front cover of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime
American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime
The Challenge to Liberal Pluralism
Thomas F. Powers
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Wokeness, cancel culture, identity politics, political correctness, multiculturalism—terms unsettling but also somehow inescapable. Thomas F. Powers shows how these are all one thing, elements of one broad political phenomenon—the anti-discrimination regime—–that has since 1964 been working to challenge and undermine America’s defining liberal democratic tradition (the tradition of the Declaration and the Constitution). The many deep lines of tension between the old and the new, presented here with arresting clarity, allow us to grasp the new order in its distinctiveness. Novel imperatives to regulate private life (behavior, speech, thought) begin to come to sight in the new order’s many laws and institutions. Attentive to the crucial role of law, the main focus of this book is nevertheless on the ideas, especially the moral ideals, thrust upon us by the new regime. This study examines theorists of multicultural education (non-postmodernist and postmodernist) who, without hesitation, set forth a new civic education and a new form of democratic pluralism for America. When a country has a new civic education, a new pluralism, and a new morality, these are signs of fundamental change not to be ignored. The book culminates in a direct critical examination of the new logic of group politics and the new morality of the anti-discrimination regime. In embarking on this new chapter of democratic life, do we know what we are doing?
[more]

front cover of Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity
Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity
The Nisei Generation in Hawaii
Eileen H. Tamura
University of Illinois Press, 1994

Wartime hysteria over "foreign" ways fueled a movement for Americanization that swept the United States during and after World War I. Eileen H. Tamura examines the forms that hysteria took in Hawai'i, where the Nisei (children of Japanese immigrants) were targets of widespread discrimination.

Tamura analyzes Hawaii's organized effort to force the Nisei to adopt "American" ways, discussing it within the larger phenomenon of Nisei acculturation. While racism was prevalent in "paradise," the Nisei and their parents also performed as active agents in their own lives, with the older generation attempting to maintain Japanese cultural ways and the younger wishing to become "true Americans." Caucasian "Americanizers," often associated with powerful agricultural interests, wanted labor to remain cheap and manageable; they lobbied for racist laws and territorial policies, portending the treatment of ethnic Japanese on the U.S. mainland during World War II.

Tamura offers a wealth of original source material, using personal accounts as well as statistical data to create an essential resource for students of American ethnic history and U.S. race and class relations.

[more]

front cover of America's Peacemakers
America's Peacemakers
The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights
Bertram Levine
University of Missouri Press, 2020
America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights tells the behind-the-scenes story of a small federal agency that made a big difference in civil rights conflicts over the last half century. In this second edition of Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964–1989, Grande Lum continues Bertram Levine’s excellent scholarship, expanding the narrative to consider the history of the Community Relations Service (CRS) of the U.S. Department of Justice over the course of the last three decades. That the Trump administration has sought to eliminate CRS gives this book increased urgency and relevance.
 
Covered in this expanded edition are the post–9/11 efforts of the CRS to prevent violence and hate crimes against those perceived as Middle Eastern. Also discussed are the cross-border Elián González custody dispute and the notable tragedies of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, both of which brought police interaction with communities of color back into the spotlight.  

The 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act substantially altered CRS’s jurisdiction, which began to focus on gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, and disability in addition to race, color, and national origin. Lum’s documentation of this expanded jurisdiction provides insight into the progression of civil rights. The ongoing story of the Community Relations Service is a crucial component of the national narrative on civil rights and conflict resolution. This new edition will be highly informative to all readers and useful to professionals and academics in the civil rights, dispute resolution, domestic and international peacemaking, and law enforcement-community relations fields.

 
[more]

front cover of Appearance, Discrimination and the Media
Appearance, Discrimination and the Media
Portraying Facial Disfigurement Fairly in the News
Diana Garrisi, Laima Janciute and Jacob Johanssen
University of Westminster Press, 2018

The portrayal of disfigurement in the UK media must change. This policy brief is based on recent research that found a general negative and sensationalised attitude towards disfigurement in the media.

Disfigurement is a condition that can affect anyone at any time in life regardless their social or demographic background due to accidents or health conditions or be congenital. In the UK, one in 111 people have facial disfigurements.

In order to improve the ways in which media portray disfigurement, this policy brief argues that media should move away from sensationalised coverage on disfigurement and focus instead on the lived experiences of individuals with this condition. It recommends strengthening diversity-oriented editorial practices and training as well as media literacy education. In addition, it addresses the lack of guidelines on the portrayal of disfigurement and urges regulatory bodies to be more efficient in handling complaints.

[more]

front cover of Blackhood Against the Police Power
Blackhood Against the Police Power
Punishment and Disavowal in the "Post-Racial" Era
Tryon P. Woods
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of “race” and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary “post-racial” culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement’s singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today’s critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power—from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.
[more]

front cover of Catching a Case
Catching a Case
Inequality and Fear in New York City's Child Welfare System
Lee, Tina
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Influenced by news reports of young children brutalized by their parents, most of us see the role of child services as the prevention of severe physical abuse. But as Tina Lee shows in Catching a Case, most child welfare cases revolve around often ill-founded charges of neglect, and the parents swept into the system are generally struggling but loving, fighting to raise their children in the face of crushing poverty, violent crime, poor housing, lack of childcare, and failing schools.
 
Lee explored the child welfare system in New York City, observing family courts, interviewing parents and following them through the system, asking caseworkers for descriptions of their work and their decision-making processes, and discussing cases with attorneys on all sides. What she discovered about the system is troubling. Lee reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for families, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet. For instance, parents can be accused of neglect for providing inadequate childcare or housing even when they cannot afford anything better. In many cases, child welfare exacerbates family problems and sometimes drives parents further into poverty while the family court system does little to protect their rights. 
 
Catching a Case is a much-needed wake-up call to improve the child welfare system, and to offer more comprehensive social services that will allow all children to thrive. 
 
[more]

front cover of Changing Minds
Changing Minds
Social Movements’ Cultural Impacts
Francesca Polletta
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
Social movements—organized efforts by relatively powerless people to change society—can result in legal and policy changes, such as laws protecting same-sex marriage and tax rebates for solar energy. However, movements also change people’s beliefs, values, and everyday behavior. Such changes may help bring about new policies or take place in the absence of new policy, yet we still know little about when and why they occur. In Changing Minds, sociologists Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta ask why movements have sometimes had fast and far-reaching cultural influence.
 
Polletta and Amenta examine the trajectories of U.S. social movements, including the old-age pension movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Black rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s movement of the 1970s, right-wing movements in the 1980s and 1990s, and the environmental movement up to the present, to determine when, why, and how social movements change culture. They find that influential movements are featured in the news, but not only in the news. Movement perspectives may appear also in opinion and commentary outlets, on television talk shows and dramas, in movies, stand-up comedy, and viral memes. Popular culture producers remake movement messages as they transmit them, sometimes in ways that make those messages compelling. For example, while the news largely ignored feminists’ challenge to inequality in the home, popular cultural outlets turned “liberation” into a resonant demand for women’s right to self-fulfillment outside the home and within it.  Widespread attention to the movement may lead people to change their minds individually. But more substantial change is likely when companies, schools, and other organizations outside government strive to get out in front of a newly legitimate issue, whether environmental sustainability or racial equity, by adopting movement-supportive norms and practices. Eventually, ideas associated with a movement may become a new common sense—though not always the ideas that the movement intended.
 
Throughout Changing Minds, Polletta and Amenta provide activists with strategies for getting their message heard and acted on. They suggest how movement actors can get into the news as political players or experts rather than lawbreakers or zealots. They show when it makes sense for activists to work with popular cultural producers and when they should create their own cultural outlets. They explain why the routes to cultural influence have changed and why urging people to take one easy step to save the planet can do more harm than good.
 
Changing Minds is a fascinating exploration of why and how some social movements have caused profound shifts in society.
 
