Matthew Desmond

"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...

Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer have written a textbook on race relations for the twenty-first century. Every chapter of "Race in America" examines how racism intersects with other forms of social division -- those based on gender, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationhood -- as well as how whiteness surrounds us in unnamed ways that produce and reproduce a multitude of privileges for white people. Featuring a table of contents that...

Proceeding from the bold and provocative claim that there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race, Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond set out to reformulate how we think about this most difficult of topics in American life. In The Racial Order, they draw on Bourdieu, Durkheim, and Dewey to present a new theoretical framework for race scholarship. Animated by a deep and reflexive intelligence, the book engages the large and...