Cambridge University Press Understanding Race

"Race matters. Historically, economically, and culturally, race matters a lot. In the United States, for example, a straight and uninterrupted line of distress can be drawn between slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the mass incarcerations of African Americans in the twenty-first. A similar line connects the early nineteenth-century miseries of the "Trail of Tears" (a series of horrendously long forced marches in which members of various southeastern indigenous American tribes were made to relocate to unfamiliar new western territories, at least a quarter of them dying of disease and exhaustion along the way) to the conditions of deep deprivation that prevail on many Native American reservations today. These important historical factors cannot be ignored; and without accommodating them we cannot explain, or understand, or even begin to improve the deeply flawed social world we live in. And there is equally no doubt that those historical and current travesties are inextricably intertwined with notions of race"-- Autorid: Rob DeSalle, Ian Tattersall