Race & Inequality

Young people are told that effort and education decide success. Following Chinese youth from early adolescence into their twenties, the study finds college students still value effort but increasingly see family wealth, connections and luck at work, and those who notice it most grow more depressed.

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...

How do nations, peoples, and ethnic groups fashion their own collective identities? For antiquity as well as for the modern era, one general answer has prevailed: societies shape their self-consciousness...

I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...

“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...

My earliest publications, on childhood in ancient Greece, grew out of my involvement with the movement to force the University of Toronto to provide day-care for the children of its...

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

When first readers pick up The Sports Revolution, they might assume that it is yet another book about football in Texas, and with good reason. H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights,...

Just around Midnight is about the entanglements of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and particularly the question of how rock and roll music “became white.” By the...

My book is about a historic change that occurred a century ago in the way people view human differences, illustrated through the work and life of a major artist. Today,...

Despite the prevalence of name changing in American Jewish culture, few historians have studied the actual practice of name changing in the United States. A Rosenberg by Any Other Name...

The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating...

Some readers will probably turn to the images first—and that is a good place to start. There are two inserts that tell the story in pictures. We see Kennedy on...

The book examines three cases: the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-6, at the end of the Second World War; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at...

My book elaborates upon the ongoing, centuries-long reality of anti-blackness as a structure of feeling; the recent ecological turn in black studies as an inter-institutional, intracommunal response to the fact...

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

Making Monsters is about the phenomenon of dehumanization, a phenomenon that is implicated in the most hideous acts that human beings have inflicted upon one another. Perpetrators of mass violence...

When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...

The Man in the Dog Park describes the experience of homelessness from a homeless point of view. Co-authored with a homeless man, the book is based on scores of interviews...

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway...

When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...

The near-continuous movements of people and of ideas are two themes that flow through the work. Migration from within the United States and across international boundaries increased the population of...

The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...

For a book that touts the power of storytelling, I would be remiss not to recommend that casual readers flip to pages of aid recipients telling stories from their own...

I would—of course, I did—start with the Preface. It aims to draw the reader directly into the problem of Americans and foreigners, and how I see the development of this...

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of the contemporary world. We are currently experiencing a series of crises related to how we move. As cities...

New World A-Coming examines a set of religious movements founded in the early twentieth-century urban north whose members refused the racial category of Negro and rejected Christianity in favor of...

This book is about understanding how schools influence achievement gaps. The traditional story is that schools are part of the problem and that large differences in school quality make achievement...

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become ...

Mura Dehn is this fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her, nobody knew who she was. I did my dissertation on her, and in the 30 years since, she has become very famous in some circles. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list, as long as my leg, of things that I was gonna do...

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have begun to investigate the social construction of race and sexuality in the United States. Noting the absence of any fixed biological or...

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

A look at the long, often erased history of anti-Asian racism in the United States—from nineteenth-century violence to the surge of hate during the COVID-19 pandemic—and why these histories remain widely misunderstood.

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

Starving for Justice examines three hunger strikes that took place in the 1990s on university campuses. Twenty years ago, Chicana/o, Latina/o students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford stopped...

This book traces the antecedents, origins, major figures, and tactics of the white nationalist movement commonly known as the Alt-Right. Although the Alt-Right’s ideology is not new, it is much...

As a Canadian who specializes in American literature, I’ve always been fascinated by the weakness of the U.S. welfare state compared to that of other first world nations. The reasons...

The Interethnic Imagination raises to view an important shift in the contemporary literature Americans have been reading. It claims that since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the...

The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one...

Since the 1970s, there has been a tendency in America to see inequalities in society solely through the lens of race. Our understanding of the Wounded Knee massacre has reflected...

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over the last decade, there has been...

If you come across this book in a bookstore, I hope you will browse the Prologue, “The Death of Shorty,” and that it will draw you in to the rest...

While Macbeth may not fit neatly into the category of a “race” play, like a specter it is nevertheless haunted by, and haunts, the language and performances of race. Othello, in...

This is first a book about ideas and how they can have consequences in politics, if they are linked to powerful, well-financed movements. I excavate the ideas on race of the...

Zoot Suit is a history of one of the most famous “street styles” of the 20th century. With its broad shoulders, tapered long jacket, pegged pants, and swinging key...

In order to illustrate the way that a black dandy can embody complex and even competing notions of blackness, meet “Dandy Jim, from Carolina,” a theatrical figure made famous by...

If a person were randomly opening the book I think I’d want them to flip to page 177, the beginning of Chapter Six, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the...

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over...

In many ways, Youth in a Suspect Society is motivated by a sense of outrage and a sense of hope. While youth have always represented an ambiguous category, they have within...

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive...

It’s often said that biographies reveal as much about their biographers as their subject. I plead guilty, for I was born in Lincoln (Nebraska) and fell in love with the...

Although I hesitated to put a Harlem image on the cover of Slumming, precisely because I wanted to challenge the almost exclusive association of that neighborhood with my book’s topic,...

