A “list” of what five sociologists consider breakthrough books about race and racism.
The first in a series of occasional columns in which we invite scholars to name a book that changed the way sociologists think.
Zaire Dinzey-Flores (sociology and Latino & Hispanic Carribean Studies, Rutgers University):
“…I think it would be good if certain things were said,” writes Frantz Fanon in the first lines of his 1952 book
Black Skin, White Masks
. Looking at how race and colonialism are intertwined, Fanon sees race/racism as global travelers that strip people of their humanity, becoming materially embodied and psychologically durable. While pointing to the massive structures of race/racism, Fanon highlights its individual manifestations. His psycho-power analysis shows that race is as psychological as it is social, as local and immediate as it is global and far-reaching, and as obvious and explicit as it is deeply engrained and codified.”
Douglas Hartmann (sociology, University of Minnesota):
“No writer I know has ever crafted sentences that better capture the depth, complexity, and pathology of race in America than James Baldwin. And although Baldwin may be most famous as a novelist, no volume of his work contains as rich and wide-ranging collection of ideas, insights, and profound formulations as
Notes of a Native Son
, originally published [in] 1955. Whether about Richard Wright or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hollywood movies or living abroad, Baldwin’s essays illustrate and unpack the deep structure and lived experience of race as a social system. Even more, Baldwin uses race as a lens onto the ironies (and hopes) of the American experiment, different ways of knowing, and this thing we call the human condition. Baldwin’s is a vision we sociologists can still learn from, and constantly aspire to.”
Mignon Moore (sociology, University of California, Los Angeles):
“I do not know any sociologist who can study the relationships between race, gender and class without reading and incorporating Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. The book was first published in 1990, and 22 years later it continues to be ‘the’ seminal text in the study of intersectionality. The work investigates four components of black feminist thought: its thematic content, interpretive frameworks, epistemological approaches and significance for empowerment. Historically grounded, it traverses the complexity of black women’s lives and in so doing, lays the foundation for the study of other raced, classed, and gendered positions in society.”
Jiannbin Shiao (sociology, University of Oregon):
“Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States remains the breakthrough book for the sociology of race/ethnicity. More than any other single work before or since, it integrates explanations of the significance of race/ethnicity, the difference between race and ethnicity, similarities and differences across many group experiences, and shifts in race relations since the civil rights era. Although initially dismissed by sociologists, Omi and Winant’s book remains one of the few to connect our studies of racial stratification, racial attitudes, ethnic assimilation, racial/ethnic identities and interactions, and racial/ethnic boundaries.”
Howard Winant (sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara):
“W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 [1935] discusses the color-line, class and labor, revolution and reaction, the origins of racism, and the global capitalist system. But the book’s central concept is what Du Bois calls ‘abolition democracy.’ In his view, the American Revolution was a partial and incomplete anti-imperial revolution, dominated by elites. The Civil War and Reconstruction were the second phase of the revolution, greatly expanding democratic rights. Slaves led the movement to achieve abolition democracy—withdrawing their labor and stealing their oppressors’ most valuable property—themselves. In taking up arms against their former masters, they emancipated themselves and their country, winning the Civil War for the Union. How they did so in different settings, and how they began to reconstruct a new society, are the central subjects of the book. In the end, of course, Reconstruction was terminated, and blacks had to endure new forms of ostracism, peonage, and violence. Yet their pioneering efforts made modern democracy possible.”
