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The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today
In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today’s most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society.
The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.
Introduction / Wahneema Lubiano
Home / Toni Morrison
The liberal retreat from race during the post-civil rights era / Stephen Steinberg
White workers, new Democrats, and affirmative action / David Roediger
Tales of two judges : Joyce Karlin in People v. Soon Ja Du; Lance Ito in People v. O.J. Simpson / Neil Gotanda
Racial dualism at century's end / Howard Winant
"Ain't nothin' like the real thing" : black masculinity, gay sexuality, and the jargon of authenticity / Kendall Thomas
Living at the crossroads : explorations in race, nationality, sexuality, and gender / Rhonda M. Williams
Rethinking vernacular culture : black religion and race records in the 1920s and 1930s / Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
What is black culture? / David Lionel Smith
Playing for keeps : pleasure and profit on the postindustrial playground / Robin D.G. Kelley
Black nationalism and black common sense : policing ourselves and others / Wahneema Lubiano
The ethnic scarring of American whiteness / Patricia J. Williams
Race and criminalization : black Americans and the punishment industry / Angela Y. Davis
Color blindness, history, and the law / Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Subjects in history : making diasporic identities / Stuart Hall
Afterword / Cornel West
Acknowledgments
Index
About the contributors
The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.
Introduction / Wahneema Lubiano
Home / Toni Morrison
The liberal retreat from race during the post-civil rights era / Stephen Steinberg
White workers, new Democrats, and affirmative action / David Roediger
Tales of two judges : Joyce Karlin in People v. Soon Ja Du; Lance Ito in People v. O.J. Simpson / Neil Gotanda
Racial dualism at century's end / Howard Winant
"Ain't nothin' like the real thing" : black masculinity, gay sexuality, and the jargon of authenticity / Kendall Thomas
Living at the crossroads : explorations in race, nationality, sexuality, and gender / Rhonda M. Williams
Rethinking vernacular culture : black religion and race records in the 1920s and 1930s / Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
What is black culture? / David Lionel Smith
Playing for keeps : pleasure and profit on the postindustrial playground / Robin D.G. Kelley
Black nationalism and black common sense : policing ourselves and others / Wahneema Lubiano
The ethnic scarring of American whiteness / Patricia J. Williams
Race and criminalization : black Americans and the punishment industry / Angela Y. Davis
Color blindness, history, and the law / Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Subjects in history : making diasporic identities / Stuart Hall
Afterword / Cornel West
Acknowledgments
Index
About the contributors
336 pages, Paperback
First published February 11, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 28, 2017
Excellent collection of essays about racial justice by a slew of well-known scholars in the field. It was published in 1997 and I'm sad to say that this book hasn't aged one bit. Some of the essays are academic and can be a difficult read if you're not familiar with the field. It's not a book for beginners. But if you're at all concerned about racial justice in the United States, there are some important essays in this book. It covers a wide variety of topics, from colonialism, imperialism, government oppression by republican and democratic policies, police brutality, gender, sexual violence, feminism, economic issues including capitalism and socialism, white supremacy, and inter-community policing of others within the black community. I took my time with this book and suggest you do too. It's much easier to digest if you read one essay at a time, but it's well worth exploring.
August 13, 2020
As a librarian I'm in a good position to notice trends in people's reading, and one hopeful sign lately is the significant increase in circulation of books about racism and anti-racism among our largely white demographic after the police killing of George Floyd and the many similar incidents that have forced their way into the media and popular consciousness as a result of the wave of protests. I don't want to exaggerate the significance either; one of the few good memes I've seen on the Internet says, "Stop calling George Floyd a "wake-up call", the alarm's been ringing for four hundred years and y'all just keep hitting snooze." Since the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties we have seen the battle to desegregate the Boston schools, Rodney King (the incident most referred to in this book), Ferguson, and so forth, and the media and public attention lasts just about as long as the protests. In any case, I decided to join the trend; I chose this book among those that the Library had because I've been reading Morrison's novels lately and it came up when I searched for her as an author in our catalog.
