Race and NationAmerica Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences. Edited by Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001. 2 vols. Pp. 1084. $49.94 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) each volume.

Abstract

The sociologist W. E. B. DuBois was surely prescient in his projection at the beginning of the twentieth century that this would be “the century of the color line” (DuBois 1903, p. vii). He foresaw the coming of a heightened struggle for social justice on the part of the people of color, not only in the United States but in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Before his death in Africa in 1963 at the age of 95, in the midst of the historic Civil Rights March on Washington that year, DuBois could see profound changes in the relations between the “colonized” people of color and the dominant European people. Since that time race and ethnic relations as well as race and ethnic diversity have exhibited unanticipated patterns of conflict and accommodation, progress and retrogression. Since the seventeenth century, through American slavery, emancipation, segregation, and the modern civil rights movement, no issue has been more persistently salient in the United States than the issue of race and ethnic relations. For generations, scientists have urged that the concept of race be abandoned in our public discourse because it has no scientific or biological meaning. In recent years, using DNA samples to study human cell structures, laboratory scientists working