The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today’s most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society.
 
The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.

Introduction / Wahneema Lubiano
Home / Toni Morrison
The liberal retreat from race during the post-civil rights era / Stephen Steinberg
White workers, new Democrats, and affirmative action / David Roediger
Tales of two judges : Joyce Karlin in People v. Soon Ja Du; Lance Ito in People v. O.J. Simpson / Neil Gotanda
Racial dualism at century’s end / Howard Winant
“Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing” : black masculinity, gay sexuality, and the jargon of authenticity / Kendall Thomas
Living at the crossroads : explorations in race, nationality, sexuality, and gender / Rhonda M. Williams
Rethinking vernacular culture : black religion and race records in the 1920s and 1930s / Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
What is black culture? / David Lionel Smith
Playing for keeps : pleasure and profit on the postindustrial playground / Robin D.G. Kelley
Black nationalism and black common sense : policing ourselves and others / Wahneema Lubiano
The ethnic scarring of American whiteness / Patricia J. Williams
Race and criminalization : black Americans and the punishment industry / Angela Y. Davis
Color blindness, history, and the law / Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Subjects in history : making diasporic identities / Stuart Hall
Afterword / Cornel West
Acknowledgments
Index
About the contributors