The House That Race Built
Subtitle: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain
Edition: 1st ed edition
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: February 11, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 323
ISBN-13: 9780679440901
Subjects: Social conditions; Race relations; Race And Ethnic Relations; United States; Sociology; Racism; Anthropology - Cultural; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General; Minority Studies - Race Relations; Social Science / African-American Studies; 1975-; African Americans
Description: The House That Race Built is the response by some of this country's most admired intellectuals to the crisis of democracy represented by the recent, ominous shift toward a renewed white racial nationalism.

It is unified by a central argument that deserves to be at the heart of the national debate: that "race" and "racism" must be understood not just as referring to the relations between black and white Americans, but as constituting the central American dynamic by which a pervasive, antidemocratic social inequality is re-created, maintained, and justified to the detriment of all.

In a post-civil rights era of rapidly increasing economic and social apartheid, The House That Race Built makes us see how Americans' continuing delusory investments in the privileges of whiteness and the pathology of blackness uphold a social hierarchy that is destructive of democratic possibility. This book's analysis of race and racism extends to the complexities of within-the-group dynamics of black Americans.

How race is defined, and who gets to talk about it, determine how race and American whiteness will be understood and used: either to reconsolidate racial domination or to establish racial democracy.