The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking classic, with a new introduction First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West’s most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X. The insights Dr. West brings to these complex problems remain relevant, provocative, creative, and compassionate. In a new introduction for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Dr. West argues that we are in the midst of a spiritual blackout characterized by imperial decline, racial animosity, and unchecked brutality and terror as seen in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlottesville. Calling for a moral and spiritual awakening, Dr. West finds hope in the collective and visionary resistance exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and the Black freedom tradition. Now more than ever, Race Matters is an essential book for all Americans, helping us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium."--BOOK JACKET.

Philosopher Michael Levin has delivered one of the most authoritative and incisive treatises on the importance of race ever written. Why Race Matters is must reading for anyone interested in the debates on race, IQ, crime, welfare, affirmative action, and multiculturalism. Levin cross-examines the statistical data, psychological test scores, and behavioral genetic analyses, brilliantly illuminating the logical pitfalls and stumbling blocks in so much of what has been written on the subject. His powerful logic digs deep and his courageous inferences vault forward. Levin seems to be always bang on target. -- J. Philippe Rushton, University of Western OntarioProf. Michael Levin?s analytical tour de force differs uniquely from other books dealing with racial differences. Levin views the various complex arguments regarding the reality and nature of race and race differences, not from any of the typical specialized viewpoints of anthropology, education, evolution, genetics, psychology, or sociology, or from any social or political ideology, but from the sweeping vantage point of the philosophy of science. Levin?s impressive technical mastery of the subject is evinced in his book?s amazingly broad and detailed scope and analytical depth. But what I consider the most valuable and exciting feature of Levin?s treatment of every facet of the race issue is the consistent critical stance his incisive intellect brings to every aspect, based entirely on his keen understanding of the philosophy of science. It is definitely a ?must read? for all serious students of this subject.-- Arthur R. Jensen, U.C. BerkeleyWhy Race Matters does exactly what the title promises?it removes all illusions about the insignificance of race, and explains what racial differences mean for a multiracial society. It is a thorough, overwhelmingly convincing treatment of America?s most serious and least understood problem. -- Jared Taylor, editor, American Renaissance

'Why are you making this about race?' This question is repeated daily in public and in the media. Calling someone racist in these times of mounting white supremacy seems to be a worse insult than racism itself. In our supposedly post-racial society, surely it’s time to stop talking about race? This powerful refutation is a call to notice not just when and how race still matters but when, how and why it is said not to matter. Race critical scholar Alana Lentin argues that society is in urgent need of developing the skills of racial literacy, by jettisoning the idea that race is something and unveiling what race does as a key technology of modern rule, hidden in plain sight. Weaving together international examples, she eviscerates misconceptions such as reverse racism and the newfound acceptability of 'race realism', bursts the 'I’m not racist, but' justification, complicates the common criticisms of identity politics and warns against using concerns about antisemitism as a proxy for antiracism. Dominant voices in society suggest we are talking too much about race. Lentin shows why we actually need to talk about it more and how in doing so we can act to make it matter less.

This book tells the story of how the transition to democracy in South Africa enfranchised blacks politically but without raising most of them from poverty. Although democratic South Africa is officially "non-racial," the book shows that racial solidarities continue to play a role in the country's political economy.

Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson alongside slaughterhouse lithographs, hunting photography, and sheep “husbandry” manuals, Lindgren Johnson argues instead for a critical African American tradition that at pivotal moments reconsiders and recuperates discourses of animality weaponized against both African Americans and animals. Johnson articulates a theory of “fugitive humanism” in which these texts fl ee both white and human exceptionalism, even as they move within and seek out a (revised) humanist space. The focus, for example, is not on how African Americans shake off animal associations in demanding recognition of their humanity, but on how they hold fast to animality and animals in making such a move, revising “the human” itself as they go and undermining the binaries that helped to produce racial and animal injustices. Fugitive humanism reveals how an interspecies ethics develops in these African American responses to violent dehumanization. Illuminating those moments in which the African American canon exceeds human exceptionalism, Race Matters, Animal Matters ultimately shows how these black engagements with animals and animality are not subsequent to efforts for racial justice — a mere extension of the abolitionist or antilynching movements— but, to the contrary, are integral to those efforts. This black- authored temporality challenges widely accepted humanist approaches to the relationship between racial and animal justice as it anticipates and even critiques the valuable insights that animal studies and posthumanism have to offer in our current moment.