Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations - Softcover

Feagin, Joe R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415925320 ISBN 13: 9780415925327

Publisher: Routledge, 2001

Synopsis

Despite the apparent advances since the civil rights era, America remains fundamentally racist, argues award-winning author Joe Feagin. Racist America is a bold, thoughtful exploration of the ubiquity of race in contemporary life. From a black New Jersey dentist stopped by police more than 100 times for driving to work in an expensive car to the labourer who must defend his promotion against charges of undeserved affirmative action, Feagin lays bare the economic, ideologic, and political structure of American racism. In doing so he develops an antiracist theory rooted not only in the latest empirical data but also in the current reality of racism in the U.S.

About this title

About the Author

Joe R. Feagin teaches sociology at the University of Floriday at Gainsville. He is the author of over thirty books including The Agony of Education and White Racism, all published by Routledge.

From Kirkus Reviews

A sometimes searing indictment of American racial practices.Sociologist Feagin (White Racism, not reviewed) traces the development of American racism to its roots in Europe. Ideologically, race was not a major consideration in human endeavors until the beginning of the European slave trade in the 1400s, Feagin tells us. But some 300 years later, it had grown full-blown and become a major cornerstone of intellectual thought--dominated by such thinkers as Locke, Kant, and Hegel, and by the Frenchman Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. All of these harbored anti-black views to varying degrees, including the curious natural-law notion that blacks somehow were born to be slaves. Much of this 18th-century twaddle was absorbed by our Founding Fathers, especially by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. Feagin also examines Reconstruction, the lynchings of the late–19th and early–20th centuries, the Civil Rights era, and the post–Civil Rights period. As we enter a point in the new millennium where the white population is beginning to shrink, Feagin points out that less than half the population of America's four largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago) is white. This and other factors lead Feagin to call for an international view of civil rights (i.e., one in which all are entitled to equal concern because all are human beings and not members of this or that state or tribe). Feagin, who is avowedly influenced by Franz Fanon and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), is at his overwrought best when he is in historical pursuit of the roots of racism. Perhaps because it is something not readily fresh on the mind, it is a matter of more than idle curiosity what Benjamin Franklin and James Madison thought about whiteness. On the other hand, matters such as affirmative action and reparations are too widely discussed and familiar to make Feagin's discussion of them very interesting or fresh.A useful study, even for those who are not guilt-ridden. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415925320
• ISBN 13: 9780415925327
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320