Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit - Couverture rigide

Miller, Karen R.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1479880094 ISBN 13 : 9781479880096

Editeur : New York University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In Managing Inequality, Karen R. Miller examines the formulation, uses, and growing political importance of northern racial liberalism in Detroit between the two World Wars.

In the wake of the Civil War, many white northern leaders supported race-neutral laws and anti-discrimination statutes. These positions helped amplify the distinctions they drew between their political economic system, which they saw as forward-thinking in its promotion of free market capitalism, and the now vanquished southern system, which had been built on slavery. But this interest in legal race neutrality should not be mistaken for an effort to integrate northern African Americans into the state or society on an equal footing with whites. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African Americans into Northern cities after World War I, white northern leaders faced new challenges from both white and African American activists and were pushed to manage race relations in a more formalized and proactive manner.

The result was northern racial liberalism: the idea that all Americans, regardless of race, should be politically equal, but that the state cannot and indeed should not enforce racial equality by interfering with existing social or economic relations. Miller argues that racial inequality was built into the liberal state at its inception, rather than produced by antagonists of liberalism. Managing Inequality shows that our current racial system--where race neutral language coincides with extreme racial inequalities that appear natural rather than political--has a history that is deeply embedded in contemporary governmental systems and political economies.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Karen R. Miller is Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (NYU Press, 2014) and has published a book chapter in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Struggles in America (NYU Press, 2005). Her work has appeared in in the American Quarterly, The Journal of American History, The Middle West Review, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Michigan Feminist Studies, and Against the Current.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: New York University Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1479880094
• ISBN 13: 9781479880096
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 277
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible