referencebooks (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} referencebooks) wrote,@ 2005-09-13 13:48:00 |
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| Entry tags: | ethnic studies, racism |
Racism in Contemporary America
Racism in Contemporary America
Compiled by Meyer Weinberg.
Published by Greenwood Press, 1996. Copyright held by the author.
This is a 6.5" by 9.5" clothbound book of 838 pages including the author and subject indexes, plus the table of contents and a three page introduction.
The title doesn't indicate it, but what the book is is a major bibliography of racism in contemporary America - not an encyclopedia. This one is number six in the series Bibliographies and Indexes in Ethnic Studies. This one is the third in its own sub-series of bibliographies on racism, which together contain more than 36,650 entries.
This work is composed of simple, unannotated references to books, dissertations, legislative hearings, monographs, journal articles, investigative accounts, and other material on racism under 87 subject categories. The first fifteen of these subject categories are:
- Affirmative Action
- Africa
- Anti-Racism
- Antisemitism
- Autobiography and Biography
- Black Towns
- Blacks and Jews
- Business
- Children
- Citizenship
- Civil Rights
- Class Structure
- Collective Self-Defense
- Colonialism
- Community Development
The introduction defines racism, which is important for communicating the scope of the book:
"A common misunderstanding of racism is to equate it with racial prejudice exercised by some individuals against other individuals and actuated by sentiments of hate. Racism, however, is far more than the sum of individual hates or dislikes. It may, in fact, have little or nothing to do with such sentiments. Racism is an ideology or system of ideas that allocates superiority or inferiority to separate sections of people so as to award privileges to the former and deprivations to the latter. Thus, racism rests on a base of differential worth of human beings and the legitimacy of unequal treatment according to presumed superiority and inferiority."
The introduction goes on to explain the meaning of institutional racism and then to describe the scope of the larger categories in the bibliography.
Bibliographies get old faster than many other types of reference books. At nearly ten years old, age is the major weakness of this bibliography, which includes citations as old as the late 80's. There has as yet not been an update to this edition. Bibliographies are less essential than they used to be because of improved access to scholarly indexes in electronic form on most campuses, but they can still be important for thorough research. Actually, in some cases older bibliographies have added value in their coverage of materials that are older than what appears in most databases.
Altogether, this is a very nice resource for someone doing serious research on aspects of racism.
