Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy

Turning Back is a challenge to conservatives and liberals alike who have fueled the backlash against policies designed to alleviate racial inequality.


"Committed, anti-racist scholarship. . . . A useful contribution to clear thinking about race."


--George M. Fredrickson, The New York Review of Books

In this astringent, accessible study, Queens College sociologist Steinberg (The Ethnic Myth) takes issue with "the scholarship of backlash"?academic works that oppose remedying racial inequality. Gunnar Myrdal's classic An American Dilemma, the author points out, portrayed racism as a moral problem but did not go so far as to challenge "major political and economic institutions." By the 1960s, the paradigm had shifted, but recommendations in national critiques such as the Kerner Report for achieving racial equality were never implemented. Steinberg takes on both Daniel Patrick Moynihan and sociologist William Julius Wilson for legitimizing the retreat from race-based policies, and even argues that left-winger Cornel West's critique of black "nihilism" differs little from conservative views of ghetto culture. The author sees the retreat from affirmative action as "an unmitigated disaster for African Americans" and warns that U.S. "immigration policy amounts to a form of disinvestment in native workers." And, he says, history suggests that the current step back from racial justice may be followed by a populist move forward. A trenchant, closely reasoned critique of the nation's failure to confront its continuing legacy of racism.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.