The Racial Order

In the past half century, remarkable progress in race relations has been made--a near majority of Americans, just 40 years ago, favored a ban on interracial marriage.  But at the social level, racial domination remains entrenched--our cities remain starkly segregated.  Racial domination and racial progress push and pull at each other:  Barack Obama was elected president in a country that imprisons more of its citizens than any other--the incarceration rate of poor, uneducated black men soars high above the national average.  Latinos have moved closer to the center while anti-immigrant sentiment stretches the length of the Southern border.  One Native American nation flourishes while another sinks deeper into poverty.  Emirbayer and Desmond ask how it is that racial domination has endured for so long in America, in both social structure and social psychology.  The authors are not concerned exclusively with blacks and whites; they devote attention to a wide range of racial and ethnic groups, including Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.  They also provide a systematization of race theory (drawing from Bourdieu, Durkheim, and John Dewey), the first theoretical treatment of race in more than 25 years.    They have given scholars and students a conceptual framework in which to think and talk about why racial divisions have endured for so long, and to think about the logic of problem-solving (for racial policy) and the ideal of growth, also the issue of symbolic racial classification, plus the questions of power and conflict that emerge most clearly in fields of practice and systems of feeling, thought, and action that generate strategies for correcting injustices.   N.B.The Racial Order will appear late next spring about the same time as Emirbayer and Desmond’s successful textbook on race (Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America), published in 2009 by McGraw-Hill and due in a 2nd edition from Norton.  Ours is the theory book; Norton’s is the empirical book.  They will be used together, allowing us to promote and sell ours as a kind of tandem outing.