Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do.

Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a "post-race" world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Markus and Moya, who base this collection of essays on their course in comparative studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford U., have gathered in one text a compelling group of essays by leading academics on all aspects of race in the US and worldwide. The essays delve into questions of identity, models of ethnicity, legal definitions, DNA and biology, the disproportionate rates of incarceration, the role of the media in creating racial stereotypes, and the role of artists and musicians in changing those stereotypes, among other topics. Each essay includes an introductory abstract and a list of work cited. This is an outstanding text for undergraduate courses in sociology, among other fields. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity.

In Doing Race, scholars from across the disciplines have written original essays on race and ethnicity aimed at an undergraduate audience. The book provides a practical response to the view, common in American debates, that race and ethnicity no longer matter, or that race and ethnicity should not be taken into account when deciding how to structure society and formulate public policy. It also answers the question of why race and ethnicity play such a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Raceshows that race and ethnicity matter because they are important resources in answering the fundamental, even universal 'Who am I?' and 'Who are we?' questions. It demonstrates how understanding how identities are shaped by race and ethnicity is central to understanding individual and collective behavior in the United States and throughout the world.

Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, these original essays provide undergraduates with an effective framework for understanding the persistence of racial inequalities and problems in the 21st century.