How Racism Takes Place

Reviews / Votes

"George Lipsitz's new book, How Racism Takes Place, has a great deal to teach Americans-especially white Americans-about the devastating effects of contemporary racism. Lipsitz utilizes the best research and brilliant arguments to demonstrate how racism continues to fester in racially segregated neighborhoods, workforces, suburbs, schools and country clubs. He demonstrates convincingly that contemporary racism did not emerge accidently but by historical and contemporary designs of white Americans whether they know it or not. How Racism Takes Place is a must read, for it challenges us to grapple with our racial demons and, in the process, become a people truly representing the democratic claims we broadcast throughout the globe." -Aldon Morris, Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University "How Racism Takes Place is a brilliant, timely, and much needed book about racial segregation-how it is produced and reproduced, how white privilege and the subjugation of people of color have a clear spatial dimension, and how the racialization of space and the spatialization of race shape, and are manifestations of, the political and cultural economy of the United States. Beyond unveiling the mechanics of structural racism, Lipsitz also draws out what he calls a 'Black spatial imaginary,' the site of expressive culture where aggrieved and displaced peoples have waged a struggle to resist and survive policies of racial segregation and conceived a different future." -Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California