Racial Diversity and Social Capital: Equality and Community in America
"Focusing on fundamental questions that concern participation, public policy, and vectors of inequality, this thoughtful book enlarges our understanding of how race deeply constitutes many features of American politics and society.  In so doing, it powerfully demonstrates the costs to empirical and normative theory when such matters are downplayed or underestimated, and the gains to understanding and possibility when they are brought from the periphery to the center of political analysis."Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005)."Rodney Hero has done it again!  With characteristic polish and aplomb, Hero moves the debate over racial diversity and social capital from Sturm und Drang to carefully considered, empirically testable propositions.  Social capital, it turns out, is neither a Trojan horse nor a panacea for the deep divisions that characterize pluralistic societies.  In many contexts, it works more toward the maintenance of white privilege than it does as a collective good, aiming toward the betterment of a community dans l'ensemble.  This is a splendid, signal contribution."Taeku Lee, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley"This is a long-awaited and important book...Coming from a distinguished scholar, Rodney E. Hero, it provides an invaluable contribution to the current culture versus structure debate, and its contents are relevant beyond the American context."Paul M. Kellstedt, Journal of Politics