In this tightly argued book, Professor Young takes on the liberal race establishment. He insistently critiques the multiple ways—through the deployment of anti-realism, fetishism, and pluralism—in which "race" as discourse or experience becomes decoupled from class. Young understands class not as a category of identity we should respect and maintain; rather, he understands it primarily as social relations of production, ... Read morepolitical economy: he thus emphasizes the connection between "racial" discourse as ideology and structures and processes of class rule, structures that make the fight against racism central.
Gregory Meyerson, North Carolina A & T University Young is to be commended and imitated for this rarity among books on theory: one which ably demonstrates its mastery of a broad range of complex theories by thoroughly laying out the fundamental principles of a concept and then cogently describing and analyzing their intersections and the resulting paradoxes and aporia. Equally laudable to my mind is Young's truly rigorous, egalitarian and balanced approach: he does not, like so many other theorists who work on race, simply pay lip service to black feminism and queer theory, but gives them equal weight and consideration rather than directing them to the margins of consideration as nontheoretical interest groups.
African American Review
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