The book is a collection of sixteen essays deriving from the 1994 Race Matters Conference of left-liberal Black academics held at Princeton. While the subtitle gives prominence to the three "celebrities", in fact the introductory essay, "Home" by Toni Morrison and the "Afterword" by Cornel West were very short and almost without any real content. The other essays took a variety of positions and were somewhat uneven (and of course had varying amounts of academic "culture-theory" jargon).
The first essay was probably the most useful, Stephen Steinberg's "The Liberal Retreat from Race During the Post-Civil Rights Era", which documents the Johnson administration's -- and the "mainstream" liberals' -- abandonment of the Civil Rights movement after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Black demands shifted from formal legal equality to the question of economic equality to make practical use of the legal rights -- particularly the demand for "affirmative action." He describes the strategy of shifting attention from racism and discrimination to the supposed "pathology" of Black culture and the Black family, which was orchestrated largely by Johnson's advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his academic coauthor Nathan Glazer. (I admit to a real dislike for Moynihan and Glazer from the time I had to read their book Beyond the Melting Pot for a class in high school -- I knew that their argument was reactionary but at that time I couldn't really explain why.) He points out how Black conservatives (e.g. William Julius Wilson) tried to give legitimacy to the Moynihan emphasis on the "culture of poverty" and the pathology of the Black family, shows that Wilson was a favorite of Bill Clinton, and interestingly accuses Cornel West, one of the conference organizers, of being the "Left-wing of the Backlash" (criticism and defense of West run through many of the articles, though not always explicitly.) This article should be required reading for those who still think the liberal Democrats were great supporters of Black civil rights.
The overall argument about the importance of genuine affirmative action and the rejection of the Black cultural pathology strategy is a leitmotif of the book. Steinberg claims that the Johnson administration missed a "great opportunity" to break the racial domination hierarchy, but as another author points out, genuine affirmative action was "never on the table" in any case. Most of the articles in the book are very critical of liberalism, but in the end they just appeal from the "bad" liberals to the "good" liberals; it is telling that the index has no entries for "socialism" or "Marxism", and the few entries for "capitalism" are almost all from the single article by Angela Davis.
I won't discuss all sixteen articles here, but just highlight three more that were particularly interesting:
Patricia J. Williams' "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness" discusses the appeal of racist conservative arguments to white workers, and the way that elitist liberals play into the idea that there is a monolithic racist white working class -- "the wholesale depiction of "poor whites" as bigoted, versus the enlightened, ever-so-liberal middle and upper classes who enjoy the privilege of thinking of themselves as classless." Well-said!
Two of the most disturbing articles, because they describe facts rather than just theorizing, are Robin D.J. Kelley's "Playing for Keeps" and Angela Davis' "Race and Criminalization", which document the lack of any real employment opportunity for young Black workers, with the consequent fortification of the inner cities and imprisonment of a large proportion of Black youth. Dystopian novels and films fall far short of the actual truth about American cities in the age of deindustrialization.
The book is a collection of sixteen essays deriving from the 1994 Race Matters Conference of left-liberal Black academics held at Princeton. While the subtitle gives prominence to the three "celebrities", in fact the introductory essay, "Home" by Toni Morrison and the "Afterword" by Cornel West were very short and almost without any real content. The other essays took a variety of positions and were somewhat uneven (and of course had varying amounts of academic "culture-theory" jargon).
The first essay was probably the most useful, Stephen Steinberg's "The Liberal Retreat from Race During the Post-Civil Rights Era", which documents the Johnson administration's -- and the "mainstream" liberals' -- abandonment of the Civil Rights movement after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Black demands shifted from formal legal equality to the question of economic equality to make practical use of the legal rights -- particularly the demand for "affirmative action." He describes the strategy of shifting attention from racism and discrimination to the supposed "pathology" of Black culture and the Black family, which was orchestrated largely by Johnson's advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his academic coauthor Nathan Glazer. (I admit to a real dislike for Moynihan and Glazer from the time I had to read their book Beyond the Melting Pot for a class in high school -- I knew that their argument was reactionary but at that time I couldn't really explain why.) He points out how Black conservatives (e.g. William Julius Wilson) tried to give legitimacy to the Moynihan emphasis on the "culture of poverty" and the pathology of the Black family, shows that Wilson was a favorite of Bill Clinton, and interestingly accuses Cornel West, one of the conference organizers, of being the "Left-wing of the Backlash" (criticism and defense of West run through many of the articles, though not always explicitly.) This article should be required reading for those who still think the liberal Democrats were great supporters of Black civil rights.
