Metaracism
How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The definitive book on how systemic racism in America really works, revealing the vast and often hidden network of interconnected policies, practices, and beliefs that combine to devastate Black lives
In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism’s very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled.
In Metaracism, pioneering scholar Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back. She reveals how—from housing to education to criminal justice—an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce an even more devastating “metaracism” far worse than the sum of its parts. While these systemic connections can be difficult to see—and are often portrayed as “color-blind”—again and again they function to disproportionately contain, exploit, and punish Black people.
By helping us to comprehend systemic racism’s inner workings and destructive impacts, Metaracism shows us also how to break free—and how to create a more just America for us all.
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Sociologist Rose (The Hip Hop Wars) demonstrates in this astute critique how the mainstream idea of racism as rooted in individual bias masks a complex system of oppression. Highlighting the dynamic interplay between laws and informal practices that together lead people to get "caught up in the system," Rose traces interconnected anti-Black policies in housing, schools, banking, criminal justice, and media. She identifies the "metaeffects" of these policies as a trio of functions—containment (via segregation and redlining), extraction (the removal of wealth and assets, including the government seizure of over 16 million acres of Black-owned farmland since 1920), and punishment (such as when minor infractions are enforced against Black people that are not enforced against white people). Examining three highly publicized cases of contemporary racism—the slayings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the jailing of Kelley Williams-Bolar for lying about her address so her children could attend a better school—that were largely presented in the press as grounded in the racist behaviors of individual malefactors, Rose tracks the broad policies (such as generations of discriminatory housing and lending) which served as backstories to these events. Marshalling extensive evidence into a lucid and powerful narrative, Rose provides an essential new look at American inequality. Even readers well versed in the topic will have their eyes opened by this cogent analysis.
