This guide provides information and links to tools and resources that will help you with your research and coursework in SOC 120: Racial and Ethnic Relations.
LatinoLand by
LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana's life experience as a Latina. Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.
Race and Ethnic Relations on Campus by
Can college students confront race relations issues directly and make positive changes? Yes, they can. This book provides a fresh, practical approach to addressing these issues--individually and collectively--to ignite a positive revolution in race and ethnic relations. As racial and ethnic incidents continue to occur at college campuses across the nation, an esteemed African American professor who teaches in the heart of a region that has seen some of the most volatile racial incidents in American history breaks the uneasy silence to respond to growing concerns from undergraduate students. In Race and Ethnic Relations on Campus: Understanding, Empowerment, and Solutions for College Students, Eric J. Bailey presents a new approach to addressing and better understanding the major controversial issues associated with race and ethnic relations for today's college students. This book confronts commonplace race relations issues directly and sets forth a completely different way of addressing these problems that empowers today's college students to take charge and start to effect change--to do something about racially charged conflict rather than to simply talk about it. The chapters describe how race and ethnic relations issues typically arise on college campuses, share insight into how national incidents affect college students' reactions to incidents on their own campus, and identify the negative consequences of poor race relations as well as describe the positive effects of good race relations.
Making the Immigrant Soldier by
Immigrants to the United States have long used the armed forces as a shortcut to citizenship. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir profiles Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, three immigrants of varying nationalities and backgrounds who chose military service as their way of becoming American citizens. Privileging the trio's own words and experiences, Dragomir crafts a human-focused narrative that moves from their lives in their home countries and decisions to join the military to their fraught naturalization processes within the service. Dragomir illuminates how race, ethnicity, class, and gender impacted their transformation from immigrant to soldier, veteran, and American. She explores how these factors both eased their journeys and created obstacles that complicated their access to healthcare, education, economic resources, and other forms of social justice. A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.
How to Be an Antiracist by
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a "groundbreaking" (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society--and in ourselves. "The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind."--The New York Times (Editors' Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism--and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas--from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities--that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.
White Fragility by
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people' (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Our Hidden Conversations by
Peabody Award-winning journalist Michele Norris offers a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through her decade-long work at The Race Card Project. The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send. The answers, though, have been challenging and complicated. In the twelve years since award-winning journalist Michele Norris first posed that question, over half a million people have submitted their stories to The Race Card Project inbox. The stories are shocking in their depth and candor, spanning the full spectrum of race, ethnicity, identity, and class. Even at just six words, the micro-essays can pack quite a punch, revealing, fear, pain, triumph, and sometimes humor. Responses such as: You're Pretty for a Black girl. White privilege, enjoy it, earned it. Lady, I don't want your purse. My ancestors massacred Indians near here. Urban living has made me racist. I'm only Asian when it's convenient. Many go even further than just six words, submitting backstories, photos, and heirlooms: a collection much like a scrapbook of American candor you rarely get to see. Our Hidden Conversations is a unique compilation of stories, richly reported essays, and photographs providing a window into America during a tumultuous era. This powerful book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories. The breadth of this work came as a surprise to Norris. For most of the twelve years she has collected these stories, many were submitted by white respondents. This unexpected panorama provides a rare 360-degree view of how Americans see themselves and one another. Our Hidden Conversations reminds us that even during times of great division, honesty, grace, and a willing ear can provide a bridge toward empathy and maybe even understanding.
Not So Black and White by
Is white privilege real? Does American history begin in 1619 or 1776? Why has left-wing antisemitism grown? How racist is the working class? Who benefits most, when anti-racists speak in racial terms? These very different questions have all emerged from today's heated debates around race, identity and culture. The "culture wars" have generated ferocious argument, but little clarity. Not So Black and White offers that clarity by taking the long view, explaining the real origins of 'race' in Western thought, and tracing its path from those beginnings to today's fractious world. In doing so, the book upends many accepted views about race, identity, whiteness and privilege. Leading thinker Kenan Malik interweaves three narratives: the history of the idea of race, from the Enlightenment to the present; the historical and current relationship between race and class; and his account of how we created a world riven by identity politics. Through these histories, he challenges longstanding assumptions, revealing forgotten stories of a racialized working class, and questioning fashionable concepts like cultural appropriation. Not So Black and White is both a lucid history that rewrites the story of race and class, and an elegant polemic making an anti-racist case against the politics of identity.
The Racial Contract by
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition--featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author--makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.