 
[more]

front cover of Correctional
Correctional
Ravi Shankar
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
The first time Ravi Shankar was arrested, he spoke out against racist policing on National Public Radio and successfully sued the city of New York. The second time, he was incarcerated when his promotion to full professor was finalized. During his ninety-day pretrial confinement at the Hartford Correctional Center—a level 4, high-security urban jail in Connecticut—he met men who shared harrowing and heart-felt stories. The experience taught him about the persistence of structural racism, the limitations of mass media, and the pervasive traumas of twenty-first-century daily life.
 
Shankar’s bold and complex self-portrait—and portrait of America—challenges us to rethink our complicity in the criminal justice system and mental health policies that perpetuate inequity and harm. Correctional dives into the inner workings of his mind and heart, framing his unexpected encounters with law and order through the lenses of race, class, privilege, and his bicultural upbringing as the first and only son of South Indian immigrants. Vignettes from his early life set the scene for his spectacular fall and subsequent struggle to come to terms with his own demons. Many of them, it turns out, are also our own.
[more]

front cover of Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South
Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South
Edited by Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Policing, incarceration, capital punishment: these forms of crime control were crucial elements of Jim Crow regimes. White southerners relied on them to assert and maintain racial power, which led to the growth of modern state bureaucracies that eclipsed traditions of local sovereignty. Friction between the demands of white supremacy and white southern suspicions of state power created a distinctive criminal justice system in the South, elements of which are still apparent today across the United States.

In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights.

Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood

[more]

front cover of Criminalized Lives
Criminalized Lives
HIV and Legal Violence
Alexander McClelland
Rutgers University Press, 2024
POZ Best in Literature Award 

Canada has been known as a hot spot for HIV criminalization where the act of not disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to sex partners has historically been regarded as a serious criminal offence. Criminalized Lives describes how this approach has disproportionately harmed the poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada. In this book, people who have been criminally accused of not disclosing their HIV-positive status, detail the many complexities of disclosure, and the violence that results from being criminalized. 
 
Accompanied by portraits from artist Eric Kostiuk Williams, the profiles examine whether the criminal legal system is really prepared to handle the nuances and ethical dilemmas faced everyday by people living with HIV. By offering personal stories of people who have faced criminalization first-hand, Alexander McClelland questions common assumptions about HIV, the role of punishment, and the violence that results from the criminal legal system’s legacy of categorizing people as either victims or perpetrators. 

Note: A regrettable error appears on page 22. The number 240 should be 206 when referring to the number of people prosecuted in relation to allegations of HIV nondisclosure. This will be fixed in future reprints.
[more]

front cover of Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory
The Cutting Edge
Richard Delgado
Temple University Press, 2013
Critical Race Theory has become a dynamic, eclectic, and growing movement in the study of law. With this third edition of Critical Race Theory, editors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have created a reader for the twenty-first century-one that shakes up the legal academy, questions comfortable liberal premises, and leads the search for new ways of thinking about our nation's most intractable, and insoluble, problem-race.

The contributions, from a stellar roster of established and emerging scholars, address new topics, such as intersectionality and black men on the "down low." Essays also confront much-discussed issues of discrimination, workplace dynamics, affirmative action, and sexual politics. Also new to this volume are updated section introductions, author notes, questions for discussion, and reading lists for each unit. The volume also covers the spread of the movement to other disciplines such as education.

Offering a comprehensive and stimulating snapshot of current race jurisprudence and thought, this new edition of Critical Race Theory is essential for those interested in law, the multiculturalism movement, political science, education, and critical thought.

[more]

front cover of Death beyond Disavowal
Death beyond Disavowal
The Impossible Politics of Difference
Grace Kyungwon Hong
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Death beyond Disavowal utilizes “difference” as theorized by women of color feminists to analyze works of cultural production by people of color as expressing a powerful antidote to the erasures of contemporary neoliberalism.

According to Grace Kyungwon Hong, neoliberalism is first and foremost a structure of disavowal enacted as a reaction to the successes of the movements for decolonization, desegregation, and liberation of the post–World War II era. It emphasizes the selective and uneven affirmation and incorporation of subjects and ideas that were formerly categorically marginalized, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability. It does so in order to suggest that racial, gendered, and sexualized violence and inequity are conditions of the past, rather than the foundations of contemporary neoliberalism’s exacerbation of premature death. Neoliberal ideologies hold out the promise of protection from premature death in exchange for complicity with this pretense.

In Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation and Waiting in the Wings, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, Inge Blackman’s B. D. Women, Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, and the work of the late Barbara Christian, Death beyond Disavowal finds the memories of death and precarity that neoliberal ideologies attempt to erase.

Hong posits cultural production as a compelling rejoinder to neoliberalism’s violences. She situates women of color feminism, often dismissed as narrow or limited in its effect, as a potent diagnosis of and alternative to such violences. And she argues for the importance of women of color feminism to any critical engagement with contemporary neoliberalism.


[more]

front cover of The Dimensions of Tolerance
The Dimensions of Tolerance
What Americans Believe About Civil Liberties
Herbert McClosky
Russell Sage Foundation, 1983
Reaching well beyond traditional categories of analysis, McClosky and Brill have surveyed civil libertarian attitudes among the general public, opinion leaders, lawyers and judges, police officials, and academics. They analyze levels of tolerance in a wide range of civil liberties domains—first amendment rights, due process, privacy, and such emerging areas as women's and homosexual rights—and along numerous variables including political participation, ideology, age, and education. The authors explore fully the differences between civil libertarian values in the abstract and applying them in specific instances. They also examine the impact of tensions between liberties (free press and privacy, for example) and between tolerance and other values (such as public safety). They probe attitudes toward recently expanded liberties, finding that even the more informed and sophisticated citizen is often unable to read on through complex new civil liberties issues. This remarkable study offers a comprehensive assessment of the viability—and vulnerability—of beliefs central to the democratic system. It makes an invaluable contribution to the study of contemporary American institutions and attitudes.
[more]

front cover of Disabled Futures
Disabled Futures
A Framework for Radical Inclusion
Milo W. Obourn
Temple University Press, 2020

Disabled Futures makes an important intervention in disability studies by taking an intersectional approach to race, gender, and disability. Milo Obourn reads disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies to develop a framework for addressing inequity. They theorize the concept of “racialized disgender”—to describe the ways in which racialization and gendering are social processes with disabling effects—thereby offering a new avenue for understanding race, gender, and disability as mutually constitutive.  

Obourn uses readings of literature and popular culture from Lost and Avatar to Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy to explore and unpack specific ways that race and gender construct—and are constructed by—historical notions of ability and disability, sickness and health, and successful recovery versus damaged lives. What emerges is not only a more complex and deeper understanding of the intersections between ableism, racism, and (cis)sexism, but also possibilities for imagining alternate and more radically inclusive futures in which all of our identities, experiences, freedoms, and oppressions are understood as interdependent and intertwined.

[more]

front cover of Discrimination in Modern Japan
Discrimination in Modern Japan
Case Studies in Identity Politics
J. Mark Ramseyer
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An informative rethinking of how Japanese society discriminates against its Korean, Okinawan, and Burakumin populations.
 
In this book, J. Mark Ramseyer, a noted authority on Japan looks at discrimination against groups in Japanese society, focusing on the Korean, Okinawan, and Burakumin groups. Ramseyer asks why they experience discrimination in Japan, an unusually homogeneous society. Is it because of some prejudice on the part of the majority that prevents their integration into mainstream Japanese society? Or is it because some of the dynamics within the group create incentives for the group to stay together and to be on the fringes of society?
 
Ramseyer argues that the real explanation is the latter, and each of these three groups has been victimized by its own leadership. Precisely because the groups are dysfunctional, members of the group cannot control members who would appoint themselves group leaders.  The result has been the capture of leadership positions by people who manipulate the group to their own private advantage and to the detriment of the group as a whole.
[more]

front cover of Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics
Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics
The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States since the New Deal
Paul Burstein
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Throughout this impressive and controversial account of the fight against job discrimination in the United States, Paul Burstein poses searching questions. Why did Congress adopt EEO legislation in the sixties and seventies? Has that legislation made a difference to the people it was intended to help? And what can the struggle for equal employment opportunity tell us about democracy in the United States?

