Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: situating the present
- Part I Debates
- Introduction to Part I
- 2 Race and the science of difference in the age of genomics
- 3 Color-blind egalitarianism as the new racial norm
- 4 Getting over the Obama hope hangover: the new racism in ‘post-racial’ America
- 5 Does a recognition of mixed race move us toward post-race?
- 6 Acting ‘as’ and acting ‘as if’: two approaches to the politics of race and migration
- 7 Can race be eradicated? The post-racial problematic
- Part II Perspectives
- 15 Conclusion: back to the future
- Index
Introduction to Part I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: situating the present
- Part I Debates
- Introduction to Part I
- 2 Race and the science of difference in the age of genomics
- 3 Color-blind egalitarianism as the new racial norm
- 4 Getting over the Obama hope hangover: the new racism in ‘post-racial’ America
- 5 Does a recognition of mixed race move us toward post-race?
- 6 Acting ‘as’ and acting ‘as if’: two approaches to the politics of race and migration
- 7 Can race be eradicated? The post-racial problematic
- Part II Perspectives
- 15 Conclusion: back to the future
- Index
Summary
In the introduction to this volume, we pointed out that the past few decades have seen important transformations in research agendas on questions about race, racism and ethnicity. In Part I of the collection, we bring together chapters that explore key facets of these debates. This begins in Chapter 2, through Sandra Soo-Jin Lee’s overview of key aspects of debates about the contemporary meanings attached to the category of race within scientific discourses. Lee’s critical discussion focuses on the impact of research into the human genome on our understandings of ideas about race. Her suggestive analysis helpfully guides us through the ways in which scientific debates about the human genome are likely to impact on both scholarly and popular discourses of race as a social category. Her analysis highlights the importance of contemporary scientific research agendas in the analysis of race as a social category.
The question of the changing dynamics of contemporary racial norms is also at the core of Chapter 3, by Charles Gallagher. Locating his analysis within the broader transformations of debates about race in American society, Gallagher argues that a discourse of ‘colour-blind egalitarianism’ has become the dominant racial norm in narratives about race in the USA. In situating both the historical and contemporary reasons for this process, he also seeks to argue that such a framing of race in American society can be seen as limiting the potential for a critical understanding of the racialised inequalities that remain an integral component of its social, economic and cultural relations in the present.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Theories of Race and EthnicityContemporary Debates and Perspectives, pp. 24 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014