New Politics of Race

It isn't uncommon to hear now that race hardly matters anymore—that we've somehow gotten beyond it. In the face of such pronouncements, and the misconceptions that prompt them, this book aims to show precisely why and how race has always been, and remains, absolutely fundamental to modern politics. Howard Winant, one of the leading sociologists of race and ethnicity working today, clearly locates race at the crossroads of identity and social structure, where difference frames inequality and where political processes operate with a comprehensiveness that ranges from the world-historical to the intimately psychological.The New Politics of Race brings together Winant's new and previously published essays to form a comprehensive picture of the origins and nature of the complex racial politics that engulf us today. It is only in light of the post–World War II patterns of racial insurgency and reform that these politics can be understood, Winant asserts. His work offers a thorough grounding in these patterns, describing the breakdown of a certain racial order after World War II and identifying the ways in which racial hierarchies everywhere are being reestablished and reenergized, often in clandestine, or at least unfamiliar, forms.Theoretically acute and empirically sound, his essays deftly analyze the character of racial formations in a world that is, on the surface, deeply committed to eradicating racism.Howard Winant is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Racial Conditions (Minnesota, 1994) and The World Is a Ghetto, and the coauthor with Michael Omi of Racial Formation in the United States.