Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Mack and Charles, eds., "The New Black"

This fall the New Press released The New Black: What Has Changed—and What Has Not—with Race in America, edited by Kenneth Mack (Harvard Law School) and Guy-Uriel Charles (Duke University). The book brings together "some of the country’s most celebrated and original thinkers on race" to "reexamine the familiar framework of the civil rights movement with an eye to redirecting our understanding of the politics of race." It's not legal history, but we imagine that Mack's historically informed perspective has helped shape the collection.

A few blurbs:
The New Black is an indispensable guide to thinking one’s way through the peculiar institutional complexities of our supposedly postracial moment: the tensions among racial progress in some quarters, fierce backlash in others, the shifting demographics of ethnicity, the subtleties of denial and unconscious bias, and the reconfigured challenge of civil rights for all Americans.” -- Patricia Williams

“The contributors to this book raise significant questions about the continued relevance of the civil rights ideal and argue persuasively that new ideas are necessary, advancing an important discussion of the shape of race relations beyond the Obama presidency.” -- Mary Frances Berry
More information is available here.