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The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity and Ethics Along the Color Line

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

Mark Q. Sawyer
Affiliation:
UCLA

Extract

The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. By Bruce Baum. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 352p. $45.00.

Ethics Along the Color Line. By Anna Stubblefield. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 216 p. $16.95.

There is a tendency in political science to see identities as given and fixed. They are placed in equations and used to predict things, but the content of those identities and our normative understanding of them remain a mystery. For that reason, Ethics Along the Color Line and The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity are essential books both for political theorists and those working in other fields of political science. Both add analytical rigor to our use of race as social scientists and implore us to keep in mind normative questions as we explore the contours and meanings of race as a sociopolitical construct.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS: POLITICAL THEORY
Copyright
2006 American Political Science Association

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