This book of readings is designed to be both a stand alone reader as well as a companion title to Healey's Diversity and Society, Second Edition. The book is a unique mix of first-person accounts, competing views on various issues, and it includes articles from the research literature. The Narrative Portraits and most of the Current Debates articles are from Healey's Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Class, Fourth Edition. It will provide orientation on the issues which many instructors utilize when teaching the race and ethnicity course.

Divided into four volumes, Race and Ethnicity in America provides a complete overview of the history of racial and ethnic relations in America, from pre-contact to the present. The five hundred years since Europeans made contact with the indigenous peoples of America have been dominated by racial and ethnic tensions. During the colonial period, from 1500 to 1776, slavery and servitude of whites, blacks, and Indians formed the foundation for race and ethnic relations. After the American Revolution, slavery, labor inequalities, and immigration led to racial and ethnic tensions; after the Civil War, labor inequalities, immigration, and the fight for civil rights dominated America's racial and ethnic experience. From the 1960s to the present, the unfulfilled promise of civil rights for all ethnic and racial groups in America has been the most important sociopolitical issue in America. Race and Ethnicity in America tells this story of the fight for equality in America. The first volume spans pre-contact to the American Revolution; the second, the American Revolution to the Civil War; the third, Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement; and the fourth, the Civil Rights Movement to the present. All volumes explore the culture, society, labor, war and politics, and cultural expressions of racial and ethnic groups.

This book provides a rich, multi-disciplinary approach to the study of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Taken as a whole, the contributors—consisting of both established and relatively newer scholars—have written a collection of essays which are invaluable for understanding the changing structure and dynamics of race, ethnicity, as well as nationality in the United States as we head toward the twenty-first century.Designed for both the general reader and the growing proliferation of racial/ethnic undergraduate courses, the book provides thematic integration and synthesis of knowledge about race and ethnicity from many diverse fields. Taking the racial formation perspective in the study of race, ethnicity, and nationality as its starting point, the book extends this theory in a number of ways. Several essays apply the perspective to the analysis of changes in race relations in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Several contributors examine the intersections of ethnicity, class, race and gender. Others deal with the deep structure and dynamics of identity formation and the neglect of nation and nationality in racial and ethnic studies. National oppression in U.S. history vis-à-vis African Americans, Chicanos, Indians, and Puerto Ricans, as well as the impact of imperialism on immigration to the United States is also explored.Throughout, the book is concerned with the changing patterns of inter-minority group relations which has tended to be neglected for a focus on white/black relations in scholarly and public discourse.

This book is intended for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses on race and ethnicity and on diversity in America. It was first con- ceived as a collective project of the Research and Resident Scholar Program in Comparative Race Relations at Washington State University, which was established in 1994 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. A number of the participating authors are established scholars in racial/ethnic studies, and several have published award-winning bestsellers. Others are relative newcomers to the field who were invited to join the project because they were doing important work on less well covered topics, such as relations between African Americans and Chicano/Latino Americans.