Review: The color of power: Racial coalitions and political power in Oakland by Frédérick Douzet, translated by George Holoch

Abstract

Frederick Douzet's account of urban racial politics in Oakland, California attempts to frame the racial geopolitics of California via Yves Lacoste's geopolitical framework. Suggesting that American political geographers focus too much on international politics, Douzet contends for a return to Lacoste's classic definition of geopolitics as simply the study of how groups compete for power over territorial space—whether as large as nation-states in an international order or as small as neighbourhoods in cities. Douzet's study of Oakland thus claims to be about how African Americans in Oakland wrested power from a white oligarchy in the 1970s, only to be faced with the prospect of founding multiracial coalitions in the 1990s due to the increase of Asian and Latino immigration. Yet her book fails to bring the potential of her argument about California's geopolitics to full realization. Moreover, the work is plagued by Douzet's seeming unwillingness to cite existing work in American urban studies