Best of
Race

1994

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom


bell hooks - 1994
    Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.Bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise critical questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself."To educate as the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching that any one can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.–from the back of the book

Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior


Marimba Ani - 1994
    Examines the influence of European culture on the formation of modern institutional frameworks, through colonialism and imperialism, from an African perspective.

James Baldwin


David A. Leeming - 1994
    Leeming, Baldwin's friend for 25 years, accessed all of Baldwin's private papers to bring readers closer than ever to the complex man who struggled out of Harlem to become a legend of American literature. Photos.

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations


bell hooks - 1994
    Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a 'powerful site for intervention, challenge and change'. And intervene, challenge and change is what hooks does best.

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High


Melba Pattillo Beals - 1994
    Board of Education.Throughout her harrowing ordeal, Melba was taunted by her schoolmates and their parents, threatened by a lynch mob’s rope, attacked with lighted sticks of dynamite, and injured by acid sprayed in her eyes. But through it all, she acted with dignity and courage, and refused to back down.

Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, And The Black Working Class


Robin D.G. Kelley - 1994
    Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s


Michael Omi - 1994
    This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant's groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration's racial politics and policies."…required reading for scholars engaged in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of race. In the new edition, the authors further develop their provocative theory of 'racial formation' and extend their political analyses into the 1990s. They introduce the concept of 'racial project', linking race as representation with race as it is embedded in the social structure." -- Angela Y. Davis

All the Colors We Are: Todos los colores de nuestra piel/The Story of How We Get Our Skin Color


Katie Kissinger - 1994
    Includes unique activity ideas.

The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Volume 1


Theodore W. Allen - 1994
    Historical debate about the origin of racial slavery has focused on the status of the Negro in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. However, as Theodore W. Allen argues in this magisterial work, what needs to be studied is the transformation of English, Scottish, Irish and other European colonists from their various statuses as servants, tenants, planters or merchants into a single new all-inclusive status: that of whites. This is the key to the paradox of American history, of a democracy resting on race assumptions.Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the “white blind spot” which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color. Compelling analogies are presented between the history of Anglo-Irish and British rule in Ireland and American White Supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. But the relativity of race is shown in the sea change it entailed, whereby emigrating Irish haters of racial oppression were transformed into White Americans who defended it. The reasons for the differing outcomes of Catholic Emancipation and Negro Emancipation are considered and occasion is made to demonstrate Allen’s distinction between racial and national oppression.

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America


Nathan McCall - 1994
    Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard--and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles--and the great hopes--of our nation. With a new afterword by the author

Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass


Frederick Douglass - 1994
    Day...." The articles narrated here are "My Escape From Slavery" (1881) and "Reconstruction" (1866). - Summary by Lee Smalley

Racism 101


Nikki Giovanni - 1994
    And that is just for starters. She also writes about W.E.B. Du Bois, gardening, Toni Morrison, Star Trek, affirmative action, space exploration, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the role of griots, and the rape and neglect of urban schools. But to reduce Nikki Giovanni's essays to their subjects is to miss altogether their significance. As Virginia C. Fowler writes in her Foreword, These pieces are artistic expressions of a particular way of looking at the world, featuring a performing voice capable of dizzying displays of virtuosity. Profoundly personal and blisteringly political, angry and funny, lyrical and blunt, Racism 101 will add an important chapter to the debate on American national values.

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye


GRIN Publishing - 1994
    Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character’s points of view.The subtext of the first part of the novel ('Autumn' and 'Winter') suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the “Dick and Jane narrative” by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes “whiteness as the standard of beauty” and “seeing versus being seen” which are sometimes closely connected.'The Bluest Eye' provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her.However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.

The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World


John Carlos - 1994
    Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most iconic images of Olympic history and the Black Power movement. Here is the remarkable story of one of the men behind the salute, lifelong activist John Carlos.John Carlos is an African American former track and field athlete, professional football player, and a founding member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. He won the bronze medal in the 200 meters race at the 1968 Olympics, where his Black Power salute on the podium with Tommie Smith caused much political controversy. The John Carlos Story is his first book.Dave Zirin is the author of four books, including Bad Sports, A People's History of Sports in the United States, and What's My Name, Fool? He writes the popular weekly online sports column "The Edge of Sports" and is a regular contributor to SportsIllustrated.com, SLAM, Los Angeles Times, and The Nation, where he is the publication's first sports editor.

