[Review of] Gretchen M. Bataille and Albert L. McHenry. eds. Living the Dream in Arizona: The Legacy of Martin Luther King. Jr

Living the Dream in Arizona. edited by Gretchen M. Bataille and Albert L. McHenry, is at first glance a tidy, unpretentious little book. Subtitled The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., this work is, in effect, a series of testimonies by a multicultural chorus of Arizonans. Each voice speaks plainly about the meaning of the struggle for dignity, opportunity, and equality. As unpretentious as this work is, it is also informative; the words of the contributors are -- in the spirit of Dr. King\u27s life -- challenging and provocative. There is more than meets the eye in the one hundred and six pages of Living the Dream ..

[Review of] Herbert Hill and James E. Jones. Race in America: The Struggle for Equality

The predicament of race shapes the social and cultural landscape of this society. That this has been long true prompted Dr. W.E.B. DuBois to insightfully remark that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races ... in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea (W. E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk. New York: The Blue Heron Press, 1953, 13 ). DuBois was not offering a critique of race as an abstract sociological or cultural idea; he was critically commenting on how race as a social construct -- as social practice was being used all over the world to penalize, subjugate, colonize, and dehumanize people. The people who were the objects of this foul treatment were deemed by their tormentors to be members of valued races . Race, racism, and the color line, all of which are products of the imagination of the racist, have been instrumental in producing lines of social demarcation in the United States

[Review of] Charles Green and Basil Wilson. The Struggle for Black Empowerment in New York City

This book by Charles Green and Basil Wilson is most informative. The authors, a sociologist and a political scientist respectively, draw upon the research and reporting methods of their disciplines in bringing forth a comprehensive interdisciplinary social science examination of the melodrama that is politics in New York City

Editor\u27s Note

This volume introduces a new look for the Ethnic Studies Review. We believe that this bold new presentation of the journal will be eye catching and at the same time will represent a new era and a broadened scope for ESR

Editor\u27s Notes

The scholarly narratives comprising the ethnic studies project take into the multidimensional worlds of diverse ethnic communities both in the United State and abroad. Using the conceptual, analytical and experiential lenses of ethnic studies scholars we are presented opportunities for learning more about the multifarious experiences of ethnic groups

Critique [of Implications for Survival: Coping Strategies of the Women in Alice Walker\u27s Novels by Robbie Jean Walker]

Intersecting the tools of psychological and sociological research which attempt to explain real human behavior with the tools of the novelist which attempt to portray a fictional accounting of human behavior, Walker presents an analytical model for examining the coping behaviors of three women in two novels of Alice Walker: The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Color Purple

Ethnic Studies Past and Present: Towards Shaping the Future

Ethnic Studies as a curriculum at predominantly white colleges and universities remains a relatively new phenomenon in academe. The recent history of these formations can be traced back to the several social change movements of the 1960s. These changes, spearheaded by the civil rights movement and the black student protests in the South in early 1960s, provided the impetus for the social change spillover which many college and university campuses were to experience in earnest beginning with the mid-1960s.[1

Editor\u27s Note

At first glance the articles in this volume of ESR appear as disparate entities connected only by so much glue and binding materials as necessary to construct this volume. But this is not the case. Not that there must necessarily be a nexus between the pieces, but the fact of the matter is, that there are several points of conveptual convergence between the articles contained in this volume. It is also more than a little interesting that where there is subject matter convergence it occurs at research and instructional junctures long capturing the attention of ethnic studies teacher-scholars. The works included here again turn our attention to the important subjects relating to identity formation, the socialization processes of acculturation-assimilation-nationalism and how these dynamics effect our sense of who we are and our understanding of our individual and group place in this space called the United States

[Review of] Thomas J. LaBelle and Christopher R. Ward, Ethnic Studies and Multiculturalism

Within the barely 133 pages of this book, the authors, LaBelle and Ward, carefully examine the timely, important, and controversial issues swirling around the roles and placement of ethnic studies and multiculturalism in academe. The straightforward examination of the origin of the discipline of ethnic studies and the development of multiculturalism are confined to three parts: Historical and Conceptual Backdrop, Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies: A Contemporary View, and The Context and Strategies for Addressing Diversity

Critique [of Gong Lum v. Rice: The Convergence of Law, Race and Ethnicity by Malik Simba]

For all intent and purposes the United States of America in 1927 was an apartheid state. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 determined that the best social policy for this nation to pursue was one which required racial separation. The Plessy decision essentially capped a series of Supreme Court decisions which underscored the destruction of Reconstruction and the return of states rights to southern governments. Decisions like the Slaughter House Cases (1872) and the Civil Rights Cases (1883) gave clear evidence of the federal government\u27s hasty retreat from serving as an advocate for the civil rights of African Americans