"This is an important, well-researched book. . . . Burstein has had the courage to break through narrow specializations within sociology . . . and even to address the types of acceptable questions usually associated with three different disciplines (political science, sociology, and economics). . . . This book should be read by all professionals interested in political sociology and social movements."—Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Social Forces

"Discrimination, Jobs and Politics [is] satisfying because it tells a more complete story . . . than does most sociological research. . . . I find myself returning to it when I'm studying the U.S. women's movement and recommending it to students struggling to do coherent research."—Rachel Rosenfeld, Contemporary Sociology

[more]

front cover of The Economics of Discrimination
The Economics of Discrimination
Gary S. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 1971
This second edition of Gary S. Becker's The Economics of Discrimination has been expanded to include three further discussions of the problem and an entirely new introduction which considers the contributions made by others in recent years and some of the more important problems remaining.

Mr. Becker's work confronts the economic effects of discrimination in the market place because of race, religion, sex, color, social class, personality, or other non-pecuniary considerations. He demonstrates that discrimination in the market place by any group reduces their own real incomes as well as those of the minority.

The original edition of The Economics of Discrimination was warmly received by economists, sociologists, and psychologists alike for focusing the discerning eye of economic analysis upon a vital social problem—discrimination in the market place.

"This is an unusual book; not only is it filled with ingenious theorizing but the implications of the theory are boldly confronted with facts. . . . The intimate relation of the theory and observation has resulted in a book of great vitality on a subject whose interest and importance are obvious."—M.W. Reder, American Economic Review

"The author's solution to the problem of measuring the motive behind actual discrimination is something of a tour de force. . . . Sociologists in the field of race relations will wish to read this book."—Karl Schuessler, American Sociological Review
[more]

front cover of The Education of a WASP
The Education of a WASP
Lois M. Stalvey
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

Brimming with honestly and passion, The Education of a WASP chronicles one white woman's discovery of racism in 1960s America. First published in 1970 and highly acclaimed by reviewers, Lois Stalvey's account is as timely now as it was then. Nearly twenty years later, with ugly racial incidents occurring on college campuses, in neighborhoods, and in workplaces everywhere, her account of personal encounters with racism remains deeply disturbing. Educators and general readers interested in the subtleties of racism will find the story poignant, revealing, and profoundly moving.

“Delightful and horrible, a singular book.” —Choice

“An extraordinarily honest and revealing book that poses the issue: loyalty to one’s ethnic group or loyalty to conscience.” —Publishers Weekly

[more]

front cover of Emerging Intersections
Emerging Intersections
Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice
Dill, Bonnie Thornton
Rutgers University Press, 2009
The United States is known as a "melting pot" yet this mix tends to be volatile and contributes to a long history of oppression, racism, and bigotry.

Emerging Intersections, an anthology of ten previously unpublished essays, looks at the problems of inequality and oppression from new angles and promotes intersectionality as an interpretive tool that can be utilized to better understand the ways in which race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference shape our lives today. The book showcases innovative contributions that expand our understanding of how inequality affects people of color, demonstrates the ways public policies reinforce existing systems of inequality, and shows how research and teaching using an intersectional perspective compels scholars to become agents of change within institutions. By offering practical applications for using intersectional knowledge, Emerging Intersections will help bring us one step closer to achieving positive institutional change and social justice.

[more]

front cover of A Feminist Theory of Violence
A Feminist Theory of Violence
A Decolonial Perspective
Françoise Vergès
Pluto Press, 2022
'A robust, decolonial challenge to carceral feminism' - Angela Y. Davis

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2022***

The mainstream conversation surrounding gender equality is a repertoire of violence: harassment, rape, abuse, femicide. These words suggest a cruel reality. But they also hide another reality: that of gendered violence committed with the complicity of the State.

In this book, Françoise Vergès denounces the carceral turn in the fight against sexism. By focusing on 'violent men', we fail to question the sources of their violence. There is no doubt as to the underlying causes: racial capitalism, ultra-conservative populism, the crushing of the Global South by wars and imperialist looting, the exile of millions and the proliferation of prisons - these all put masculinity in the service of a policy of death.

Against the spirit of the times, Françoise Vergès refuses the punitive obsession of the State in favour of restorative justice.
[more]

front cover of The Gentleman from Ohio
The Gentleman from Ohio
Louis Stokes with David Chanoff with a foreword by Congressman John Lewis
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Louis Stokes was a giant in Ohio politics and one of the most significant figures in the U.S. Congress in recent times. When he arrived in the House of Representatives as a freshman in 1969, there were only six African Americans serving. By the time he retired thirty years later, he had chaired the House Special Committee on the Kennedy and King assassinations, the House Ethics Committee during Abscam, and the House Intelligence Committee during Iran-Contra; he was also a senior member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
 
Prior to Louis Stokes’s tenure in Congress he served for many years as a criminal defense lawyer and chairman of the Cleveland NAACP Legal Redress Committee. Among the Supreme Court Cases he argued, the Terry “Stop and Frisk” case is regarded as one of the twenty-five most significant cases in the court’s history. The Gentleman from Ohio chronicles this and other momentous events in the life and legacy of Ohio’s first black representative—a man who, whether in law or politics, continually fought for the principles he believed in and helped lead the way for African Americans in the world of mainstream American politics.
 
[more]

front cover of Healthcare and Human Dignity
Healthcare and Human Dignity
Law Matters
Frank M. McClellan
Rutgers University Press, 2020
The individual and structural biases that affect the American healthcare system have serious emotional and physical consequences that all too often go unseen. These biases are often rooted in power, class, racial, gender or sexual orientation prejudices, and as a result, the injured parties usually lack the resources needed to protect themselves. In Healthcare and Human Dignity, individual worth, equality, and autonomy emerge as the dominant values at stake in encounters with doctors, nurses, hospitals, and drug companies. Although the public is aware of legal battles over autonomy and dignity in the context of death, the everyday patient’s need for dignity has received scant attention.  Thus, in Healthcare, law professor Frank McClellan’s collection of cases and individual experiences bring these stories to life and establish beyond doubt that human dignity is of utmost priority in the everyday process of healthcare decision making.
[more]

front cover of The Huddled Masses Myth
The Huddled Masses Myth
Immigration And Civil Rights
Kevin R. Johnson
Temple University Press, 2003
Despite rhetoric that suggests that the United States opens its doors to virtually anyone who wants to come here, immigration has been restricted since the nation began. In this book, Kevin R. Johnson argues that immigration policy reflects the social hierarchy that prevails in American society as a whole and that immigration reform is intertwined with the struggle for civil rights. The "Huddled Masses" Myth focuses on the exclusion of people of color, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, the poor, political dissidents, and other disfavored groups, showing how bias shapes the law. In the nineteenth century, for example, virulent anti-Asian bias excluded would-be immigrants from China and severely restricted those from Japan. In our own time, people fleeing persecution and poverty in Haiti generally have been treated much differently from those fleeing Cuba. Johnson further argues that although domestic minorities (whether citizens or lawful immigrants) enjoy legal protections and might even be courted by politicians, they are regarded as subordinate groups and suffer discrimination. This book has particular resonance today as the public debates the uncertain status of immigrants from Arab countries and of the Muslim faith.
[more]

front cover of I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying
I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying
Race, Place, and Discrimination in a Costa Rican High School
Karen Stocker
University Press of Colorado, 2005
While teaching and researching on an indigenous reservation in Costa Rica, Karen Stocker discovered that for Native students who attended the high school outside the reservation, two extreme reactions existed to the predominantly racist high school environment. While some maintained their indigenous identity and did poorly in school, others succeeded academically, but rejected their Indianness and the reservation. Between these two poles lay a whole host of responses. In "I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying," Stocker addresses the institutionalized barriers these students faced and explores the interaction between education and identity.

