An Impossible Dream?: Racial Integration in the United States
Sharon A. Stanley
Abstract
This book offers a novel conception of racial integration for black Americans in the United States, and a sobering assessment of the prospects for its realization. It builds a bridge between two positions typically seen as irreconcilable: the defense of integration as an imperative of racial justice, and the critique of integration as a form of compulsory assimilation that buttresses white supremacy. Part I of the book provides a model of integration that emphasizes internal, psychic transformation and a redistribution of power rather than the more typical spatial mixing. This model of integra ... More
This book offers a novel conception of racial integration for black Americans in the United States, and a sobering assessment of the prospects for its realization. It builds a bridge between two positions typically seen as irreconcilable: the defense of integration as an imperative of racial justice, and the critique of integration as a form of compulsory assimilation that buttresses white supremacy. Part I of the book provides a model of integration that emphasizes internal, psychic transformation and a redistribution of power rather than the more typical spatial mixing. This model of integration secures a form of mutual transformation rather than assimilation. Part II of the book turns to a thorough and detailed accounting of the challenges that confront the realization of a worthwhile form of integration in the United States. It demonstrates that the legacy of Jim Crow and the entrenchment of white privilege have the capacity to distort efforts to achieve genuine integration in a manner that may wrest still further sacrifices from black Americans without securing racial justice. Therefore, the future of integration remains uncertain and it can neither be prescribed as an imperative of justice nor rejected as intrinsically indefensible. This is the moral and political quandary at the heart of the book.
Keywords:
race,
African Americans,
integration,
segregation,
desegregation,
racial justice,
critical race theory,
white supremacy,
white privilege
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190639976 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190639976.001.0001 |
