archive

The American racial order

From Daedalus, William Julius Wilson (Harvard): The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited and Revised; Jennifer Hochschild (Harvard), Vesla Weaver (Virginia), and Traci Burch (Northwestern): Destabilizing the American Racial Order; Douglas S. Massey (Princeton): The Past and Future of American Civil Rights; Philip A. Klinker (Hamilton): Challenging History: Barack Obama and American Racial Politics; Daniel Sabbagh (CNRS): Affirmative Action: The U.S. Experience in Comparative Perspective; Richard Nisbett (Michigan): The Achievement Gap: Past, Present and Future; and Lawrence Bobo (Harvard): Somewhere between Jim Crow and Post-Racialism: Reflections on the Racial Divide in America Today. Michael C. Dawson and Julie Lee Merseth (Chicago): Racial Pessimism in the Early Obama Era. After the 2008 election, "The Cosby Show" was credited for transforming attitudes on race — are we moving backward? A review of The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency by Randall Kennedy. Don’t call them "post-racial": How young people actually think about race. That we continue to find a pattern of black exceptionalism points to the paradox of diversity in the 21st century. Brooks B. Robinson on point zero nation formation for black Americans. From Dissent, Nicolaus Mills on saving affirmative action from itself. What do black Americans need in order to get ahead? A truly free market (and more on Walter Williams). Here are 8 political myths about blacks that you shouldn’t believe. The Anti-Imperialist tackles the whitewash of black beauty. An interracial fix for black marriage: Black women could find more partners across the race line — and it might just spur more black couples to wed. A review of Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone by Ralph Richard Banks. Myth-busting the black marriage "crisis": Panic over single black women is unfounded — two black scholars have the numbers to prove it.