Stocker reveals how overt and hidden curricula taught ethnic, racial, and gendered identities and how the dominant ideology of the town, present in school, conveyed racist messages to students.

"I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying" documents how students from the reservation reacted to, coped with, and resisted discrimination. Considering the students' experiences in the context of the Costa Rican educational system as a whole, Stocker discusses policy shifts that might reduce institutionalized discrimination. Her interpretation of the experiences of these students makes a significant contribution to anthropology, Latin American studies, critical race theory, and educational theory.

[more]

front cover of Identity and the Case for Gay Rights
Identity and the Case for Gay Rights
Race, Gender, Religion as Analogies
David A. J. Richards
University of Chicago Press, 1999
How should we chart a course toward legal recognition of gay rights as basic human rights? In this enlightening study, legal scholar David Richards explores the connections between gay rights and three successful civil rights movements—black civil rights, feminism, and religious toleration—to determine how these might serve as analogies for the gay rights movement.

Richards argues that racial and gender struggles are informative but partial models. As in these movements, achieving gay rights requires eliminating unjust stereotypes and allowing one's identity to develop free from intolerant views. Richards stresses, however, that gay identity is an ethical choice based on gender equality. Thus the right to religious freedom offers the most compelling analogy for a gay rights movement because gay identity should be protected legally as an ethical decision of conscience.

A thoughtful and highly original voice in the struggle for gay rights, David Richards is the first to argue that discrimination is like religious intolerance-denial of full humanity to individuals because of their identity and moral commitments to gender equality.
[more]

front cover of Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem
Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem
John S W Park
Temple University Press, 2013
Throughout American history, citizens have encountered people who are "illegal"-- that is, people who have no legal right to be in the United States or to freedom of movement because of their immigration status or race. Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, these citizens face the conflict between sympathy for the unlawful other and the force of the law. 
In Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, John Park explores problems of status and illegality in American law and society by examining on-going themes in American legal history, comparative ethnic studies, and American literature. He observes that in reconsidering racially discriminatory laws, Americans have celebrated persons who were "out of status," as well as the citizens who had helped them avoid American law. Similarly, in confronting illegal immigrants in our own time, many Americans have chosen to ignore or to violate federal laws in favor of assisting such persons. In light of these experiences, Park insists that the U.S. ought to rethink policies that have criminalized millions of immigrants, as the injustice of such rules has encouraged people to disobey the law, thereby undermining broader commitments to principles of equality and to the rule of law itself.
[more]

front cover of Influenza and Inequality
Influenza and Inequality
One Town's Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918
Patricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the worst medical disasters in human history, taking close to thirty million lives worldwide in less than a year, including more than 500,000 in the United States. What made this pandemic even more frightening was the fact that it occurred when death rates for most common infectious diseases were diminishing. Still, an epidemic is not merely a medical crisis; it has sociological, psychological, and political dimensions as well. In Influenza and Inequality, Patricia J. Fanning examines these other dimensions and brings to life this terrible episode of epidemic disease by tracing its path through the town of Norwood, Massachusetts.

By 1918, Norwood was a small, ethnically diverse, industrialized, and stratified community. Ink, printing, and tanning factories were owned by wealthy families who lived privileged lives. These industries attracted immigrant laborers who made their homes in several ethnic neighborhoods and endured prejudice and discrimination at the hands of native residents. When the epidemic struck, the immigrant neighborhoods were most affected; a fact that played a significant role in the town's response—with tragic results.

This close analysis of one town's struggle illuminates how even well-intentioned elite groups may adopt and implement strategies that can exacerbate rather than relieve a medical crisis. It is a cautionary tale that demonstrates how social behavior can be a fundamental predictor of the epidemic curve, a community's response to crisis, and the consequences of those actions.
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Just Who Loses?
Discrimination in the United States, Volume 2
Samuel Lucas
Temple University Press, 2013

In Just Who Loses? Samuel Roundfield Lucas continues his penetrating and comprehensive assessment of sex and race discrimination in the United States that he began in Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice.

This new volume demonstrates that the idea of discrimination being a zero-sum game is a fallacy. If discrimination costs women, men do not necessarily reap the gains. Likewise, if discrimination costs blacks, non-blacks do not reap the gains. Lucas examines the legal adjudication of discrimination, as well as wider public debates about policy on the issue, to prove how discrimination actually operates. 

He uses analytic methods to show that across the socioeconomic lifecycle—including special education placement, unemployment, occupational attainment, earnings, poverty, and even mortality—both targets and non-targets of discrimination “lose.”

In Just Who Loses? Lucas proposes the construction of a broad-based coalition to combat the pervasive discrimination that affects social relations and law in the United States.

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The Long Walk to Equality
Perspectives on Racial Inequality, Injustice and the Law
Avis Whyte, Patricia Tuitt and Judith Bourne
University of Westminster Press, 2024
In 1965 the UK enacted the Race Relations Act while the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) opened for signature and ratification. In the US, the changes that brought down the walls of segregation, conveying some equality to black people essentially began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These ground-breaking instruments marked a commitment—domestically and internationally by the state parties to the ICERD—to address racial injustice and inequality through legal means.Yet, the intervening years reveal the challenges of pursuing racial justice and equality through the medium of law. In recent years, allegations of institutional racism have been levelled against numerous public institutions in the UK, while the rise of populism globally has challenged the ability of law to effect change.This edited collection draws attention to the need to reflect on the persistence of racial inequalities and injustices despite law’s intervention and arguably because of its ‘unconscious’ role in their promotion. It does so from a multiplicity of perspectives ranging from the doctrinal, socio-legal, critical and theoretical, thereby generating different kinds of knowledge about race and law. By exploring contemporary issues in racial justice and equality, contributors examine the role of law—whether domestic or international, hard or soft—in advancing racial equality and justice and consider whether it can effect substantive change.
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A Man Visited by History
Judge James E. Horton Jr. and the Scottsboro Case
Steven P. Brown
University of Alabama Press, 2026

A revealing portrait of Judge James E. Horton Jr., whose quiet moral courage reshaped one of the most explosive legal battles in American history.

A Man Visited by History illuminates what author Steven P. Brown calls the “last major Scottsboro trials–related subject to have eluded careful study”: the life of Judge James E. Horton Jr., the white Alabama Eighth Circuit judge who set aside an all-white jury’s guilty verdict and death sentence in the second trial of African American defendant Haywood Patterson. Of the three trial judges and more than one hundred jurors who considered the cases of the Scottsboro defendants, Horton was the only one to find that the evidence against them was virtually nonexistent. Horton was then removed from further involvement with the cases and, despite being on the fast track to political prominence before the 1933 retrial of the Scottsboro defendants, was defeated for reelection as circuit judge in 1934. His ruling in the Patterson case impacted the Scottsboro defendants’ lives and continues to affect their legacies today. 

Brown researched largely untapped resources that, for the first time, illuminate who Horton was before the Scottsboro trials, what he faced presiding over Patterson’s case, the factors that led him to overturn the jury’s verdict, and his later life raising award-winning cattle. What emerges is a remarkably consistent picture of a man who, Brown argues, for more than ninety years, sought nothing more than to do what he thought was right. Historians of the South, the early twentieth century, the law, and race relations as well as general readers will find this intimate account of the judge in the infamous trials to be riveting and instructive.
 

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The Many Futures of Work
Rethinking Expectations and Breaking Molds
Edited by Peter A. Creticos, Larry Bennett, Laura Owen, Costas Spirou, and Maxine Morphis-Riesbeck
Temple University Press, 2021

What will work eventually look like? This is the question at the heart of this timely collection. The editors and contributors—a mix of policy experts, academics, and advocates—seek to reframe the typical projections of the “future” of work. They examine the impact of structural racism on work, the loss of family‑sustaining jobs, the new role of gig work, growing economic inequality, barriers to rewarding employment such as age, gender, disability, and immigration status, and the business policies driving these ongoing challenges. 