African Women: Three Generations


Mark Mathabane - 1994
    He shows the personal struggles each faced as a woman and how their lives were affected by apartheid and the struggle for independence. 16 pages of photos.

Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma


Ana Castillo - 1994
    The essays are addressed to everyone interested in the roots of the colonized woman's reality. Castillo introduces the term Xicanisma in a passionate call for a politically active, socially committed Chicana feminism. In "A Countryless Woman, " Castillo outlines the experience of the brown woman in a racist society that recognizes race relations mostly as a black and white dilemma. Essays on the Watsonville strike, the early Chicano movement, and the roots of machismo illustrate the extent to which women still struggle against male dominance. Other essays suggest strategies for opposing the suppression of women's spirituality and sexuality by institutionalized religion and the state. These challenging essays will be a provocative guide for those who envision a new future for women as we face a new century.

Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas


Jane Mayer - 1994
    Drawing on hundreds of interviews and scores of documents never seen before, Mayer and Abramson demonstrate that the political machinations that assured Thomas's ascension to the Court went far beyond what was revealed to the public: Several witnesses were prepared but not allowed to testify in support of Anita Hill's specific allegations about Thomas's pronounced interest in sexually explicit materials.; Republican Judiciary Committee members manipulated the FBI and misled the American public into believing that Hill was fabricating testimony during the televised hearings.; Clarence Thomas mythologized certain elements of his upbringing and career to draw attention away fr

Memoir of a Race Traitor


Mab Segrest - 1994
    bell hooks called it a “courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.” Adrienne Rich wrote that it was “a unique document and thoroughly fascinating.”Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. Now, amid our current national crisis driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition of her classic book. With a new introduction and afterword that explore what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump—and to what can and must be done.Called “a true delight” and a “must-read” (Minnesota Review), Memoir of a Race Traitor is an inspiring and politically potent book.

Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists


Joanna Kadi - 1994
    While anti-Arab racism depicts Arab women as veiled, passive victims living in hopelessly sexist communities, Food for our Grandmothers analyzes and challenges these innacurate and distorted views.

My Life in Search of Africa


John Henrik Clarke - 1994
    This book finally uncovers the tumultuous life of this great figure. Through a series of autobiographical essays, Clarke looks back on his lifelong struggle to restore African history to its proper place in the context of world history.

Colored People


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 1994
    From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling.

Mining the Museum


Fred Wilson - 1994
    One such institution is the museum, particularly the history museum, which, much like a history book, is popularly perceived as a repository of truth. But as Mining the Museum, a book based on the award-winning collaboration between The Contemporary, The Maryland Historical Society, and installation artist Fred Wilson illustrates, museums are not neutral places.

Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History


Darlene Clark Hine - 1994
    Reverby, Luella LaMer Associate Professor for Women's Studies, Wellesley College

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America


Tricia Rose - 1994
    In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary


Nelson Peery - 1994
    The author describes his childhood in rural Minnesota, his encounters as a teenage adventurer on freight trains, and his tour of duty as a soldier in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division.

These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places: The Story of the Stoney People


John Snow - 1994
    After consulting archival records and the Stoney oral tradition, Chief John Snow describes with clarity, depth, and understanding the Native perspective on life since the birth of Treaty Seven in 1877. With compassion and detail, Snow describes the stable state of First Nations prior to contact with Europeans and the destruction wrought by the whisky traders. He records the period of treaty-signing and the failure on the government's part to hold to treaty agreements. And most importantly, Snow explains his people's feeling of dispossession that continues to threaten the very survival of Stoney beliefs, values, and lifestyle.In his wisdom, however, Snow is also optimistic: about the hope that was born after the introduction of self-government in 1969, following the granting of citizenship to Indian people across the nation; and about his people's belief in biculturalism as they seek a path that allows them to thrive and benefit from both Native and non-Native cultures, rather than slip between the two.In an epilogue written in 2005, Chief John Snow reflects upon his career since the Treaty Seven commemoration in 1977, describing some of the events that affected First Nations at the end of the twentieth century and, also, discussing more personal, philosophical issues, such as cultural revitalization, Native spirituality, and the beauty of the oral tradition.

Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies


Kobena Mercer - 1994
    The ten essays collected here examine new forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora.

