Race, ethnicity and social theory /

In this book Solomos (Univ. of Warwick, UK) offers a detailed historical analysis of the turns in scholarship and policy regarding the social construction of identities involved in struggles for domination or liberation in the UK and the US. The first three chapters consider the discourse of major theoretical frameworks, while the next four detail empirical and policy issues to which the major theories have been applied since the 1960s. This book's key finding is that social identities are socially constructed and not biological or natural scientific categories, but their mobilization in social relations has real-world repercussions that privilege certain individuals and communities or exclude them from resources and power. However, the extent to which class issues are articulated or intersect with race, ethnicity, and nationalism in unequal societies remains relatively neglected. Instead, class is only noted as an issue addressed by theorists like Robert Miles and Charles Mills before supposedly being abandoned to focus on the "'fateful trinity' of race, ethnicity, and nation," especially in Stuart Hall's W. E. B. Du Bois lectures. And yet, critical race theory never abandoned class analysis, an empirically tenable reality given that many US states ban the teaching. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Onwubiko Agozino, Virginia Tech