[Review of] Alain LeRoy Locke (Jeffrey C. Stewart, ed.). Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race

Scholars of the history of race and race relations social science should be deeply indebted to Jeffrey C. Stewart for uncovering and meticulously reconstructing these extant lectures by the philosopher better known for his later contributions to the Harlem Renaissance than his social scientific theorizing: Alain LeRoy Locke. The book is an invaluable source on the thought of an African American intellectual on the subject of the nature of race relations during the Progressive Era and on its relationship to ethnic and class relations as well. So fecund are these lectures with insights and hypotheses which deserve further investigation and analysis that it would require a work of equal length to do justice to this collection of lectures. As a consequence, this review focuses only on Locke\u27s treatment of race, race prejudice, and race relations

A History of Race Relations Social Science

This essay argues that the inclusion of white women, African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians into historiography is a fairly recent development ; and that the aforementioned development, which did not begin until the 1960s, has resulted in rigorous investigation into the racial thought of Franz Uri Boas, Robert Ezra Park, and Gunnar Myrdal and a hot debate in reference to their significance and influence on today\u27s social sciences. Furthermore, the integration of African American history into the historiography of race relations social science has given impetus to the movement towards making American intellectual history more inclusive

[Review of] David Levering Lewis. W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

In a stunning exhibition of biographical craftsmanship, David Levering Lewis narrates, for the years between 1868 and 1919, both the spectacular achievements -- and their import for intellectual life in our own times -- and the equally significant failings of one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. Lewis\u27s erudite tome supercedes all of the previous biographical treatments of DuBois and will doubtlessly require an equally Herculean effort to match this phenomenal work. Indeed, the awesome task of concluding the latter part of DuBois\u27s long, controversial, and complex life will be exhaustively challenging. Since any exhaustive review of Lewis\u27s work would require much greater space, I will confine my comments to an adumbration of the import of DuBois\u27s thought for ethnicity and gender theories

[Review of] George M. Fredrickson. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa

George M. Fredrickson, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University, has written a magisterial volume that complements his earlier explorations in his highly acclaimed White Supremacy and in some of his major essays in a collection, entitled The Arrogance of Race. Yet, unlike the earlier works, which compare the predominant white racism and ethnocentrism in race relations in the United States and the Union of South Africa, Black Liberation focuses on the political ideologies of “organic” African American and Black South African intellectuals. Fredrickson, to my mind, demonstrates convincingly that historically the ideology of “color-blind universalism” has been both more potent and effective -- in more cases than not-- in countering the overt claims and actions of white supremacists in both countries than “racially exclusive nationalism.

[Review of] James B. McKee. Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective

In his sweeping study of the treatment of African Americans in American sociology from the 1920s until the 1960s, James B. McKee, a professor emeritus of sociology at Michigan State University, concludes that sociologists need to revive an older democratic commitment to speak to a larger public that includes and cuts across the conflicting racial identities whose fates are inexorably bound together in the same historical struggles (366-7)