Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader (Blackwell Readers in Sociology)

Book Overview

In recent years, race and ethnicity have been the focus of theoretical, political, and policy debates. This comprehensive and timely reader covers the range of topics that have been at the center of these debates including critical race theory, multiracial feminism, mixed race, whiteness, citizenship and globalization. Contributors include Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Richard Delgado, Robert Miles, Michael Eric Dyson, Saskia Sassen, Etienne Balibar, Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Stanley Aronowitz, and Collette Guillaumin.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0631210229
• ISBN13: 9780631210221
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 468 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.7" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Indispensable resource

Practitioner fields inevitably overlap in social science professions, making it impossible to effectively study how goverment and people impact each other without considering the social stratification and classification of inter-related groups. Past mono-discipline efforts understandably released incomplete, contradictory, and ultimately unhelpful studies. The picture generated only represented a selective fraction of what actually existed. Miron, Torres and Inda eloquently bring historically separate social science disciplines together for social change where other people have previously and currently failed.Ranging from case studies to quantitative analysis, the collection essays examine why race and ethnicity continue to be a controversial part of America. Bureaucrats and their constituents react negatively (even with open hostilities) because we subconciously fear what is different from our own immediate enviroment. It is also easier to blame these different groups for our real and percieved misfortune (such as the overseas relocation of factory jobs) than to critically examine the specifics of initially benign-sounding policies and our own (quiet) compliance for not applying the critical eye.Aidia Hurtado's essay "The trickster's play" exposes the racism 'liberal' whites inadvertently engage in when they telling people of color just how damaged they are by racism and attempt to negate the critical different experiences between various ethnicities through 'color-blind' policies, subconciously denying racism's very existence. Although other works such as This Bridge Called My Back (1982) do a far more comprehensive job of intergrating women of color into their policy prescriptions, the section on gender pointedly reminds readers they are constantly obligated to consider how gender and other subordinate idenities intrsect with each other. In the sociopolitical hierarcy of American society, the low income non-white woman was historically (and currently) branded as the least valuable society member. It is most telling that the same perpetrators are only begining to be held accountable now, but the global community clearly has a long way to go.