House That Race Built : Black Americans, U. S. Terrain

by LUBIANO, WAHNEEMA

• ISBN13: 9780679440901
• ISBN10: 0679440909
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-02-01
• Publisher: Pantheon

Summary

The House That Race Built is the response by some of this country's most admired intellectuals to the crisis of democracy represented by the recent, ominous shift toward a renewed white racial nationalism. It is unified by a central argument that deserves to be at the heart of the national debate: that "race" and "racism" must be understood not just as referring to the relations between black and white Americans, but as constituting the central American dynamic by which a pervasive, antidemocratic social inequality is re-created, maintained, and justified to the detriment of all. In a post-civil rights era of rapidly increasing economic and social apartheid, The House That Race Built makes us see how Americans' continuing delusory investments in the privileges of whiteness and the pathology of blackness uphold a social hierarchy that is destructive of democratic possibility. This book's analysis of race and racism extends to the complexities of within-the-group dynamics of black Americans. How race is defined, and who gets to talk about it, determine how race and American whiteness will be understood and used: either to reconsolidate racial domination or to establish racial democracy.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Wahneema Lubiano
Home	3	(10)
Toni Morrison
The Liberal Retreat from Race During the Post--Civil Rights Era	13	(35)
Stephen Steinberg
White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative Action	48	(18)
David Roediger
Tales of Two Judges: Joyce Karlin in People v. Soon Ja Du; Lance Ito in People v. O.J. Simpson	66	(21)
Neil Gotanda
Racial Dualism at Century's End	87	(29)
Howard Winant
"Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing": Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity	116	(20)
Kendall Thomas
Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality, and Gender	136	(21)
Rhonda M. Williams
Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s	157	(21)
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
What Is Black Culture?	178	(17)
David Lionel Smith
Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit on the Postindustrial Playground	195	(37)
Robin D. G. Kelley
Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others	232	(21)
Wahneema Lubiano
The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness	253	(11)
Patricia J. Williams
Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry	264	(16)
Angela Y. Davis
Color Blindness, History, and the Law	280	(9)
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities	289	(12)
Stuart Hall
Afterword	301	(3)
Cornel West
Acknowledgments	304	(1)
Index	305	(14)
About the Contributors	319