Customer Reviews

The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox: New Perspectives (Research in Race and Ethnic Relations)

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This book is a must if you want to understand the Marxist perspective on race relations. Previous authors like Robert Park and Gunnar Myrdal found the root of race prejudice to be in a natural tendency humans have to be ethnocentric. In this sense, they see racial antagonism between poor whites and blacks as an issue of individual beliefs: Whites discriminate Blacks in order to benefit from a higher social status. In this book Cox breaks with this paradigm, proposing that racial ideology is a process "produced and carefully maintained by the exploiters of both the poor whites and the Negros". He proposes that capitalists benefit from a labor market divided along racial lines -- which drives wages down, weaken the possibility of strikes, etc.

William J. Wilson is talking directly to Cox in his famous book "The Declining Significance of Race". Wilson's book and a vast literature that followed it are in fact trying to demonstrate that after the Civil Rights movement capitalists are not anymore able to divide the market along racial lines. In a nutshell, this is, in Wilson's opinion, why race has declined in significance when determining people's life chances.

In sum, if you want to better understand important criticisms to the work of Robert Park and Gunnar Myrdal, as well as how Bill Wilson's work fit in the broader sociological debate, Cox's book is a fundamental piece.

The only negative aspect of this edition of the book is that it is highly overpriced. It is hard to understand why this edition is priced at over $100, when the book is over 50 years old now.