A compelling critique of the development of the sociology of race. The book makes clear that we still have much to learn, not only about the structural foundations of racism, but also about how careerism can subtly twist our perspectives so that we fail to rise to the intellectual and moral challenges of the sociological project. Steinberg has done us a great service. -- Frances Fox Piven * Past President, American Sociological Association, author of Why Americans Still Dont Vote, And Politicians Like It That Way *
...this book is an impressive achievement, an essay in radical racial theory by a recognized authority who is committed to the revitalization of our field and, more broadly, to the racial and social justice the United States has yet to achieve. -- -Howard Winant, University of California * Santa Barbara *
In Race Relations, Stephen Steinberg has written a passionate, personal, and devastating critique of the race relations paradigm, and perhaps more important, of sociology, the academic discipline that foisted that conceptual mystification upon American society By demolishing the race relations paradigm, Stephen Steinberg has made a seminal contribution to the study of race and racial oppression in the United States. -Sundiata Cha-Jua, Vice President of the National Council for Black Studies
[A] contentious new book that condemns American social science. -- Chronicle of Higher Education
Biting, lucid, wise, and humane: this is a premier scholar's manifesto. With more twists and conceptual reversals than a double helix, Stephen Steinberg puts paid to the stale tales ofrace relations dogma. -- Eric Lott * author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual *
Argues, among other things, that the sociological language of race relations obscures the structural foundation of hierarchies and inequality. -- Chronicle of Higher Education
Steinberg's discussion of ongoing racial injustice may not be popular in today's allegedly 'post racism' era, but he has again written a 'must read' book for our time. In a book of only 147 pages, Stephen Steinberg explained how an academic, foundation, and political 'infrastructure' promotes a 'racism is not the problem' agenda while urging exclusively class-based solutions to the crisis in the black community. -- Beyond Chron
Stephen Steinberg, a racism truth-teller par excellence, explores in vivid writing that shocks as it enlightens, the evolution of the term Race Relations. Crafted a century ago by sociologists, it uses false objectivity to obscure the continuing reality of racial oppression in America. -- Derrick Bell * Visiting Professor, NYU School of Law, and author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and Ethical Ambition *
In this hard-hitting book, Stephen Steinberg unveils the sociology of ignorance-and shows that we need look no further to find it than mainstream white American sociology's historic evasions on race. A devastating expose of a century of the discipline's theoretical bad faith, sociological mystification, and conceptual obfuscation of what should have been the central and obvious socio-historical fact of the white oppression of people of color in the United States. -- Charles W. Mills * University of Illinois at Chicago, author of The Racial Contract *
Race Relations is a critical essay-not a comprehensive history. Steinberg is relentlessly polemical, often witty and sometimes brilliant in his debunking of the conventional wisdom. Like all iconoclasts, he overstates his case. But for all of his rhetorical excess, his argument that the mainstream of twentieth-century social science downplayed racial oppression and exploitation for individualistic understandings of race relations is powerful and convincing, and it needs to be heard as he shouts it from the rooftops. -- Thomas J. Sugrue * U. of Pennsylvania, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North *
