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A revised version of abstract 86Q9592.

It is argued that today's political language serves to heap further blame on the victims of discrimination & to present problems of poverty & unemployment as predominantly black problems, caused by the deficiencies of blacks. One of the results has been the undermining of the civil rights movement's hard-won affirmative-action policies. In Arguments Upside Down, Roger Wilkins (Instit for Policy Studies, 1901 Q St, Washington, DC 20009) points out that current attempts to do away with affirmative-action policies seek to justify the class inequality of a free market economy. In History and the Politics of Race, Richard P. Young (U of Texas, San Antonio) finds affirmative action an inadequate strategy for overcoming racial inequality, & argues that the Left should work for a full employment economy that would benefit all the disadvantaged. In Response to Wilkins and Young, Wellman relates disagreements to differing definitions of racism. S. McAneny

One of the memorable features of 1984 will be the political language that passed for an analysis of Presidential elections. Professors and pundits were particularly resourceful in their use of political language: The only group to vote solidly Democratic was held responsible for the Party's failure. The Democratic Party's overwhelming defeat was attributed to its enormous success with black people. This political feat was made plausible by the simple expedient of linguistic reclassification. Black people ceased to be a cultural or "interest group" in 1984. They became, instead, a "special interest." The new political language of racial politics communicates two seemingly contradictory messages in one language: The black community is told its salient issues are low priority items. The language used to say it, however, enables the speaker to sound neither racist nor conservative. Democratic Party spokespeople are therefore able to keep a straight face when they tell their most loyal constituency to lay low, lay off, or take a back seat to party defectors. Thus, at the very moment when black people are positioned to demand their share of center stage in American politics, sociologists and political scientists are helping to develop a rationale for keeping them backstage, or in the wings. This essay explores the intellectual activities that contribute to the new political language. It focuses on two questions: 1) How and why black people became a special interest and what difference it makes? 2) What is the sociological analysis that reclassifies affirmative action as "reverse discrimination"? Together, these two activities provide the formula for minimizing priority items on the black political agenda with a language that sounds neither racist nor neo-conservative. Note: This working paper was originally published by the Institute for the Study of Social Change, now the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. It was subsequently published in Socialist Review, vol. 16, no. 3 & 4, May-August 1986.

First published in 1977, Portraits of White Racism advanced a distinctively sociological theory of racism. Based on five case histories, it critically assessed the prevailing social-psychological paradigm that equated racism with prejudice and provided an alternative interpretation. Racism, the book argued, could be understood as a culturally sanctioned strategy for defending social advantage based on race; it was not simply the product of psychological abnormalities. In this revised edition the theoretical perspective is updated, taking into account recent theorising in the sociology of racism