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It isn’t uncommon to hear now that race hardly matters anymore—that we’ve somehow gotten beyond it. In the face of such pronouncements, and the misconceptions that prompt them, this book aims to show precisely why and how race has always been, and remains, absolutely fundamental to modern politics. Howard Winant, one of the leading sociologists of race and ethnicity working today, clearly locates race at the crossroads of identity and social structure, where difference frames inequality and where political processes operate with a comprehensiveness that ranges from the world-historical to the intimately psychological.The New Politics of Race brings together Winant’s new and previously published essays to form a comprehensive picture of the origins and nature of the complex racial politics that engulf us today. It is only in light of the post–World War II patterns of racial insurgency and reform that these politics can be understood, Winant asserts. His work offers a thorough grounding in these patterns, describing the breakdown of a certain racial order after World War II and identifying the ways in which racial hierarchies everywhere are being reestablished and reenergized, often in clandestine, or at least unfamiliar, forms.Theoretically acute and empirically sound, his essays deftly analyze the character of racial formations in a world that is, on the surface, deeply committed to eradicating racism.Howard Winant is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Racial Conditions (Minnesota, 1994) and The World Is a Ghetto, and the coauthor with Michael Omi of Racial Formation in the United States.

More than a quarter-century after the passage of civil rights legislation in the United States and decades since the last European colonies attained their independence, race continues to play a central role in cultural, political, and economic life, both in the United States and around the globe. Race divides societies and individuals, shapes social policies of the most diverse sort, and organizes basic ideas about human identity and difference. Why?

This ambitious book addresses the gaps in our understanding of contemporary racial dynamics, and develops a powerful theoretical approach to the vast subject of race. Howard Winant, one of the leading writers in the United States on the subject, argues that race cannot be understood as a "social problem" or as a "survival" of earlier, more benighted ages. Indeed, from the rise of Europe to the present, race has been a social condition, a permanent though flexible feature of human society and identity. The key to Winant's analysis is racial formation theory, an approach he refines and advances as he considers a wide range of contemporary controversies in racial theory and politics. Among these are the relationship between race and class, as well as the racial dimensions of gender, diaspora, colonialism, and fascism. Other key topics include the changing nature of racial identity in the post-civil rights era, the 1992 Los Angeles riot, and politics of race in Brazil. Intellectually challenging and clearly written, well informed and deeply committed to social and racial justice, Racial Conditions marks an important advance in critical thinking about race today. Howard Winant teaches sociology at Temple University.