RACIAL AND ETHNIC MINORITIES
2011
Marlese Durr*
Wright State University
Our division’s vision of society is one in which racial, ethnic, and gender oppression and discrimination not longer exists. Within this uncomplicated visualization, our desire is that individuality and cultural understanding be reached to progressively eradicate injury to people(s) and culture(s) within or between nations. Embedded within this societal image, is our desire that government, media (both print and electronic), and social movements assist us in pursuing social equality nationally and globally, while ending poverty and economic exploitation.
To work towards this end, we utilize various sociological models that exemplify our farsightedness, as we work to: (1) transform what may be faulty areas of capitalism; (2)design societal prototypes that employ representations of inclusive social and cultural democracy; (3) inform organizations and institutions whether they be governmental, civic, social, cultural or workplace to alter fortunes of many to achieve an equal distribution of societal resources.
Challenges to these ends (e.g., racial and political violence, unbalanced global economies, deindustrialization, global terrorism, religious ethnocentrism, technological that advances leave developed and undeveloped countries wanting, growing economic inequalities, aggressive global advance of “free market” capitalism, and “identity politics”) may well appear eclipse the goal. Yet, in spite of these trends, new avenues of opportunity appear, leading to innovative corridors that help to realize social and cultural, racial and ethic, political and economic revision. These apertures subtly obligate us to renew our commitment to move past what debilitates and build on our successes- for a “just” society.
To understand this image of society, a list of suggested readings follows for new and long time members. These readings, in most instances emphasize societal tensions, but also point to the avenues of opportunity for social change-our desire. Most important, is that their arguments regardless of age, each time they are read, allow for expanding upon their premises to foster new and import ideas.
Suggested Readings:
Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral life of the Inner City. W.W. Norton and Company, 1999.
Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Eduardo Bonilla Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003.
Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, Doris Wilkinson and Maxine Baca Zinn (eds.), Race, Class, & Gender: Common Bonds, Different Voices. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Adela De La Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (eds.), Building With Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Rajani Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay, New York: International Publishers, 1934.
Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York: Russell Sage, 1997.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Holt Paperbacks , 2002.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Amanda E. Lewis, Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Mary Patillo-Mc Coy Black Pickett Fenses: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000.
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Boston, Beacon Press, 1995.
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, New York: The Monthly Review Press, 1964.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
William Ryan, Blaming the Victim. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, New York: Academic Press, 1974.
William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Second edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
_____The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990.
Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (eds.), Women of Color in U.S. Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.
Steven Seidman Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
* Chair, Racial and Ethnic Minority Division, 2010-2012
