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Howard Winant, one of the leading sociologists of race and ethnicity working today, clearly locates race at the crossroads of identity and social structure, where difference frames inequality. The New Politics of Race brings together Winants new and previously published essays to form a comprehensive picture of the origins and nature of the complex racial politics that engulf us today

Preface; 1. Introduction; Part I. Racial Theory; 2. The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race; 3. Where Culture Meets Structure: Race in the 1990s; 4. Dictatorship, Democracy, and Difference: The Historical Construction of Racial Identity; Part II. Racial Politics; 5. Contesting the Meaning of Race in the Post-Civil Rights Period; 6. The Los Angeles "Race Riot" and Contemporary U.S. Politics; 7. Hard Lessons: Recent Writing on Racial Politics; Part III. The Comparative Sociology of Race; 8. Racial Formation and Hegemony: Global and Local Developments

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Race and racism may be termed the 'dark matter' of the modern epoch. Race was invented along with the modern era. It was central to the liftoff of capitalism, a big bang itself. The dark matter then – the darker peoples of that time – was not complete: in fact they were not invisible as 'matter', as something that mattered. They were invisible as people. Empire, slavery, augmented state power, and the dialectic of enlightenment as well, can all be seen as racial dynamics in which absolutism's grasping and violent claws tore at these 'others', seeking to dominate their bodies and their lands. Today the 'dark matter' persists in the form of disregard from above. An institutionalized forgetting of the meaning of race ('colorblindness') disguises this coercion and violence, these assaults, this war. Race and racism also continue from below, as matters of resistance and as frameworks for alternative identities and collectivities.

AbstractPresident-elect Barack Obama will take office after a campaign that was pathbreaking on many levels. The argument here, necessarily somewhat speculative, is that Obama's management of his racial identity and of racial politics is roughly predictive of his soon-to-begin management of executive power in the United States. Obama is characterized as a "practical idealist," a true pragmatist in the deeply grounded, philosophical (as opposed to vulgar) sense of that term. Attention is directed to the way Obama has handled or may be likely to handle the racial politics of the election itself, the ongoing realities of structural racism in the United States and the problem of exercising executive power in an endemically racial state, the role of race in national politics, and the role of race in global politics. The uniqueness of this new administration—headed by a preternaturally skilled and intellectually prepared Black politician—is not chiefly located in the symbolism of Obama's Blackness, important as that is. Rather it is Obama's formation as a Black intellectual and politician that may be expected to guide his thought and action in the White House.

The harnessing of the themes of race, ethnic nationality, religious difference, & the menace of "otherness" to the purposes of empire is argued to have found important echoes in the contemporary political panorama of the "clash of civilizations" & theocratic Protestant evangelism in the US. The new imperialism is not a "clash of civilizations", but a conflict within civilizations that is an attempt to generate a global hegemonic project for the 21st century. The formidable new problem for US racial hegemony is the problem of diaspora in which the "clash of civilizations" is occurring no less in Washington than in the Middle East! The new imperialism has made a definite turn towards militarism & a tendency towards a ferocious anti-statism. The Bush regime is concluded to be carrying out a desperate effort to preserve a moribund social order both globally and nationally that is based largely on military superiority, & is dependent on a dying form of white racial nationalism. The counterhegemonic project has at its core, the principle of participatory democracy, & the great resource of the vast support of millions all around the world. References. J. Harwell

A thoughtful book on a subject that can be quite vexing, Shades of Citizenship benefits greatly from the comparative analytical framework employed. The central poles of comparative attention are the U.S. and Brazilian censuses, but Nobles also comments on a range of other national processes of census-taking and systems of racial classification employed; Germany and South Africa as well as other Latin American, African, and European countries are mentioned.