Together the essays present varied and practical insights into both U.S. and global trends, discuss the role of labor activism in furthering economic justice, and examine progressive strategies to improve the experience of work, wages, and the lives of workers. The Many Futures of Work offers a range of viable policies and practices that can promote rewarding employment and steer our course away from low-wage, unstable jobs toward jobs that lead to equitable prosperity and economic inclusion.

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The Maze of Urban Housing Markets
Theory, Evidence, and Policy
Jerome Rothenberg, George C. Galster, Richard V. Butler, and John R. Pitkin
University of Chicago Press, 1991
This powerful new theoretical approach to analyzing urban housing problems and the policies designed to rectify them will be a vital resource for urban planners, developers, policymakers, and economists. The search for the roots of serious urban housing problems such as homelessness, abandonment, rent burdens, slums, and gentrification has traditionally focused on the poorest sector of the housing market. The findings set forth in this volume show that the roots of such problems lie in the relationships among different parts of the market—not solely within the lower-quality portion—though that is where problems are most dramatically manifested and housing reforms are myopically focused.

The authors propose a new understanding of the market structure characterized by a closely interrelated array of quality submarkets. Their comprehensive models ground a unified theory that accounts for demand by both renters and owner occupants, supply by owners of existing dwellings, changes in the stock of housing due to conversions and new construction, and interactions across submarkets.
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The Mexican Outsiders
A Community History of Marginalization and Discrimination in California
By Martha Menchaca
University of Texas Press, 1995

People of Mexican descent and Anglo Americans have lived together in the U.S. Southwest for over a hundred years, yet relations between them remain strained, as shown by recent controversies over social services for undocumented aliens in California. In this study, covering the Spanish colonial period to the present day, Martha Menchaca delves deeply into interethnic relations in Santa Paula, California, to document how the residential, social, and school segregation of Mexican-origin people became institutionalized in a representative California town.

Menchaca lived in Santa Paula during the 1980s, and interviews with residents add a vivid human dimension to her book. She argues that social segregation in Santa Paula has evolved into a system of social apartness—that is, a cultural system controlled by Anglo Americans that designates the proper times and places where Mexican-origin people can socially interact with Anglos.

This first historical ethnographic case study of a Mexican-origin community will be important reading across a spectrum of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity, Latino studies, and American culture.

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Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance
The Crisis of Democratic Rights
Guillermina Seri
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance explores how democratic governments continue to exclude and abuse people. It examines the authoritarian roots of neoliberal policies that portray markets as the solution to every single problem and how these policies have been prioritized above democracy, human rights, and even nature. By examining global trends, the book identifies neoliberalism as the current dominant expression of capitalism. Grounded in emergency, security, police mechanisms, and the politics of the spectacular, this framework helps explain the rationale behind the persistence of unlawful governance and its legitimizing strategies. 

In looking at the ways in which people resist, the book honors the perspective of the excluded and the voices of those most immediately affected by neoliberal austerity—from activists defending land and rights to communities subjected to various forms of exploitation, extractivism, and displacement. Bringing in these voices and theoretical perspectives, including from beyond the English-speaking world, this book highlights alternative ways of thinking about democracy and rights, drawing from the tradition of the commons. Through its deep analysis of history, theory, and world events, Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance offers fresh insights into how various forms of emergency measures, policing, and security are used to privilege markets over people and the planet, while also emphasizing the crucial role of popular movements in defending and expanding democratic rights and to rebuilding commons.
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Palestinians in Israel
Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy
Ben White
Pluto Press, 2012

Palestinians in Israel considers a key issue ignored by the official 'peace process' and most mainstream commentators: that of the growing Palestinian minority within Israel itself.

What the Israeli right-wing calls 'the demographic problem' Ben White identifies as 'the democratic problem' which goes to the heart of the conflict. Israel defines itself not as a state of its citizens, but as a Jewish state, despite the substantial and increasing Palestinian population. White demonstrates how the consistent emphasis on privileging one ethno-religious group over another cannot be seen as compatible with democratic values and that, unless addressed, will undermine any attempts to find a lasting peace.

Individual case studies are used to complement this deeply informed study into the great, unspoken contradiction of Israeli democracy. It is a pioneering contribution which will spark debate amongst all those concerned with a resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

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Pervasive Prejudice?
Unconventional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination
Ian Ayres
University of Chicago Press, 2001
If you're a woman and you shop for a new car, will you really get the best deal? If you're a man, will you fare better? If you're a black man waiting to receive an organ transplant, will you have to wait longer than a white man?

In Pervasive Prejudice? Ian Ayres confronts these questions and more. In a series of important studies he finds overwhelming evidence that in a variety of markets—retail car sales, bail bonding, kidney transplantation, and FCC licensing—blacks and females are consistently at a disadvantage. For example, when Ayres sent out agents of different races and genders posing as potential buyers to more than 200 car dealerships in Chicago, he found that dealers regularly charged blacks and women more than they charged white men. Other tests revealed that it is commonly more difficult for blacks than whites to receive a kidney transplant because of federal regulations. Moreover, Ayres found that minority male defendants are frequently required to post higher bail bonds than their Caucasian counterparts.

Traditional economic theory predicts that free markets should drive out discrimination, but Ayres's startling findings challenge that position. Along with empirical research, Ayres offers game—theoretic and other economic methodologies to show how prejudice can enter the bargaining process even when participants are supposedly acting as rational economic agents. He also responds to critics of his previously published studies included here. These studies suggest that race and gender discrimination is neither a thing of the past nor merely limited to the handful of markets that have been the traditional focus of civil rights laws.
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Prejudicial Appearances
The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law
Robert C. Post, with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey, and Reva B. Siegel
Duke University Press, 2001
In Prejudicial Appearances noted legal scholar Robert C. Post argues modern American antidiscrimination law should not be conceived as protecting the transcendental dignity of individual persons but instead as transforming social practices that define and sustain potentially oppressive categories like race or gender. Arguing that the prevailing logic of American antidiscrimination law is misleading, Post lobbies for deploying sociological understandings to reevaluate the antidiscrimination project in ways that would render the law more effective and just.
Four distinguished commentators respond to Post’s provocative essay. Each adopts a distinctive perspective. K. Anthony Appiah investigates the philosophical logic of stereotyping and of equality. Questioning whether the law ought to endorse any social practices that define persons, Judith Butler explores the tension between sociological and postmodern approaches to antidiscrimination law. Thomas C. Grey examines whether Post’s proposal can be reconciled with the values of the rule of law. And Reva B. Siegel applies critical race theory to query whether antidiscrimination law’s reshaping of race and gender should best be understood in terms of practices of subordination and stratification.
By illuminating the consequential rhetorical maneuvers at the heart of contemporary U.S. antidiscrimination law, Prejudical Appearances forces readers to reappraise the relationship between courts of law and social behavior. As such, it will enrich scholars interested in the relationships between law, rhetoric, postmodernism, race, and gender.
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Public Workers in Service of America
A Reader
Edited by Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin
University of Illinois Press, 2023

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself.

Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni

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Race and Human Rights
Curtis Stokes
Michigan State University Press, 2008

The terrorist attacks against U.S. targets on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked an intense debate about "human rights." According to contributors to this provocative book, the discussion of human rights to date has been far too narrow. They argue that any conversation about human rights in the United States must include equal rights for all residents.
     Essays examine the historical and intellectual context for the modern debate about human rights, the racial implications of the war on terrorism, the intersection of racial oppression, and the national security state. Others look at the Pinkerton detective agency as a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the role of Africa in post–World War II American attempts at empire-building, and the role of immigration as a human rights issue.

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Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat
Jennifer L. Hochschild
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Race and class inequality are at the crux of many policy disputes in American cities. But are they the only factors driving political discord? In Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat, political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild examines significant policies in four major American cities to determine when race and class shape city politics, when they do not, and what additional forces have the power to shape urban policy choices.
 
