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Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The Changing Class Structure of Black America and the Political Behavior of African Americans -- 2. The Changing Class Structure of Black America and the Political Behavior of African Americans -- 3. The Politicization of African-American Racial Group Interests -- 4. Models of African-American Racial and Economic Group Interests -- 5. African-American Partisanship and the American Party System -- 6. African-American Political Choice -- 7. Racial Group Interests, African-American Presidential Approval, and Macroeconomic Policy -- 8. Group Interests, Class Divisions, and African- American Policy Preferences -- 9. Epilogue: Racial Group Interests, Class, and the Future of African-American Politics -- Bibliography -- Index

From Katrina to Obama -- Katrina and the Nadir of black politics -- The Obama campaign and the myth of a post-racial America -- Black political economy and the effects of neoliberalism -- On black politics -- The people united? -- Toward new black visions -- Taking the country back.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter 1 - Foundational Myths: Recovering and Reconciling Narratives of Resistance -- Chapter 2 - Power to the People? -- Chapter 3 - Who and What Killed the Left -- Chapter 4 - Modern Myths: Constructing Visions of the Future -- References -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

The radical black left has largely disappeared from the struggle for equality and justice. Michael Dawson examines the causes and consequences, and argues that the conventional left has failed to take race seriously as a force in reshaping American institutions and civil society. Black politics needs to find its way back to its radical roots.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, polls revealed that only 20 percent of African Americans believed that racial equality for blacks would be achieved in their lifetime. But following the election of Barack Obama, that number leaped to more than half. Did that dramatic shift in opinion really reflect a change in the vitality of black politics & mdash;and hope for improvement in the lives of African Americans? Or was it a onetime surge brought on by the euphoria of an extraordinary election? With Not in Our Lifetimes, Michael C. Dawson shows definitively that it is the latter: for all.

The Trayvon Martin tragedy, the optimistic spectacle of the election and inauguration of Barack Obama during late 2008 and early 2009, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina seemingly represent three very different events with little in common except the claim made by some that all were in some way related to racial politics in the US. Many would consider such a claim weak, noting each event's unique scale and relationship to the politics of race in the US. Yet I argue that that the events are in fact closely linked in fundamental ways that are important not only to political scientists, but, more importantly, to all who care about the health of democracy within the US. Each event demonstrates the massive racial cleavages within the US. Each event illustrates the nature of evolving racial order in the US. Each event illustrates the weaknesses and problems that confront contemporary black politics. And each event thus illuminates key questions that should motivate theoretical and empirical work on race and politics within political science. In this essay, I highlight the themes and processes that tie together these seemingly disparate events, some marked by hope, others by despair. I start by analyzing each event from the standpoint of the persistent, if evolving, racial divide in American public opinion. And I end by arguing that scholars of race and politics often have to adhere to the most rigorous scholarly standards while also fulfilling their duties as citizens.

It is fitting that in the same issue that we present a previously unpublished article by W. E. B. Du Bois and host a symposium reviewing new major works on his political philosophy, we also present major essays debating the contours of the color line in the twenty-first century. Immigration and a strong rightward movement in American society are rapidly remaking the demographic and political configuration of the color line in the United States. Several essays in this issue debate critical aspects of this reconfiguration such as the relative importance of cultural versus structural causes of continued racial disparities; the role, if any, that racialization plays in shaping the modern immigrant incorporation into U.S. society; and, the legacy of the Moynihan report. Complementing these essays is a symposium on two major new books that provide fresh takes on the philosophical and theoretical relevance of Du Bois's thought for our times. We are also proud, for the first time anywhere, to publish Du Bois's essay, "The Social Significance of Booker T. Washington," with an accompanying analytical introduction by Robert Brown.

I want to start with a story from the period of chaos that followed
Hurricane Katrina. I am going to present some data as an entry into a
brief discussion of how different publics evaluated the disaster, and the
implications for how we think about civil society in the United
States.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, security for the nation's Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force has become a prominent concern for personnel in the highest levels of government. This has resulted in many physical security upgrades and new methods to counter hostile activities. This research seeks to find the optimal placement for one layer of the security net protecting these crucial assets, the daily-deployed security forces Fire Teams. The problem of finding the optimal placement for these forces is modeled as a facility location problem. Three of the methods of locating facilities available in the literature are selected to solve this problem. The maximum covering location problem strives to cover the maximum demand possible with a predetermined, finite number of facilities. The p-center problem covers all demand and seeks to minimize the maximum distance between a demand point and a servicing facility. The p-median problem intends to minimize the demand-weighted total distance between demand sites and servicing facilities. A hybrid model is also developed to first employ a p-center solution and then attempt to reduce the total distance using a p-median approach. Comparison of the four models is based on Fire Team usage, the average response time calculated from the placement of Fire Teams, the average total distance, and the average maximum distance any Fire Team is located from a penetrated Launch Facility.

The cry of "Black Power" shook American society three decades ago. "Black Power" was a slogan that energized a generation of young African Americans, troubled their elders such as Dr. King (who agreed with many of the goals, but saw the slogan itself as divisive), and appalled the great majority of whites. As seriously as the slogan divided blacks, the intra-racial gap was small compared to the inter-racial gap as Aberbach and Walker documented in the pages of the APSR decades ago (1970). Blacks and whites understood black power to represent very different concepts. Where blacks understood the concept to mean either fairness or black unity, whites saw the slogan as representing blacks' demand that white supremacy be replaced with black supremacy.It has been nearly thirty years since our colleague Charles V. Hamilton co-authored the extremely influential Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America with Stokely Charmichael (1967). They forcibly argued that "before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks." (Charmichael and Hamilton 1967, 44, emphasis in original). However, blacks generally rejected nationalist programs and opted as they had in the past for what many such as Guinier have labeled a civil rights agenda (Guinier 1994). Instead of rejecting traditional politics, black empowerment strategies embraced during the 1970s by both integrationist and nationalist forces concentrated on the electoral arena. Black power moved from confrontations in the streets and on college campuses into the electoral arena during this period. This "New Black Politics" was celebrated by many blacks and whites inside the academy. The "new" electoral successes were heralded as representing true black power, the institutionalization of the mass movement, the exercise of power in the real policy forums of the nation.

Examines bases of Black empowerment and its association with social justice, barriers to achieving it, and the conditions under which it is most effectively realized; US.