Group identities have been an important part of political life in America since the founding of the republic. For most of this long history, the central challenge for activists, politicians, and scholars concerned with the quality of U.S. democracy was the struggle to bring the treatment of ethnic and racial minorities and women in line with the creedal values spelled out in the nation’s charters of freedom. We are now several decades from the key moments of the twentieth century when social movements fractured America’s system of ascriptive hierarchy. The gains from these movements have been substantial. Women now move freely in all realms of civil society, hold high elective offices, and constitute more than 50 percent of the workforce. Most African-Americans have now attained middle class status, work in integrated job sites, and live in suburbs. Finally, people of color from nations in Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean now constitute the majority of America’s immigration pool.
In the midst of all of these positive changes, however, glaring inequalities between groups persist. Indeed, ethnic and racial minorities remain far more likely to be undereducated, unemployed, and incarcerated than their counterparts who identify as white. Similarly, both violence and work place discrimination against women remain rampant in U.S. society. The Routledge series on identity politics features works that seek to understand the tension between the great strides our society has made in promoting equality between groups and the residual effects of the ascriptive hierarchies in which the old order was rooted.
Some of the core questions that the series will address are: how meaningful are the traditional ethnic, gender, racial, and sexual identities to our understanding of inequality in the present historical moment? Do these identities remain important bases for group mobilization in American politics? To what extent can we expect the state to continue to work for a more level playing field among groups?
Edited
By Nadia E. Brown, Sarah Allen Gershon
July 31, 2023
The second edition of Distinct Identities continues to provide a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to the complexities of the politics, social structures, and cultural contexts that animate how women of color engage in and shape U.S. politics. Keeping the structure of the original volume, ...
By Clarissa Peterson, Emmitt Y. Riley, III
April 19, 2022
With this book, Clarissa Peterson and Emmitt Y. Riley, III dive into how racial attitudes change and inform political decisions. Peterson and Riley use racial resentment, black blame, and racial identity to investigate the extent to which racial attitudes influence vote choice, evaluations of Black...
By Barbara Burrell
October 02, 2017
This textbook for courses on women and politics thematically integrates two profound historical developments focusing on women's political participation in contemporary public life in the United States. The second wave of women’s rights activism has now spanned a half century producing a revolution...
Edited
By Jonathan Keller, Alex Zamalin
April 21, 2017
The twenty-first century presents unique political challenges, like increasing concern over racially based police brutality and mass incarceration, continuing economic and gender inequality, the rise of conservative and libertarian politics, and the appropriate role of religion in American politics...
By Edmund Fong
April 21, 2016
In contemporary American political culture, claims of American exceptionalism and anxieties over its prospects have resurged as an overarching theme in national political discourse. Yet never very far from such debates lie animating fears associated with race. Fears about the loss of national unity...
By David S. Gutterman, Andrew R. Murphy
November 02, 2015
Profound demographic and cultural changes in American society over the last half century have unsettled conventional understandings of the relationship between religious and political identity. The "Protestant mainline" continues to shrink in numbers, as well as in cultural and political influence....
By Wilbur C. Rich
September 25, 2015
In a provocative and controversial analysis, Wilbur C. Rich’s The Post-Racial Society is Here conclusively demonstrates that nation is in midst of a post-racial society. Yet many Americans are skeptical of this fundamental social transformation. The failure of recognition is related to the remnants...
Edited
By Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Richard L. O’Bryant
July 14, 2015
The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has opened a new chapter in the country’s long and often tortured history of inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations. Many relished in the inauguration of the country’s first African American president — an event foreseen by ...
By Michèle Alexandre
December 17, 2014
Michèle Alexandre’s innovative study examines how sexual profiling represses, oppresses, and hinders various aspects of life for both genders, and explores the ways in which the law and the community can help eradicate the practice of sexual profiling. Alexandre defines "sexploitation" as the ...
By Cynthia Stavrianos
November 13, 2014
As various contemporary groups use the language of motherhood to advance their political causes, maternal rhetoric has become very visible in the American political discourse of late. Yet while it has long been recognized that women have invoked their political status as mothers to organize and ...
By Atiya Kai Stokes-Brown
November 10, 2014
Latinos are the fastest growing population group in the U.S. and have exerted widespread influence in numerous aspects of American culture from entertainment to economics. Unlike Asian, black, white, and Native Americans who are defined by race, Latinos can be of any race and are beginning to shed ...
By Therí A. Pickens
February 05, 2014
In the increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic American landscape of the present, understanding and bridging dynamic cross-cultural conversations about social and political concerns becomes a complicated humanistic project. How do everyday embodied experiences transform from being anecdotal to ...