racism

How can we think about people and cultures unlike our own? In the early modern period, the fact of human diversity presented Europeans with little cause for anxiety: they simply assumed the superiority of the West. During the 18th century this view was gradually abandoned, as thinkers argued that other peoples possessed reason and sensibility, and thus deserved the same respect that Westerners accorded themselves.

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is the most wide-ranging and interdisciplinary textbook on genocide yet published. The book is designed as a text for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a primer for non-specialists and general readers interested in learning about one of humanity's most enduring blights.

The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years—and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism. At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States.

Stirring the Pot of Haitian History is the first-ever translation of Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti (1977), the earliest book written by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Challenging understandings of two centuries of Haitian history, Trouillot analyzes the pivotal role of formerly enslaved Haitian revolutionaries in the Revolution and War of Independence (1791–1804), a generation of people who became the founders of the modern Haitian state and advanced the vibrant culture that flourishes in Haiti.

This book examines what is happening, in the context of segregated and unequal public education, to children from poor families in the inner cities and less affluent suburbs, and describes how children of poor families get less real education, less hope, and less concern than children from rich families. Chapter 1 of the book examines the causes and impact of the spiritual, racial, and economic isolation confronting the residents and public school students of East St. Louis, Illinois.

American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to "hypersegregation." 

Refugees can be formed as “subjects” as they navigate forced displacement in countries that are not their own. In particular, everyday life as the politicized Other, and as humanitarianism’s depoliticized beneficiary, can constitute them as political subjects. Understanding these produced subjects and subjectivities leads us to conceive of forced displacement – or “refugeedom” – as a human condition or experience of political (sub)alterity, within which inhere distinctive subjectivations and subjectivities.

Many sociologists have considered the intersection of race and gender in the production of social life, but while works on “intersectionality” have offered a useful paradigm for analyzing the experience of individual persons, a model for understanding how structures interact remains unclear. Appropriating Sewell's (1992) argument that structures consist of cultural schemas applied to resources, this article develops a more nuanced approach to intersectionality.

Scholars have documented the emergence of apparently race-neutral discourses that serve to entrench racial stratification following the elimination of de jure segregation. These discourses deny the existence of both present-day racism and the contemporary effects of histories of racial oppression. Researchers posit that individuals are socialized into these views, but little empirical attention has been paid to the processes through which such socialization occurs.