The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS


Simon Garfield - 1994
    As well as the 8000 who have died, some 20,000 are infected with HIV, and many more carry the virus unknowingly. With no cure or even a vaccine in sight, and growing evidence of complacency, AIDS is still one of the greatest post-war challenges the UK faces. This book covers every significant development of the disease, from the early ignorance and panic to the emergence of AIDS as a good cause taken up by Sir Ian McKellen, George Michael and the Princess of Wales. The author uses information supplied by doctors, scientists, government ministers and civil servants, as well as interviews with leading entertainment figures such as Stephen Fry, Elton John and the late Derek Jarman.

Bus Ride To Justice


Fred D. Gray - 1994
    He returned to his hometown in 1954 and became one of two black lawyers in the city. He was, he writes, determined to destroy everything segregated that I could find. He did not have to wait long. When Gray's friend Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for violating the segregated seating ordinance on a Montgomery bus, 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and 24-year-old Fred Gray became his--and the movement's--lawyer. Gray's legal victory in the federal courts ended the boycott 381 days later. Over the four decades since, Gray has won scores of civil rights cases in education, voting rights, transportation, health, and other areas. He represented the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and many more. Bus Ride to Justice is the exciting story of a courageous life in the courtrooms of America and in the pulpits of churches where Fred Gray began as a child preacher and continues today, and of a strong human being filled with love and admiration for his fellow man.

A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito De Mi Corazon: The Art of Carmen Lomas Garza


Carmen Lomas Garza - 1994
    In a career that spans twenty years, Carmen Lomas Garza has depicted the cherished traditions and harsh struggles of Chicano culture. From Grandparents Cutting Cactus to Felino’s Breakdancers, Lomas Garza’s bright, colorful images capture the beauty and texture of daily life among families, friends, and neighbors in southern Texas.Carmen Lomas Garza is the first Chicana to be the subject of a major traveling retrospective;The artist came of age during the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and El Movimiento helped shape her identity and goals. Lomas Garza’s evocative portraits of faith healings and tamale-making parties, of girls fixing their hair, and children gazing at the moon add a distinctly female perspective to her male compatriots’ earnest depictions of the oppressive living conditions of Chicanos.A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi Corazón presents the artist’s finest works, including paintings, etchings, cut-paper hangings, and altarlike installations. Together with a biographical chronology and rich interpretive essay by Amalia Mesa-Bains, this book is a long-overdue introduction to an important artist.

Literature Across Cultures


Sheena Gillespie - 1994
    A newly revised pedagogy highlights brevity, clarity, and accuracy, and provides effective strategies for reading and writing about literature. Students are asked to observe, reflect upon, and write about the social, political, and cultural aspects of the literature under examination. The literature is organized by thematic units and clusters, each including stories, poems, and plays arranged in clusters to provoke personal, analytical, and critical responses.

I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation


Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot - 1994
    What she creates is a wholly original work, a penetrating portrait of the lives of middle-class African-Americans that has not been seen before. The six storytellers in Lightfoot's work are poised in midlife, the time we all look back as a way to anticipate the future. In dialogue with Lightfoot, they reconstruct their lives with heroic candor, reflecting on the "necessary losses, " the price of privilege. Any reader, regardless of race or gender, will identify with these lives, with the way these storytellers live with contradiction, change rage into love, and search for ways to "give forward."

Here


C.S. Giscombe - 1994
    S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in a progression of three settings, three unlikely locations: the edges of the urban south, the edges--just beyond and just within the city--of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." Here is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point." "C.S. Giscombe makes evident a genius of attention to all the determinants of any one of us, our particulars, our people. He traces with consummate art the passage of time through his own accumulating presence, his points of origin and return" - Robert Creeley "Here is a powerful, understated meditation on place, ancestry and time. Establishing themes in the first poem (ironically titled after an old railway slogan, "Look Ahead-Look South"), Giscombe looks back to Birmingham, Ala., from a vantage point in the North (...) A diffuse, open technique avoids the hazard Giscombe identifies as "aimless description" and is able to take in a great deal of material, mimicking the processes of memory." - Publisher's Weekly

Skin Deep: Women Writing on Color, Culture and Identity


Elena Featherston - 1994
    The second section, "On Becoming 'AdNormal': Finding, Creating, and Accepting Wellness," suggests ways of unlearning destructive behaviors and attitudes that affect people of color, and moving toward self-defined emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health.There is no homogeneity among women of color in the United States. The women represented in this collection are African, Asian, Sephardic Jew, Latina, Middle Eastern, Native Hawaiian, First Nation, and various mixtures. Some have never before been published; others are well-known to many. Their perceptions are presented to encourage women to be more accessible to each other. A 52-item reading list and a 51-item resource list are included.

