Abstract
Abstract Following up on their 2011 book, Still a House Divided, Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King argue in America's New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair, that the United States has recently entered a new racial institutional order. Its battle lines are organized around two alliances, each with social networks, control of some institutions, core political and ideological commitments, and specific policy goals. One alliance seeks to protect the historical and continuing hierarchy in which white people enjoy social, economic, and political dominance; the other seeks to repair American society so that Black people and other people of color become fully equal citizens and participants. In this review, I describe their analysis and then examine two questions emerging from it: what distinguishes an institutional order from a less fundamental and perhaps less durable political contest or social movement? And does an analysis centered on the Black-white binary sufficiently capture the complex nature of the United States' history and practice involving Native Americans, European immigrants, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other groups? I suggest how the protect versus repair battle lines might shift if a majority of Latinos move toward racialization or toward whiteness, or whether “racial” categories should be understood predominantly as varying intersections of race and class.
Published Version
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