Still the Big News: Racial Oppression in America

For more than thirty years, Bob Blauner’s incisive writing on race relations has drawn a wide and varied audience. Whether his topic is the Watts riots in 1965, Chicano culture, or the tension between Blacks and Jews, his work is remarkable for its originality and candor. Beginning with the key essays of his landmark book, Racial Oppression in America, this volume makes the case that race and racism still permeate every aspect of American experience. Blauner launched his concept of internal colonialism in the turbulent 1960s, a period in which many Americans worried that racial conflicts would propel the country into another civil war. The notion that the systematic oppression of people of color in the United States resembles the situation of colonized populations in Third World countries still informs much of the academic research on race as well as public discourse. Indeed, today’s critical race and whiteness studies are deeply indebted to Blauner’s work on internal colonialism and the pervasiveness of white privilege.Offering a radical perspective on the United States’ racial landscape, Bob Blauner forcefully argues that we ignore the persistence of oppression and our continuing failure to achieve equality at our own peril. Author note: Bob Blauner is Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, and a freelance writer.