The Race Track: Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism

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Despite the watershed election of Barack Obama—and resulting claims that racial history ended that day—the painful reality of racism in America has been thrust into the headlines over the past year. In urgent and compelling prose, The Race Track dispenses with the myth of post-racial America, explaining not only why race matters more than ever but also how we can fashion twenty-first-century solutions to combating racial injustice.

The celebrated authors of this timely intervention chart the long history of racism in law, health care, housing, criminal justice, employment, economic crises , and school admissions. In accessible terms, they then provide a framework for understanding how and why structural racism thrives in the present: in systematic racial profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline, housing segregation, and widespread “implicit bias.” Arguing that there is no magic bullet, no one-size-fits-all solution to racial injustice, The Race Track champions an “intersectional” path—pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw—to racial justice, one that speaks directly to emerging generations of racial justice leaders, as well as their teachers, parents, mentors, and friends.

Based on years of looking beyond the ivory tower and talking to ordinary people from all walks of life, The Race Track will be the new touchstone for understanding race in America today.