Hochschild investigates the root causes of disputes in the arenas of policing, development, schooling, and budgeting. She finds that race and class are central to the Stop-Question-Frisk policing policy in New York City and the development of Atlanta’s Beltline. New York’s Stop-Question-Frisk policy was intended to fight crime and keep all New Yorkers safe. In practice, however, young Black and Latino men in low-income neighborhoods were disproportionately stopped by a predominantly White police force. The goal of the Atlanta Beltline, a redevelopment project that includes public parks, new housing, commercial development, and a robust public transit system, is to expand access around the city and keep working-class residents in the city by constructing affordable housing. Instead, the construction completed thus far has encouraged gentrification and displacement of poor, disproportionately Black residents, and has increased the wealth and power of both Black and White city elites.
 
However, Hochschild finds that race and class inequality are not central to all urban policy disputes. When investigating the issues of charter schools in Los Angeles and Chicago’s pension system she identifies a third driver: financial threat that feels existential to the policy and political actors. In Los Angeles, there is a battle between traditional public schools and independent charter schools. Increasingly, families with sufficient resources are moving out of L.A. to areas with better school districts. Traditional public schools and charter schools must fight for the remaining students and the funding that comes with them. There are not enough students to teach and not enough money to teach them. The school district risks school closures, layoffs, and pension deficits; in this context, race/class conflict fades into the background.
 
Chicago’s public sector pension debt is at least three times as large as the city’s annual budget and continues to grow. Policy actors agree that the pension system needs to be stably funded. Yet city leaders, fearful of upsetting constituents and jeopardizing their political careers, fail to implement policies that would do so. Meaningful policy change to rectify the pension deficit continues to get kicked down the line for future policy actors to address. In this context also, race/class conflict fades into the background.
 
Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat is a compelling examination of the role that race, class, and political and fiscal threat play in shaping urban policy.
 
 
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Racial Stasis
The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics
Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Racial progress in the United States has hit a wall, and the rise of white nationalism is but one manifestation of this. Most Americans continue to hope that the younger generation, which many believe manifests less racism and more acceptance of a multiracial society, will lead to more moderate racial politics—but this may not be happening. Overtly racist attitudes have declined, but anti-black stereotypes and racial resentment remain prevalent among white Americans. To add, the shape of racial attitudes has continued to evolve, but our existing measures have not evolved in step and cannot fully illuminate the challenge at hand.

With Racial Stasis, Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith argue persuasively that this is because millennials, a generational cohort far removed from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, lack sufficient understanding of the structural nature of racial inequalities in the United States and therefore also the contextual and historical knowledge to be actively anti-racist. While these younger whites may be open to the idea of interracial marriage or living next to a family of a different race, they often do not understand why policies like affirmative action still need to exist and are weary about supporting these kinds of policies. In short, although millennials’ language and rationale around race, racism, and racial inequalities are different from previous generations’, the end result is the same.
 
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Racism
Albert Memmi
University of Minnesota Press, 1999
An eminent social analyst examines the way racism works-and how it can be overcome.

Racism: It is social, not “natural”; it is general, not “personal”; and it is tragically effective. In a remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of American life, Albert Memmi investigates racism as social pathology-a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiographical, Racism moves beyond individual prejudice and taste to engage the broader questions of collective behavior and social responsibility.

The book comprises three sections-“Description,” “Definition,” and “Treatment”-in which Memmi delineates racism’s causes and hidden workings, examines its close affinity to colonialism, and considers its everyday manifestations over a period of centuries throughout the West.

For Memmi, the structure of racism has four “moments”: the insistence on difference; the negative valuation imposed on those who differ; the generalizing of this negative valuation to an entire group; and the use of generalization to legitimize hostility. Memmi shows how it is not racism’s content-which can change at will-but its form that gives it such power and tenacity.

Born in a poor section of Tunis, Tunisia, a Jew among Muslims, an Arab among Europeans, Memmi brings his own experience of the complex contours of prejudice to his analysis of a problem that divides societies the world over. Writing in the tradition of Frantz Fanon, Memmi redirects debates about racism-and offers a rare chance for progress against social prejudice.
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Raising Arizona's Dams
Daily Life, Danger, and Discrimination in the Dam Construction Camps of Central Arizona, 1890s-1940s
A. E. Rogge, D. Lorne McWatters, Melissa Keane, and Richard P. Emanuel
University of Arizona Press, 1995
This is the engrossing story of the unsung heroes who did the day-to-day work of building Arizona's dams, focusing on the lives of laborers and their families who created temporary construction communities during the building of seven major dams in central Arizona. The book focuses primarily on the 1903-1911 Roosevelt Dam camps and the 1926-1927 Camp Pleasant at Waddell Dam, although other camps dating from the 1890s through the 1940s are discussed as well. The book is liberally illustrated with historic photographs of the camps and the people who occupied them while building the dams.
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Regulatory Barriers and the Principle of Non-discrimination in World Trade Law
Past, Present, and Future
Thomas Cottier and Petros C. Mavroidis, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce the second volume in an annual series, the World Trade Forum. The Forum's members include scholars, lawyers, and government and business practitioners working in the area of international trade, law, and policy. They meet annually to discuss integration issues in international economic relations, focusing on a new theme each year.
The World Trade Forum 1998 deals with the issue of regulatory barriers. Contributors focus their attention on the implications that government intervention has on the principle of nondiscrimination, the cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The chapters, which cover both the positive and the normative level, deal in particular with the issue of "like product" definition, and with mutual recognition agreements. The relevant WTO case law is presented and analyzed, and the roundtable discussions are primarily aimed at clarifying to what extent a constitutional function should be assigned to the WTO organs, if at all.
Contributors include: Christoph Bail, Jacques Bourgeois, Marco Bronckers, Thomas Cottier, William Davey, Paul Demaret, Piet Eeckhout, Crawford Falconer, Olivier Guillod, Meinhard Hilf, Gary Horlick, Robert Howse, Robert Hudec, Patrick Low, Aaditya Mattoo, Petros C. Mavroidis, Patrick Messerlin, Damien Neven, Kalypso Nicolaidis, David Palmeter, Ernst Ulrich Petresmann, Andre Sapir, and Michel Waelbroeck.
Thomas Cottier is Professor of Law, Institute of European and International Economic Law, University of Bern Law School. Petros C. Mavroidis is Professor of Law, University of Neuchâtel.
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Resolving Racial Conflict
The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964-1989
Bertram Levine
University of Missouri Press, 2005


In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, Congress wisely created an agency based in the U.S. Department of Justice to help forestall or resolve racial or ethnic disputes evolving from the act. Mandated by law and by its own methodology to shun publicity, the Community Relations Service developed self-effacement to a fine art. Thus the accomplishments, as well as the shortcomings, of this federal venture into conflict resolution are barely known in official Washington, and even less so by the American public. This first written history of the Community Relations Service uses the experiences of the men and women who sought to resolve the most volatile issues of the day to tell the fascinating story of this unfamiliar agency.



This multiracial cadre of conciliation and mediation specialists worked behind the scenes in more than 20,000 confrontations involving racial and ethnic minorities. From Selma to Montgomery, at the encampment of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign in Resurrection City, to the urban riots of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, from the school desegregation battles north and south, at the siege of Wounded Knee, and during the Texas Gulf Coast fishing wars between Southeast Asian refugees and Anglos, these federal peacemakers lessened the atmosphere of racial violence in every major U.S. city and thousands of small towns.



These confrontations ranged from disputes that attracted worldwide attention to the everyday affronts, assaults, and upheavals that marked the nation’s adjustment to wider power sharing within an increasingly diverse population. While Resolving Racial Conflict examines some of the celebrated breakthroughs that made change possible, it also delves deeply into the countless behind-the-scenes local efforts that converted possibility to reality.



