Suchergebnisse

"Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality questions, examines, and explains the way a new orthodoxy of American leaders has contributed to the social stratification and inequality which plagues America today. By looking at the history of our social policies since the New Deal, as well as the status of specific policy arenas, essayists show how political shifts over the past fifty years have moved us away from a more egalitarian politics. Throughout, the book responds critically to the now conventional argument that liberalism must be reconfigured in ways that retreat from immediate identification with the interests of labor, minorities, and the poor. From a look at federal housing policy and the failure of New Deal social programs to an examination of long established public assistance programs and Affirmative Action, Without Justice for All is a timely and important contribution to the dialogue on race in modern America."--Provided by publisher.

Proliferation in recent years of a literature that seeks to examine the sources, content, and meanings of whiteness in American life stems from several factors. Among these are: (1) the sociology of academic trends; (2) the growth in recent decades of new academic specialties and interdisciplinary studies that accelerate the velocity of interpretive tendencies and problematiques; (3) reaction against a perceived retreat in civic and academic discussion, and national political life, during the 1980s and 1990s from acknowledgement of the historical and persisting force of racial stratification and inequality; and 4) the combination of atrophy of extramural Left politics and heightened perceptions of the political significance of academic debates. Most consequentially, as Professor Arnesen maintains, the turn to "whiteness studies" emerges from a version of the question crystallized more than a century ago by Werner Sombart, "Why is there no socialism in America?" The literature produced under this rubric is generally marred by conceptual ambiguities, ahistorical formulations, and lack of interpretive discipline. Particularly as it engages labor history and the work of labor historians, the whiteness literature is anchored in the hoary, and fundamentally miscast, debate over the centrality of racial versus class dynamics in shaping working-class experience and American politics.