Race & Ethnicity

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1813/112310

Material in this collection is available to the Cornell community only.

Browse

Now showing 1 - 10 of 17

The racial contract
Mills, Charles W. (Cornell University Press, 1997)
Argues that racially structured discrimination is the norm by using social contract theory.
The American dream in black & white: the Clarence Thomas hearings
Flax, Jane (Cornell University Press, 1999)
The transcripts of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Clarence Thomas are extraordinarily rich and suggestive. Much has been written about the hearings, but until now no one has paid close attention to the actual language of the participants. Revisiting the words of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Jane Flax asks what we would learn about American politics if these hearings were, literally, our only text. How does our legal and judicial system operate in the face of sexual issues? Can it ever transcend race and gender? Who was the real victim in these hearings - Hill, Thomas, the Senate, or the viewing public? Who in America has the power to make political meaning? Rather than attempting to establish fact or truth, The American Dream in Black and White looks at the political narrative by which our nation makes sense of itself.
Racism and justice: the case for affirmative action
Ezorsky, Gertrude (Cornell University Press, 1991)
Affirmative action: does it really counteract racism? Is it morally justifiable? In her timely and tough-minded book, Gertrude Ezorsky addresses these central issues in the ongoing controversy surrounding affirmative action, and comes up with some convincing answers. Ezorsky begins by examining the effectiveness of affirmative action as a remedy for institutional racism in the workplace. She analyzes the ways in which common practices-selection of employees based on personal connections, qualification, and seniority standards-perpetuate the injurious effect of past racial discrimination, and she assesses the rationale for such affirmative action measures as objective job-related testing, numerical goals, and preferential treatment for basically qualified blacks. To illuminate the social reality in which affirmative action takes place, she draws on recent work by social scientists and legal scholars. Turning to the moral issues, Ezorsky posits two basic justifications for affirmative action: first, looking backward-to provide deserved compensation for past racial injustice that was sanctioned, practiced, and encouraged by our government; second, looking forward-to promote racial desegregation in the American workplace. Unlike some supporters of affirmative action, she does not deny that preferential treatment may place an unfair burden on white males. Indeed, she suggests specific practical measures for spreading that burden more equitably. Clear-headed, well-reasoned, and persuasive, this book will be read eagerly by everyone from students to legislators, by anyone concerned with racial justice in America.
Race against empire: Black Americans and anticolonialism, 1937-1957
Von Eschen, Penny M. (Cornell University Press, 1997)
During World War II, African American activists, journalists, and intellectuals forcefully argued that independence movements in Africa and Asia were inextricably linkep to political, economic, and civil rights struggles in the United States. Marshaling evidence from a wide array of international sources, including the black presses of the time, Penny M. Von Eschen offers a vivid portrayal of the African diaspora in its international heyday, from the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress to early cooperation with the United Nations.Race against Empire tells the poignant story of a popular movement and its precipitate decline with the onset of the Cold War. Von Eschen documents the efforts of African-American political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists who forcefully promoted anti-colonial politics and critiqued U.S. foreign policy. The eclipse of anti-colonial politics-which Von Eschen traces through African-American responses to the early Cold War, U.S. government prosecution of black American anti-colonial activists, and State Department initiatives in Africa-marked a change in the very meaning of race and racism in America from historical and international issues to psychological and domestic ones. She concludes that the collision of anti-colonialism with Cold War liberalism illuminates conflicts central to the reshaping of America; the definition of political, economic, and civil rights; and the question of who, in America and across the globe, is to have access to these rights.Exploring the relationship between anticolonial politics, early civil rights activism, and nascent superpower rivalries, Race against Empire offers a fresh perspective both on the emergence of the United States as the dominant global power and on the profound implications of that development for American society.
Old labor and new immigrants in American political development: union, party, and state, 1875-1920
Mink, Gwendolyn (Cornell University Press, 1986)
No fire next time: Black-Korean conflicts and the future of America's cities
Joyce, Patrick D. (Cornell University Press, 2003)
