro Caban
CHAPTER 11 READING QUESTIONS 282
12. "Livin' Just Enough for the City": An Essay on the Politics of Acquiring Food, Shelter, and Health in Urban America 286
David Crockett
CHAPTER 12 READING QUESTIONS 304
Conclusion 307
Glossary: Race Struggles 317
Contributors 325
Index 329