Among the many themes in this book that provide new perspective for understanding racial conflict in America are the effects of protest and conflict in engineering social change; the variety of civil rights views and experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics; the role of police in minority relations; and the development and refinement of techniques for community conflict resolution from seat-of-the-pants intervention to sophisticated professional practice. Resolving Racial Conflict will appeal to students of civil rights and American history in both the general and academic communities, as well as students of alternative dispute resolution and peace and conflict studies.
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Special Issue: Racial Bias in Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, and Incarceration
Suzanne Nichols
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025

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Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law
Ancheta, Angelo N
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Scientific and social scientific evidence has informed judicial decisions and the making of constitutional law for decades, but for much of U.S. history it has also served as a rhetorical device to justify inequality. It is only in recent years that scientific and statistical research has helped redress discrimination—but not without controversy.

Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law provides unique insights into the judicial process and scientific inquiry by examining major decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, civil rights advocacy, and the nature of science itself. Angelo Ancheta discusses leading equal protection cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and recent litigation involving race-related affirmative action, gender inequality, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. He also examines less prominent, but equally compelling cases, including McCleskey v. Kemp, which involved statistical evidence that a state’s death penalty was disproportionately used when victims were white and defendants were black, and Castaneda v. Partida, which established key standards of evidence in addressing the exclusion of Latinos from grand jury service. For each case, Ancheta explores the tensions between scientific findings and constitutional values. 

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Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers
Adolescent Development, Discrimination, and Consent Law
Jennifer Ann Drobac
University of Chicago Press, 2016
When we consider the concept of sexual abuse and harassment, our minds tend to jump either towards adults caught in unhealthy relationships or criminals who take advantage of children. But the millions of maturing teenagers who also deal with sexual harassment can fall between the cracks.
 
When it comes to sexual relationships, adolescents pose a particular problem. Few teenagers possess all of the emotional and intellectual tools needed to navigate these threats, including the all too real advances made by supervisors, teachers, and mentors. In Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers, Jennifer Drobac explores the shockingly common problem of maturing adolescents who are harassed and exploited by adults in their lives. Reviewing the neuroscience and psychosocial evidence of adolescent development, she explains why teens are so vulnerable to adult harassers. Even today, in an age of increasing public awareness, criminal and civil law regarding the sexual abuse of minors remains tragically inept and irregular from state to state. Drobac uses six recent cases of teens suffering sexual harassment to illuminate the flaws and contradictions of this system, skillfully showing how our current laws fail to protect youths, and offering an array of imaginative legal reforms that could achieve increased justice for adolescent victims of sexual coercion. 
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Shattered Justice
Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations
Kimberly J. Cook
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Shattered Justice presents original crime victims' experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Using in-depth interviews with 21 crime victims across the United States, Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations. Important lessons and analyses are shared related to grief and loss, and healing and repair. Using restorative justice practices to develop and deliver healing retreats for survivors also expands the practice of restorative justice. Finally, policy reforms aimed at preventing, mitigating, and repairing the harms of wrongful convictions is covered.
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Southern Insurgency
The Coming of the Global Working Class
Immanuel Ness
Pluto Press, 2015
Even as labor in the developed world seems to be in retreat, industrial struggle continues elsewhere—and with particular force in the Global South. In Southern Insurgency, Immanuel Ness provides a thorough and expert perspective of three key countries where workers are fighting the spread of unchecked industrial capitalism: China, India, and South Africa. In each case, he considers the broader historical forces in play, such as the effects of imperialism, the decline of the international union movement, class struggle, and the growing reserve of available labor. He then narrows his focus in each case on the specifics of the current grassroots insurgency: the militancy of miners in South Africa, new labor organizations in India, and the rise of worker insurgencies in China.
 
The product of extensive firsthand field research, Southern Insurgency paints a picture of the new industrial proletariat in the Global South—a group that lives a precarious, frightening existence yet at the same time offers hope for new approaches to solidarity and the anti-capitalist struggle.
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Structural Injustice and the Law
Edited by Virginia Mantouvalou and Jonathan Wolff
University College London, 2024
A proposal to incorporate the concept of structural injustice in the standard toolbox of the legal reformer.

Structural Injustice and the Law presents theoretical approaches and case studies demonstrating how the concept of structural injustice can aid legal analysis, and how legal reform can reduce, or even eliminate, some forms of structural injustice. The interdisciplinary topics discussed here in the book include domination, equality, human rights law, legal status, labor law, criminal justice, domestic homicide reviews, homelessness, regulatory public bodies, and the films of Ken Loach. Drawn together, these subjects build an invaluable resource for legal theorists exploring how to use the concept of structural injustice and political philosophers looking for nuanced accounts of the law’s role both in creating and mitigating structural injustice.
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Stuttering Meets Sterotype, Stigma, and Discrimination
An Overview of Attitude Research
Kenneth O. St. Louis
West Virginia University Press, 2015
More than a century of research has sought to identify the causes of stut­tering, describe its nature, and enhance its clinical treatment. By contrast, studies directly focused upon public and professional attitudes toward stuttering began in the 1970s. Recent work has taken this research to new levels, including the development of standard attitude measures; ad­dressing the widely reported phenomena of teasing, bullying, and dis­crimination against people who stutter; and attempting to change public opinion toward stuttering to more accepting and sensitive levels.
 
Stuttering Meets Stereotype, Stigma, and Discrimination: An Overview of Attitude Research is the only reference work to date devoted entirely to the topic of stuttering attitudes. It features comprehensive review chapters by St. Louis, Boyle and Blood, Gabel, Langevin, and Abdalla; an annotated bibliography by Hughes; and experimental studies by other seasoned and new researchers. The book leads the reader through a maze of research efforts, emerging with a clear understanding of the important issues involved and ideas of where to go next. Importantly, the evidence base for stuttering attitude research extends beyond research in this fluency disorder to such areas as mental illness, obesity, and race. Thus, although of interest primarily to those who work, interact, or oth­erwise deal with stuttering, the book has potential for increasing under­standing, ameliorating negative attitudes, and informing research on any of a host of other stigmatized conditions.
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Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice
Discrimination in the United States
Samuel Roundfield Lucas
Temple University Press, 2009

Despite several decades of attention, there is still no consensus on the effects of racial or sexual discrimination in the United States. In this landmark work, the well-known sociologist Samuel Lucas shows how discrimination is not simply an action that one person performs in relation to another individual, but something far more insidious: a pervasive dynamic that permeates the environment in which we live and work.

Challenging existing literature on the subject, Lucas makes a clear distinction between prejudice and discrimination. He maintains that when an era of “condoned exploitation” ended, the era of “contested prejudice,” as he terms it, began. He argues that the great strides made in the 1950s and 1960s repudiated prejudice, but not discrimination. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist theory, and a critique of dominant perspectives in the social sciences and law, Lucas offers a new understanding of racial and sexual discrimination that can guide our actions and laws into a more just future.

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They Don't Want Her There
Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University
Carolyn Chalmers
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Before the nation learned about workplace sexual harassment from Anita Hill, and decades before the #MeToo movement, Chinese American professor Jean Jew M.D. brought a lawsuit against the University of Iowa, alleging a sexually hostile work environment within the university’s College of Medicine.

As Jew gained accolades and advanced through the ranks at Iowa, she was met with increasingly vicious attacks on her character by her white male colleagues—implying that her sexuality had opened doors for her. After years of being subjected to demoralizing sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination, finding herself without any higher-up departmental support, and noting her professional progression beginning to suffer by the hands of hate, Jean Jew decided to fight back. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer.

This book tells the inside story of pioneering litigation unfolding during the eight years of a university investigation, a watershed federal trial, and a state court jury trial. In the face of a university determined to defeat them and maintain the status quo, Jew and Chalmers forged an exceptional relationship between a lawyer and a client, each at the top of their game and part of the first generation of women in their fields. They Don’t Want Her There is a brilliant, original work of legal history that is deeply personal and shows today’s professional women just how recently some of our rights have been won—and at what cost.
 