The overall argument about the importance of genuine affirmative action and the rejection of the Black cultural pathology strategy is a leitmotif of the book. Steinberg claims that the Johnson administration missed a "great opportunity" to break the racial domination hierarchy, but as another author points out, genuine affirmative action was "never on the table" in any case. Most of the articles in the book are very critical of liberalism, but in the end they just appeal from the "bad" liberals to the "good" liberals; it is telling that the index has no entries for "socialism" or "Marxism", and the few entries for "capitalism" are almost all from the single article by Angela Davis.
I won't discuss all sixteen articles here, but just highlight three more that were particularly interesting:
Patricia J. Williams' "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness" discusses the appeal of racist conservative arguments to white workers, and the way that elitist liberals play into the idea that there is a monolithic racist white working class -- "the wholesale depiction of "poor whites" as bigoted, versus the enlightened, ever-so-liberal middle and upper classes who enjoy the privilege of thinking of themselves as classless." Well-said!
Two of the most disturbing articles, because they describe facts rather than just theorizing, are Robin D.J. Kelley's "Playing for Keeps" and Angela Davis' "Race and Criminalization", which document the lack of any real employment opportunity for young Black workers, with the consequent fortification of the inner cities and imprisonment of a large proportion of Black youth. Dystopian novels and films fall far short of the actual truth about American cities in the age of deindustrialization.
January 29, 2018
This book opened my eyes.
August 22, 2019
It was an interesting read but was not very engaging as I did not enjoy all the author's parts but rather some in particulars.
to-keep-reference
December 16, 2015“El nacionalismo negro es significativo por la ubicuidad de su presencia en la vida de los negros Americanos”. En todas esta diversas actividades y campos de vida, el nacionalismo negro invoca precisamente a los circuitos de auto-valorización que constituyen a la comunidad y permite su relativa auto-determinación y auto-constitución. Pese al extenso rango de fenómenos llamados nacionalismo negro, pues, podemos reconocer aún en él las dos funciones progresistas fundamentales del nacionalismo subalterno: la defensa y la unificación de la comunidad. Con la expresión “nacionalismo negro” podemos nombrar cualquier expresión de la separación y poder autónomo del pueblo Afroamericano.
Imperio Pág.85-86
Imperio Pág.85-86
April 24, 2016
"These questions, which have engaged so many, have troubled all of my work. How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet non racist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fierce, fitful, and constantly (I think)evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and politically unresolved." p.5
This is why I believe that Morrison is a deity. Her ability to transcend language and give literary, mystical depth to realities that shackle the marginalized while simultaneously demystifying and grounding these things in truth is earth shattering.
I'm here for Morrison but the rest was pretty good too...
This is why I believe that Morrison is a deity. Her ability to transcend language and give literary, mystical depth to realities that shackle the marginalized while simultaneously demystifying and grounding these things in truth is earth shattering.
I'm here for Morrison but the rest was pretty good too...
January 10, 2011
A great book of essays, with a stunning exegesis on the punishment industry by Angela Davis. The rest of the book confirms colonialism was never a 'hotbed' of activity, but rather, always the 'wetbed' of our nation. And Cornel West closes the book with the fact that, "antiblack racism is integral, not marginal, to the existence and sustenance of American society." More than worth the read. Race matters.
June 18, 2008
Morrison's essay, "Home" is critical to anyone who is studying race. Paired with anything, this essay will enlighten and expand one's ideas of "self" and how race defines society.
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April 17, 2017Although published in 1997, this work still provides valuable insights into the ongoing debate on race/racism in the US and its negative impact on all but especially young black men and increasingly young black women.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews