Weak State, Strong Policy: Paradoxes of Race Policy in the United States, Great Britain, and France

Abstract

Race, in particular the peculiarly American embrace of political race-consciousness, is often portrayed as an important source of limitations on American political development. Although the color line has undergirded some of the most notorious instances of state repression in American history—the pre-civil rights South most notably, but also race-based immigration and citizenship restrictions and the FBI's COINTELPRO operations of the cold war era, to name a few—race is most commonly associated with state weakness through its effects on such processes as regional differentiation, class formation, and welfare state building.V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981); Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). These accounts fit nicely into conventional approaches to American political development, which similarly emphasize the peculiar weakness and fragmentation of the American state.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990).