Black Firsts: 2,000 Years of Extraordinary Achievement


Jessie Carney Smith - 1994
    It lists more than 3000 firsts spanning over 20 centuries, in every area of human endeavour. An eight-page, fold-out, removable timeline is included with the book.

Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean


Jan R. Carew - 1994
    But, in the process, as Jan Carew observes in Ghosts in Our Blood, the significance of Malcolm's legacy has often eluded us. Combining the lyricism of the poet with the breadth of the scholar, Carew, whose conversations with Malcolm in Britain influenced the revolutionary's thinking toward the end of his life, captures Malcolm the intellectual in pursuit of a new vision of race and a global political movement uniting progressive Blacks and whites. For the first time, readers will gain an intimate knowledge of Malcolm's breakthrough to an internationalist vision following his historic trip to Mecca, his travels throughout Africa, and his life among the Black expatriate community in London. Central also to the intricate discussions that transpire between Malcolm and Carew is their common Caribbean heritage, which Carew unfolds in the first full-fledged treatment of the history of Malcolm's Grenadian and Garveyite mother.

The Final Appeal to Mankind volume 1


Nicolai Levashov - 1994
    This book is for those whose aim is to penetrate the secrets of nature, to understand the miracle of the origin of life, what a soul is and what happens with man during and after death. Such concepts as soul, spirit, reincarnation, etc. stop being mystic and incognizable and turn into natural concepts conditioned by the evolutional laws of living matter. For the first time, the explanation of almost all phenomena of living and lifeless nature and the unity of macro- and microcosmic laws is given in this book. The author has succeeded in creating a unified field theory and uniting the concepts of Nature into a single whole.

Chicano Art: Resistance And Affirmation, 1965 1985


Richard Griswold del Castillo - 1994
    

The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child


Carolyn L. Karcher - 1994
    Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters—the historical novel, the short story, children’s literature, the domestic advice book, women’s history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.

Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled


Thadious M. Davis - 1994
    With the instant success of her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), she became a bright light in New York's literary firmament. But her meteoric rise was followed by a surprising fall: In 1930 she was accused of plagiarizing a short story, and after 1933 she disappeared from both the literary and African-American worlds of New York. She lived the rest of her life--more than three decades--out of the public eye, working primarily as a nurse. In a remarkable achievement, Thadious Davis has penetrated the fog of mystery that has surrounded Larsen to present a detailed and fascinating account of the life and work of this gifted, determined, yet vulnerable artist.In addition to unraveling the details of Larsen's personal life, Davis deftly situates the writer within the broader politics and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance and analyzes her life and work in terms of the current literature on race and gender. This book, with the prodigious amount of new material and insights that Davis provides, is a landmark in African-American literary history and criticism.

The Final Appeal to Mankind volume 2


Nicolai Levashov - 1994
    This book is for those whose aim is to penetrate the secrets of nature, to understand the miracle of the origin of life, what a soul is and what happens with man during and after death. Such concepts as soul, spirit, reincarnation, etc. stop being mystic and incognizable and turn into natural concepts conditioned by the evolutional laws of living matter. For the first time, the explanation of almost all phenomena of living and lifeless nature and the unity of macro- and microcosmic laws is given in this book. The author has succeeded in creating a unified field theory and uniting the concepts of Nature into a single whole.

Voice of the Turtle


Paula Gunn Allen - 1994
    Presents a variety of short stories, autobiographies, and other narratives by modern Native Americans that reveal how their approach to life affects the stories they tell.

James H. Cone and Black Liberation Theology


Rufus Burrow Jr. - 1994
    Discussed here are some of his major writtings. The systematic development of his themes is fully explained.

The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty


Jill Quadagno - 1994
    Some critics have explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the center of the American Dilemma, as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal did half a century ago. The American creed of liberty, justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today. From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's unconditional war on poverty, she contends that though anti-poverty programs for job training, community action, health care, housing, and education have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs, programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing, programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups. This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care, subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan, threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and therefore dropped it. In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve the American dilemma. Yet instead of finally instituting full democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial inequality.