Synopses & Reviews
"I welcome this new edition of Oliver Cromwell Cox's brilliant work. Published amid Cold War repression and postwar racist violence, and kept in print by Monthly Review Press since, it is as fresh and urgent as ever. It stands not only as one of the most incisive materialist analyses of race and racism but as a true classic in the sociology of race."
--Robin D. G. Kelley,New York University
First published in 1948, this pioneering work investigates how racism began and why it remains a persistent problem in the United States, tracing racial inequality to the social and economic system that generates it.
Race, the unexpurgated final section of Caste, Class, and Race, makes a touchstone work accessible to a new generation. Two major contemporary black intellectuals, Adolph Reed and Cornel West, offer commentary on the study's lasting importance.
About the Author
Oliver Cromwell Cox (1901-1974), born in Trinidad, received an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He taught at Wiley College, the Tuskegee Institute, Lincoln University, and Wayne State University. Cornel West teaches at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and is author of many books, including Race Matters (1993) and, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Future of the Race (1996). Adolph Reed teaches at New School University in New York City and is author of The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (1986) and W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought (1997).