Racial subjects

About this book

Arguing that racism is best understood as exclusionary relations of power rather than simply as hateful expressions, David Theo Goldberg analyzes contemporary expressions of race and racism. He engages political economy, culture, and everyday material life, against a background analysis of profound demographic shifts and changing class formation and relations. Issues covered in Racial Subjects include the history of changing racial categories over the last two hundred years of U.S. census taking, multiculturalism, the experience of being racially mixed, the rise of new black public intellectuals, race and the law in the wake of the O. J. Simpson verdict, relations between blacks and Jews, and affirmative action. As one of America's foremost theoreticians of race, Goldberg heralds the next wave of writing about race by invoking a comparative and international framework in his discussions. The work concludes with an analysis of Dinesh D'Sousa's claims to the end of racism and it is here that Goldberg critically articulates D'Souza's vision as representative of a newly emergent segregationism in which racism is no longer legally sanctioned, but rather is promoted as informal, privatized, and market driven.