The Race Track - by Kimberlé Crenshaw & Luke Charles Harris & George Lipsitz (Hardcover)

About the Book

Written by a trio of celebrated scholars, "The Race Track" is a twenty-first-century road map to how race operates in America today. From its covert and psychological dimensions to how race plays a key role in allocating assets to some while denying them to others and a "whiteness protection program" that keeps race-based advantages intact, this landmark new book challenges some of society's most cherished notions-- about merit, markets, and choice, and about the causes and consequences of unequal racial outcomes.
As leaders of a cutting-edge think-tank, the authors have crafted an essential guide to contemporary racism based on years of looking beyond the ivory tower and talking to ordinary people from all walks of life. Amid all the "post-racial" rhetoric, "The Race Track" boldly claims that it is not racist to talk about race while structural racism is alive and well. Asserting that color-bound problems cannot be remedied with colorblind solutions, this courageous new work lays out what the full range of responses must be if we are truly interested in achieving justice for all people.

Book Synopsis

Despite the watershed election of Barack Obama--and the claims that racial history ended that day--the painful reality of racism in America has been thrust into the headlines over the past year. The Race Track dispenses with the myth of post-racial America, explaining not only why race matters more than ever but also how we can fashion twenty-first-century solutions to combating racial injustice.

The celebrated authors of this timely intervention chart the long history of racism in law, health care, housing, criminal justice, employment, economic crises (including the subprime crisis), and school admissions. In accessible terms, they then provide a framework for understanding how and why structural racism thrives in the present: in systematic racial profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline, housing segregation, and widespread "implicit bias." Arguing that there is no magic bullet, no one-size-fits-all solution to racial injustice, The Race Track champions an "intersectional" path--pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw--one that will appeal to people of all races who want to know how to speak the language of racial justice in an environment where many stubbornly claim we have already achieved it.

Review Quotes

Praise for Critical Race Theory:
"As of the publication of Critical Race Theory it will be unwise, if not impossible, to do any serious work on race without referencing this splendid collection."
--Toni Morrison

"Critical Race Theory is a compilation of provocative writings that challenges us to consider the relationship between race, the legal system, and society at large."
--Senator Bill Bradley

"A fundamental reference guide to any serious work on race."
--The New York Amsterdam News

About the Author

Kimberle Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School and a co-editor of "Critical Race Theory" (The New Press). She lives in New York City and Los Angeles. Luke Charles Harris is the co-founder, with Crenshaw, of the African American Policy Forum and co-wrote the award-winning documentary "A Question of Color." He is a professor of political science at Vassar College and lives in New York City. George Lipsitz, chair of the African American Policy Forum Board of Directors, is a professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of ten books and lives in Santa Barbara."