I am putting together a special issue of Critical Sociology..

The purpose is to have a critical dialogue regarding Race, Race Relations
and/or Racism.

Here are some of my thoughts, and the rough abstract of the paper I will be
doing for the Volume.
I call upon you individually to think about contributing to this
project.  Please contact me directly, within the next 2 weeks if you are
interested in contributing.  (Papers are anticipated from a multitude of
perspectives which will include economic, psychological, Marxian, world
systems, post modern, sociological, cross cultural.   These papers will
also deal with different demographic groups as well to include - Hispanic,
Asian, White Ethnics, Black, Native American - and others not specific to
the continental U.S.   I plan to have this volume completed by summer of
next year, and published by the fall of 2001.

Thanks..



Rodney D. Coates
professor of Sociology
Director of Black World Studies
Miami University


My rough Abstract..

        The Cultural Production of Race and Racialized Systems
        Rodney D. Coates



        Amazingly, more than 30 years since the "marching stopped", Kenneth Clark
convinced the supreme court that separate was wholly unequal, since 3
little children were killed in a bombed out church, since the long hot
summers caused us to question whether we would continue to be a nation
divided, since the passage of the voters rights act, creation of
Affirmative Action, since the slaying of Medger, Malcolm, John and Robert,
and since Martin Luther King's Dream of a multi-cultural future for America
and the systematic dismantling of most obvious forms of racial
discrimination   we find ourselves once again discovering race, and
horrified by racial crimes.   As we approach the beginning of a new
millennium, the intractability of race and racism in such things as the
corporate glass ceiling (where the Man Farthest Down is once again a black
woman), the disparities in sentencing and the administration of capital
punishment, racial profiling.  Within the Academe again we watch as race is
reified as the primary factor in the lack of performance and criminality of
persons of color, where blaming the victim and the culture of poverty are
once again in vogue (while at times it is disguised as discourse and
research in human capital or the human genome studies).  The paper argues
that sociology and the discipline, as well as much of America, while
acknowledging the more obvious causes and manifestations of race and racism
(i.e. the social construction) have failed to understand or come to grips
with the cultural production of race and racialized systems.  This failure
has obvious significance for both research and policy.  Finally, this paper
suggests specific theoretical, practical and empirical ways in which a
cultural approach to race and racialized systems can be realized.




For more of my poetry please check out

http://gw.cas.muohio.edu/umoja/www.ulbobo.com/umoja/index.html

umoja

only when lions have historians will hunting cease to be glorified

rodneyc..