Why did Black-Korean tensions result in violent clashes in Los Angeles but not in New York City? In a book based on fieldwork and on a nationwide database he constructed to track such conflicts, Patrick D. Joyce goes beyond sociological and cultural explanations. "No Fire Text Time shows how political practices and urban institutions can channel racial and ethnic tensions into protest or, alternatively, leave them free to erupt violently. Few encounters demonstrate this connection better than those between African Americans and Korean Americans. Cities like New York, where politics is noisy, contentious, and involves people at the grassroots, have seen extensive Black boycotts of Korean-owned businesses (usually small grocery stores). African Americans in Los Angeles have sustained few long-term boycotts of Korean American businesses--but the absence of "routine" contention there goes hand in hand with the large-scale riots of 1992 and continuous acts of individual violence. In demonstrating how conflicts between these groups were intimately tied to their political surroundings, this book yields practical lessons for the future. City governments can do little to fight widening economic inequality in an increasingly diverse nation," Joyce writes. But officials and activists can restructure political institutions to provide the foundations of new multiracial coalitions
I'm not a racist, but--: the moral quandary of race
Blum, Lawrence (Cornell University Press, 2002)
"Not all racial incidents are racist incidents," Lawrence Blum says. "We need a more varied and nuanced moral vocabulary for talking about the arena of race. We should not be faced with a choice of 'racism' or nothing." Use of the word "racism" is pervasive: An article about the NAACP's criticism of television networks for casting too few "minority" actors in lead roles asks, "Is television a racist institution?" A white girl in Virginia says it is racist for her African-American teacher to wear African attire. Blum argues that a growing tendency to castigate as "racism" everything that goes wrong in the racial domain reduces the term's power to evoke moral outrage. In "I'm Not a Racist, But ...," Blum develops a historically grounded account of "racism" as the deeply morally charged notion it has become. He addresses the question whether people of color can be racist, defines types of racism, and identifies debased and inappropriate usages of the term. Though racial insensitivity, racial anxiety, racial ignorance, and racial injustice are, in his view, not "racism," they are racial ills that should elicit moral concern. Blum argues that "race" itself is a morally destructive idea, implying moral distance and unequal worth. History and genetic science reveal both the avoidability and the falsity of the idea of race. Blum argues that we can give up the idea of race but must recognize that racial groups' historical and social experience has been shaped by having been treated as if they were races.
Hispanas de Queens: Latino panethnicity in a New York City neighborhood
Ricourt, Milagros; Danta, Ruby (Cornell University Press, 2002)
What happens when persons of several Latin American national groups reside in the same neighborhood- Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta consider the stories of women of different nationalities-Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Uruguayan, and others-who live together in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens. Corona has long been an arrival point for immigrants and is now made up predominantly of Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean and South and Central America, with smaller numbers from Asia, Africa, and Europe. There are also long-established populations of white Americans, mainly of Italian origin, and African Americans. The authors find that the new pan-Latin American community in Corona has emerged from the interactions of everyday living. Hispanas de Queens focuses on the places where women gather in Corona-bodegas, hospitals, schoolyards, and Roman Catholic and Protestant churches-to show how informal alliances arise from proximity. Ricourt and Danta document how a group of leaders, mainly women, consciously promoted this strong sense of community to build panethnic organizations and a Latino political voice. Hispanas de Queens shows how a new group identity-Hispanic or Latino-is formed without replacing an individual's identification as an immigrant from a particular country. Instead, an additional identity is created and can be mobilized by pan-Latino leaders and organizations.
Forging America: ironworkers, adventurers, and the industrious revolution
Bezís-Selfa, John (Cornell University Press, 2004)
Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers-free, indentured, and enslaved-to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.
Fences and neighbors: the political geography of immigration control
Money, Jeannette (Cornell University Press, 1999)
"Why do some countries welcome new arrivals from abroad while other nations are less hospitable? Politics of immigration control starts at the local level, Jeannette Money asserts." "Drawing on detailed evidence from Britain, France, and Australia, and more briefly from the United States, she demonstrates that local support for and opposition to immigration is contingent upon economic conditions, as well as the number of foreigners entering the country and their access to the resources of the welfare state. Whether these local pressures are translated into policies of openness or closure at the national level depends on whether the local constituencies are critical to maintaining or gaining a national electoral majority."--Jacket

Browse

Recent Submissions