Understanding Inequality: The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender

This textbook anthology takes a fresh approach to the study of inequality, promoting a sharper understanding of the intersection of race, class, and gender. It helpfully encourages students to grapple with research articles, both quantitative and qualitative, while offering a readable array of provocative essays, many of them written by prominent scholars. The aim of the text is to give students a more solid, analytical foundation for understanding inequality, while exposing them to the key public debates in American society. Arrighi's lively introduction appeals to student interests and leads them smoothly toward a deeper understanding of the sociological research contained in the book.

Judith Butler is the author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Excitable Speech, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, and The Force of Non-Violence. In addition to numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Nation, Time Magazine, the London Review of Books, and in a wide range of journals, newspapers, radio and podcast programs throughout Europe, Latin America, Central and South Asia, and South Africa. They live in Berkeley.

bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, was an American author who used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers’ focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain’t I a Woman―written when she was only nineteen―how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized.


She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, children’s fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Communion: The Female Search for Love and the New York Times bestseller All About Love: New Visions.


A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women’s studies, hooks taught at USC, Yale, among other institutions, including Berea College in her home state of Kentucky, where the bell hooks center was established to honor her work. Winner of the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a 2000 nominee for the NAACP’s Image Award, a 2018 inductee into Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and one of Time’s 100 Women of the Year in 2020, hooks left her mark in every field she entered.

Michael S. Kimmel is a well-known educator concerning gender issues. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals, including the New York Times Book Review, the Harvard Business Review, The Nation and Psychology Today, where he was a Contributing Editor and columnist on male-female relationships. His teaching examines men's lives from a pro-feminist perspective. He is national spokesperson for the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) in the States.

Rose Weitz is a professor of sociology at Arizona State University and is past president of Sociologists for Women in Society. She is the author of several books and the editor of The Politics of Women's Bodies.