J. Eric Oliver is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic and Democracy in Suburbia.

 “J. Eric Oliver makes an important new contribution to the scholarship of racial politics, offering a detailed analysis of the simultaneous impact of neighborhood and metro-wide racial attitudes and paying careful attention to the various racial groups that make up communities. The Paradoxes of Integration is an original and revealing account that explores social capital, racial difference, and residential contexts in order to illustrate the contradictions between integration and intergroup tensions in contemporary American society.”

“The Paradoxes of Integration represents an important advance in scholarship on America's increasingly pluralistic cities. Oliver explores both the neighborhood and metropolitan effects of residence patterns for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, whites, and Latinos. This broadens the efforts of previous work that focused on black and white relationships somewhat removed from the realities of our multi-ethnic society. The original and much-needed focus of this book, which includes shining the spotlight for one of the first times on the attitudes of Asian and Latino Americans, succeeds in thinking more carefully about and drawing greater attention to racial and ethnic differences, as well those geographical and political.”

 "A glance at the newspaper headlines of the day—the achievement gap among Black and Latino students, controversies over the 9/11 Memorial, anti-immigration legislation—all suggest that J. Eric Oliver’s central thesis that “the future of race in America is fundamentally tied to place” will hold true. This book promises to reshape scholarship on race and politics toward broader conceptualizations and theories, and it will no doubt spark much-needed debate and deliberation on the effectiveness of racial integration policies."—Urban Affairs Review

“The Paradoxes of Integration is a coherently organized and insightful book and its arguments are convincing. I strongly recommend it to urban sociologists and students of race, ethnicity, and intergroup relations—already practicing scholars as well as those in the making.”