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Threatening Others
Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica
Carlos Sandoval-Garcia
Ohio University Press, 2004

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”

Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as a part of their national identity.

Carlos Sandoval-García argues that Nicaraguan immigrants, once perceived as a “communist threat,” are now victims of an invigorated, racialized politics in which the Nicaraguan nationality has become an offense in itself.

Threatening Others is a deeply searching book that will interest scholars and students in Latin American studies and politics, cultural studies, and ethnic studies.

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Understanding Affirmative Action
Politics, Discrimination, and the Search for Justice
J. Edward Kellough
Georgetown University Press, 2006

For some time, the United States has been engaged in a national debate over affirmative action policy. A policy that began with the idea of creating a level playing field for minorities has sparked controversy in the workplace, in higher education, and elsewhere. After forty years, the debate still continues and the issues are as complex as ever. While most Americans are familiar with the term, they may not fully understand what affirmative action is and why it has become such a divisive issue.

With this concise and up-to-date introduction, J. Edward Kellough brings together historical, philosophical, and legal analyses to fully inform participants and observers of this debate. Aiming to promote a more thorough knowledge of the issues involved, this book covers the history, legal status, controversies, and impact of affirmative action in both the private and public sectors—and in education as well as employment.

In addition, Kellough shows how the development and implementation of affirmative action policies have been significantly influenced by the nature and operation of our political institutions. Highlighting key landmarks in legislation and court decisions, he explains such concepts as "disparate impact," "diversity management," "strict scrutiny," and "representative bureaucracy." Understanding Affirmative Action probes the rationale for affirmative action, the different arguments against it, and the known impact it has had. Kellough concludes with a consideration of whether or not affirmative action will remain a useful tool for combating discrimination in the years to come.

Not just for students in public administration and public policy, this handy volume will be a valuable resource for public administrators, human resource managers, and ordinary citizens looking for a balanced treatment of a controversial policy.

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Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States
Elizabeth Huttman, Juliet Saltman and Wim Blauw, eds.
Duke University Press, 1991
This book provides an expert examination and comparison of housing segregation in major population centers in the United States and Western Europe and analyzes successes and failures of government policies and desegregation programs in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and West Germany.
The collection begins with a review of the historical development of housing segregation in these countries, describing current housing conditions, concentration of housing in each country’s leading cities, minority populations and the housing they occupy—specifically public, nonprofit, and owner-occupied dwellings. When focusing on the United States, the contributors assess housing segregation, antisegregation measures, and institutional racism toward blacks in the Midwest and South, and toward Mexican-Americans throughout American cities. Chapters dealing with Western Europe include housing segregation of South Asian and West Indian immigrants in Britain, immigrants in Sweden, Turkish, and Yugoslav “guest workers” in West Germany, and Algerian and other Arab groups in France. The book concludes with discussions of public housing policies; suburban desegregation, resegregation, and integration maintenance programs; specific integration stabilization programs; and desegregation efforts in one specific place.

Contributors. Elizabeth Huttman, Michal Arend, Cihan Arin, Maurice Blanc, Wim Blauw, Ger Mik, Clyde McDaniels, Jürgen Friedrichs, Hannes Alpheis, John M. Goering, Len Gordon, Albert Mayer, Rosemary Helper, Barry V. Johnston, Terry Jones, Valerie Karn, Göran Lindberg, Anna Lisa Lindén, Deborah Phillips, Dennis Keating, Juliet Saltman, Alan Murie

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Urban Lowlands
A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning
Steven T. Moga
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Interrogates the connections between a city’s physical landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points.

In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City, Black Bottom in Nashville, Swede Hollow in Saint Paul, and the Flats in Los Angeles, to interrogate the connections between a city’s actual landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the history of US urban development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Moga reveals patterns of inequitable land use, economic dispossession, and social discrimination against immigrants and minorities. In attending to the landscapes of neighborhoods typically considered slums, Moga shows how physical and policy-driven containment has shaped the lives of the urban poor, while wealth and access to resources have been historically concentrated in elevated areas—truly “the heights.” Moga’s innovative framework expands our understanding of how planning and economic segregation alike have molded the American city.
 
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Ushering Civil Rights into Law
Judge Richard T. Rives and Desegregation in the Public Sphere
Pat Arneson
University of Alabama Press, 2026

Illuminates the life and legacy of a federal jurist from Alabama, an unexpected but ardent defender of equal rights for all citizens under the law

Ushering Civil Rights into Law: Judge Richard T. Rives and Desegregation in the Public Sphere by Pat Arneson is a long-overdue exploration of one of the most consequential yet overlooked figures of the modern Civil Rights Movement. As debates over judicial philosophy and Civil Rights continue, Judge Richard T. Rives’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the judiciary’s role in shaping a more just society.

A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Judge Richard T. Rives served on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit during the height of America’s battle over racial segregation. Once aligned with segregationist views, Rives underwent a profound evolution, emerging as a key legal architect of desegregation. His landmark ruling on behalf of the court in Browder v. Gayle ended segregation on Montgomery’s public buses and expanded the scope of Brown v. Board of Education beyond education. Rives’s decisions invalidated the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow laws and furthered equality in public education, voting rights, and jury selection. Writing for the court, Rives authored legal precedents that fundamentally reshaped the nation.

Through archival research, Arneson examines the cultural and political pressures Rives faced, the legal strategies he employed, and the lasting impact of his work. Constitutional rights remain a flashpoint in American discourse. Ushering Civil Rights into Law reveals how one judge’s principled stance helped define the legal landscape of modern Civil Rights and underscores the enduring significance of his legacy.

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Waiting for the Cool Moon
Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire
Wendy Matsumura
Duke University Press, 2024
In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness. Drawing on Black radical thinkers’ critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity’s imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire’s categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. Matsumura demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.
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Who Can Speak?
AUTHORITY AND CRITICAL IDENTITY
Edited by Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman
University of Illinois Press, 1995
For women, for lesbians and gays, for African Americans, for Asians, Native Americans, or any other self-identified and -identifying group, who can speak? Who has the authority to speak for these groups? Is there genuinely such a thing as "objectivity," or can only members of these groups speak, finally, for themselves? And who has the authority to decide who has the authority?
This collection examines how theory and criticism are complicated by
multiple perspectives in an increasingly multicultural society and
faces head on the difficult question of what qualifies a critic to speak from or about a particular position. In different formats and from different perspectives from various disciplines, the contributors to this volume analytically and innovatively work together to define the problems and capture the contradictions and tensions inherent in the issues of authority, epistemology, and discourse.
 
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Your Time Will Come
The Law of Age Discrimination and Retirement
Lawrence M. Friedman
Russell Sage Foundation, 1984
Age discrimination and its corollary, mandatory retirement, are modern legal issues, barely a generation old. In this concise and readable report, Lawrence Friedman explores the apparently sudden emergence of a field of law that pertains mainly to the elderly and middle-aged. Friedman traces the brief but fascinating social, legislative, and judicial history of age discrimination law and of the laws addressing mandatory retirement. Both histories contain paradoxes and contradictions; both seem simultaneously to make an issue of "age" and to demand a kind of age neutrality, reflecting broad recent changes in American culture. Both histories are intricately bound up with other legal issues—age discrimination with race and sex discrimination; mandatory retirement with the development of pension plans and other social insurance systems. Friedman speculates on the impact of these new laws, illuminating through his analysis the complex phenomenon of "legalization," or the penetration of legal norms into ever more areas of life. Finally, Friedman offers a provocative conclusion in which he suggests that laws on age discrimination and retirement—laws that appear to have a less extensive social background than one would expect—may in fact be "stand-in" laws for vague but powerful social norms not yet recognized in the legal system. Your Time Will Come is the first new volume in a special paperback series entitled Social Research Perspectives: Occasional Reports on Current Topics. These Perspectives represent a revival of the Social Science Frontiers series published by the Foundation from 1969 to 1977 and will again offer short, timely, and accessible reports on various aspects of social science research. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Perspectives Series
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