In Getting Beyond Race, Richard Payne takes the practical approach that race relations are ultimately about ordinary people interacting with each other. Payne argues that confrontation, blaming, and dwelling on failure in race relations are not as productive as adopting a positive view and looking at individual success stories. Drawing from his own experience of having lived with different racial groups and hundreds of conversations with Americans from all walks of life and racial backgrounds, he writes about those who are helping to reduce the significance of race in society and through their actions are creating models of behavior for America’s future.Payne covers topics from how race is an artificial concept created for social purposes to race in the military, interracial marriages and adoptions, affirmative action, and the effects of generational change and immigration on racial attitudes in America. Instead of looking at questions of race simply in terms of black-white relations, he expands his discussion to include Latinos, Asians, and other people of color. Moreover, Payne contends that the very concept of race is being weakened by fundamental changes throughout many facets of American culture. This book looks forward and offers concrete suggestions for getting beyond race.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In a rigorous, jargon-free account that combines history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology with good old-fashioned common sense, political scientist Richard J. Payne defines race as "an arbitrary label ... wrapped in pseudoscientific doctrine to legitimize socioeconomic and political power." He details how race is used by politicians and social scientists to uphold criminal, intellectual, and sexual stereotypes of nonwhites--blacks in particular. Payne also attacks the notion of separate black and white cultures, stating that America is multicultural at its core, with Americans of European and African descent equally contributing to and drawing from the melting pot. At the same time, he's careful to highlight the inherent dangers of multiculturalism's potential fragmentation into ethnic tribalisms.
Although Payne acknowledges that racism is still a major problem in the United States, he attests to much progress against it. He holds up the military as the leading example of successful integration in America, citing its many black leaders, including Gen. Colin Powell, and speaks well of the successes of pop icons Michael Jordan, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey in changing cultural perceptions of blacks. Payne also astutely notes that increased immigration by Asians, West Indians, Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics to the U.S. continues to undermine the artificial, bilateral, black-white racial paradigm.
Payne's pragmatic, "bottom-up" approach to healing race relations relies on reframing the racial question in terms of culture, rejecting stances of victimhood, encouraging more mixed-race marriages (while abandoning the "one-drop" rules that have traditionally defined blackness for Americans), and undertaking policies of class-based affirmative action that, Payne believes, would "promote cooperative behavior across racial groups and help the country move closer toward getting beyond race." --Eugene Holley Jr.
About the Author
Richard J. Payne is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Illinois State University and the author of several books, including The Clash with Distant Cultures: Values, Interests, and Force in American Foreign Policy.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent,
By
This review is from: Getting Beyond Race: The Changing American Culture (Hardcover)
This book proved a very positive view of how race relations can be improved in this country. He doesn't whitewash the problems, but examines many of our silly assumptions about race (for example, most Americans believe a white woman can give birth to a black child, but never the other way around) and puts them in context, arguing that our attitudes are changing and that there is hope for the future. I use this book as supplemental reading for a course on racism.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New ideas about looking at race in America,
By A Customer
This review is from: Getting Beyond Race: The Changing American Culture (Hardcover)
This book is positive and different in terms of race in America. The chapter on the Social Construction of Race is especially enlightening. The chapter on the Military is a good "how-to" piece.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
