Race: The History of an Idea in America (Race and American Culture)

I use it for my job

An enlightening, erudite discourse into how the foundations of US racism and white supremacy were birthed, engraved, solidified and permeated into the institutional racism encasing the United States today. The racist beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, educators, scientist, writers and other ruling class luminaries are exposed. I now see how the killers of Micheal Brown, Trayvon Martin and countless other victims of US racism, are rewarded with hundreds of thousand of dollars in donations and acquittals.. A book well wroth reading.

I read the 1st edition of this book many years ago (in the 60s). It well describes the intellectual justifications for racism. It has a wonderful bibliography which allows the reader to find the original material. I have not re-read the book in years, but profoundly recall the author's discussion of how the intellectuals of the time produced literature to justify the US's continue subjagation of non-whites in American and outside--Kipling's "White Man's Burden" being one example. Highly recommended.

Nonsense

This reprint of a classic study of racism is one of the most important on the subject in the last fifty years, and significant for being the source of much later scholarly work. The place of racial pseudo-science in American history, indeed, American scholarship was once alarmingly strong, and the picture since the changes wrought in the sixties onwards tend to make one forget the insidious extent of the racist confusions. The book is quite comprehensive, and covers the issue of racism from the early modern onward, from the time of Las Casas and the Puritans to the time of Nazism, with interesting material on slavery, the treatment of the Indian, Reconstruction and afterward, Social Darwism, race in literature, and much more. As a teacher of English rather than a specialist the tone is precise yet informal, yet highly readable, and as the authors of the Forward to the new edition note, the text was an inspiration to many scholars of the time of the first printing.

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Classic study.