Young people are told that effort and education decide success. Following Chinese youth from early adolescence into their twenties, the study finds college students still value effort but increasingly see family wealth, connections and luck at work, and those who notice it most grow more depressed.

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...

How do nations, peoples, and ethnic groups fashion their own collective identities? For antiquity as well as for the modern era, one general answer has prevailed: societies shape their self-consciousness...

I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...

“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...

My earliest publications, on childhood in ancient Greece, grew out of my involvement with the movement to force the University of Toronto to provide day-care for the children of its...

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

When first readers pick up The Sports Revolution, they might assume that it is yet another book about football in Texas, and with good reason. H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights,...

Just around Midnight is about the entanglements of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and particularly the question of how rock and roll music “became white.” By the...

My book is about a historic change that occurred a century ago in the way people view human differences, illustrated through the work and life of a major artist. Today,...

Despite the prevalence of name changing in American Jewish culture, few historians have studied the actual practice of name changing in the United States. A Rosenberg by Any Other Name...

The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating...

Some readers will probably turn to the images first—and that is a good place to start. There are two inserts that tell the story in pictures. We see Kennedy on...

The book examines three cases: the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-6, at the end of the Second World War; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at...

My book elaborates upon the ongoing, centuries-long reality of anti-blackness as a structure of feeling; the recent ecological turn in black studies as an inter-institutional, intracommunal response to the fact...

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

Making Monsters is about the phenomenon of dehumanization, a phenomenon that is implicated in the most hideous acts that human beings have inflicted upon one another. Perpetrators of mass violence...

When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...

The Man in the Dog Park describes the experience of homelessness from a homeless point of view. Co-authored with a homeless man, the book is based on scores of interviews...

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway...

When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...

The near-continuous movements of people and of ideas are two themes that flow through the work. Migration from within the United States and across international boundaries increased the population of...

The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...

For a book that touts the power of storytelling, I would be remiss not to recommend that casual readers flip to pages of aid recipients telling stories from their own...

I would—of course, I did—start with the Preface. It aims to draw the reader directly into the problem of Americans and foreigners, and how I see the development of this...

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of the contemporary world. We are currently experiencing a series of crises related to how we move. As cities...

New World A-Coming examines a set of religious movements founded in the early twentieth-century urban north whose members refused the racial category of Negro and rejected Christianity in favor of...

This book is about understanding how schools influence achievement gaps. The traditional story is that schools are part of the problem and that large differences in school quality make achievement...

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become ...

Mura Dehn is this fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her, nobody knew who she was. I did my dissertation on her, and in the 30 years since, she has become very famous in some circles. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list, as long as my leg, of things that I was gonna do...

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have begun to investigate the social construction of race and sexuality in the United States. Noting the absence of any fixed biological or...

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

A look at the long, often erased history of anti-Asian racism in the United States—from nineteenth-century violence to the surge of hate during the COVID-19 pandemic—and why these histories remain widely misunderstood.

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

Starving for Justice examines three hunger strikes that took place in the 1990s on university campuses. Twenty years ago, Chicana/o, Latina/o students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford stopped...

This book traces the antecedents, origins, major figures, and tactics of the white nationalist movement commonly known as the Alt-Right. Although the Alt-Right’s ideology is not new, it is much...

As a Canadian who specializes in American literature, I’ve always been fascinated by the weakness of the U.S. welfare state compared to that of other first world nations. The reasons...

The Interethnic Imagination raises to view an important shift in the contemporary literature Americans have been reading. It claims that since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the...

The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one...

Since the 1970s, there has been a tendency in America to see inequalities in society solely through the lens of race. Our understanding of the Wounded Knee massacre has reflected...

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over the last decade, there has been...

If you come across this book in a bookstore, I hope you will browse the Prologue, “The Death of Shorty,” and that it will draw you in to the rest...

While Macbeth may not fit neatly into the category of a “race” play, like a specter it is nevertheless haunted by, and haunts, the language and performances of race. Othello, in...

This is first a book about ideas and how they can have consequences in politics, if they are linked to powerful, well-financed movements. I excavate the ideas on race of the...

Zoot Suit is a history of one of the most famous “street styles” of the 20th century. With its broad shoulders, tapered long jacket, pegged pants, and swinging key...

In order to illustrate the way that a black dandy can embody complex and even competing notions of blackness, meet “Dandy Jim, from Carolina,” a theatrical figure made famous by...

If a person were randomly opening the book I think I’d want them to flip to page 177, the beginning of Chapter Six, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the...

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over...

In many ways, Youth in a Suspect Society is motivated by a sense of outrage and a sense of hope. While youth have always represented an ambiguous category, they have within...

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive...

It’s often said that biographies reveal as much about their biographers as their subject. I plead guilty, for I was born in Lincoln (Nebraska) and fell in love with the...

Although I hesitated to put a Harlem image on the cover of Slumming, precisely because I wanted to challenge the almost exclusive association of that neighborhood with my book’s topic,...