Reader for Race and Ethnicity

This course reader was created to address characteristic shortcomings in many textbooks and popular discussions of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. These shortcomings consist of a number of intellectual "blind spots" or failures to address certain issues. These issues involve the failure to see the following: * race, ethnicity, and nationalism as fluid phenomena created and manipulated by people themselves * racism as a political project enforced by the State and society's upper class mainly for economic reasons * racism as involving not only the "stick" of repression but also the "carrot" of cooptation and opportunism * racism as a facilitator of imperialism * antiracism as a powerful evolving force which has changed the world for the better. The course reader is organized around each of these five points. -- from book's introduction