Turning Back

by Steinberg, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780807041215
• ISBN10: 0807041211
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-01-16
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

Winner of the ASA, Oliver Cox Award for Anti-Racist Scholarship From the author ofThe Ethnic Mythcomes this cogent analysis of how social science has placed a liberal gloss on racism and failed to champion civil rights. From a powerful critique of Gunnar Myrdal's classicAn American Dilemmato a new epilogue that dismantles the myth of black progress,Turning Backoffers a challenge to liberals as well as conservatives, blacks as well as whites, who have fueled the current backlash by providing a spurious intellectual cover for gutting affirmative action and other policies designed to advance the cause of racial justice.

Author Biography

Stephen Steinberg, author of The Ethnic Myth, teaches in the Department of Urban Studies at Queens College and the Ph.D. program in sociology at the Graduate Center at City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Prologue: My Education as a Teacher of Race Relations	1	(20)
I. RACIAL LIBERALISM: THE RISE AND FALL OF A PARADIGM
An American Dilemma: A New Liberal Orthodoxy on Race	21	(29)
Paradigm Crisis: The Decline of Liberal Orthodoxy	50	(18)
The 1960s and the Scholarship of Confrontation	68	(29)
II. THE SCHOLARSHIP OF BACKLASH
Backlash Outside and Inside the University	97	(10)
The Liberal Retreat from Race during the Post--Civil Rights Era	107	(30)
The Underclass: A Case of Color Blindness, Right and Left	137	(19)
The Politics of Memory	156	(8)
Affirmative Action and Liberal Capitulation	164	(15)
III. THE ENDURING LEGACY OF SLAVERY
Occupational Apartheid and the Myth of the Black Middle Class	179	(26)
America Again at the Crossroads	205	(16)
Epilogue Up from Slavery: The Myth of Black Progress	221	(21)
Notes	242	(54)
Index	296