Stephen Steinberg offers a bold challenge to prevailing thought on race and ethnicity in American society. In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution. On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of "race relations" obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a "white sociology" that reflects white interests and...

Stephen Steinberg offers a bold challenge to prevailing thought on race and ethnicity in American society. In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution. On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of "race relations" obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a "white sociology" that reflects white interests and...

Winner of the ASA, Oliver Cox Award for Anti-Racist Scholarship
From the author of "The Ethnic Myth" comes this cogent analysis of how social science has placed a liberal gloss on racism and failed to champion civil rights. From a powerful critique of Gunnar Myrdal's classic "An American Dilemma" to a new epilogue that dismantles the myth of black progress, "Turning Back" offers a challenge to liberals as well as conservatives, blacks as well as whites, who have fueled the current backlash by providing a spurious intellectual cover for gutting affirmative action and other policies...