This book illuminates how far away we are from the real race issues that are deserve our attention.

Controversial and strikingly original, Race Experts looks at how we capsized racial progress in the quest for self-esteem. Now available in paperback, it uncovers the hidden trajectory and terms of our thinking about race relations since the 1960s. Since segregation's dismantling, intense anxiety has surrounded interracial encounters, and a movement has arisen to engineer social relations through the specification of elaborate codes of conduct. Diversity Training in business, multicultural education in schools, and cross-cultural psychotherapy have created a world of prescriptions. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn carefully examines the teachings of these self-appointed "experts" and offers a bold and searching analysis of the origins of their ideas in the human potential movement and the radical milieu of the 1960s. Casting race primarily as an issue of etiquette or therapy, rather than of justice or equality, has had dire consequences for American life, diverting attention from the deeper problems of poverty, violence, and continued inequality and discrimination. In this sobering analysis, Race Experts illuminates how far away we are from the issues that deserve our attention.

In Race Experts Linda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in T​he Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrović, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. She was nonetheless commissioned by the Field Museum to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and everyday ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the artist brought scientific understandings of race and the everyday racial attitudes of museum visitors together in powerful and productive friction. The exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate not only the expertise of racial science and her own artistic training but also the popular ideas about race that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of racial expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

There are wide racial disparities in virtually every sphere of economic life. African American workers earn less than whites. They are more likely to be denied loans than whites. Minority-owned businesses are less likely to win lucrative bids on state and federal contracts than are white male owned businesses. Black children are more likely than whites to be reported to child protective services for neglect or abuse. There are even huge disparities in downing rates between blacks and whites. What to do about these disparities? There is a fundamental disagreement about the appropriate remedies to these varied indicators of racial inequality. Part of the disagreement stems from differences in public perceptions about the underlying causes of the inequality. But, another form of disagreement relates to the opposition to the remedy of choice during much of the 1970s and 1980s: Affirmative Action. Race conscious remedies -- like affirmative action policies in hiring, college admissions, and business contracting -- suffer from legal and constitutional challenges, compounded by hostility from the majority of Americans. The alternative – race-neutral remedies – attempt to address racial disparities without directly targeting benefits exclusively to racial minority group members. In doing so, race-neutral remedies putatively help minorities without hurting majority group members. The authors of Race Neutrality: Rationalizing Remedies to Racial Inequality make the case that policy analysts should shift from a focus on whether a remedy is race-conscious or not to a focus on the underlying problem that the alternative remedies is attempting to resolve. This type of rethinking of the problem of racial inequality will reveal that sometimes race-neutral remedies hold great promise in reducing disparities. Often, however, race-neutral remedies fail to do what they are intended to do. The authors challenge the reader to think about why race-neutral remedies—while desireable on their face—might fail to resolve protracted and persistent patterns of racial inequality in market and non-market contexts.

From its historical development to its current context, this is the first full-length overview of middle-class African American English.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.

Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars-working both within and beyond the United States-to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, authors cover a wide range of topics including the struggle over the very term "African American," the racialized language education debates within the increasing number of "majority-minority" immigrant communities in the U.S., the dangers of multicultural education in a Europe that is struggling to meet the needs of new migrants, and the sociopolitical and cultural meanings of linguistic styles used in Brazilian favelas, South African townships, Mexican and Puerto Rican barrios in Chicago, and Korean American "cram schools" in New York City, among other sites. Taking into account rapidly changing demographics in the U.S and shifting cultural and media trends across the globe--from Hip Hop cultures, to transnational Mexican popular and street cultures, to Israeli reality TV, to new immigration trends across Africa and Europe--Raciolinguistics shapes the future of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and language. By taking a comparative look across a diverse range of language and literacy contexts, the volume seeks not only to set the research agenda in this burgeoning area of study, but also to help resolve pressing educational and political problems in some of the most contested raciolinguistic contexts in the world.