The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century

In a country where retired U.S. Army Gen. Colin Powell--the son of Jamaican immigrants--can be nominated to be secretary of state while a group of servicemen in the U.S. Army can form a neo-Nazi group and murder an African-American couple (as happened in North Carolina in 1997), readers don't need to turn to scholars to ascertain that race is an incredibly divisive issue. But they will benefit from Holt's expert and careful examination of these ""narratives of contradiction and incoherence"" as he attempts to forecast the reigning racial ethos for the next millennium, just as W.E.B. Du Bois did when he declared that ""the color line"" was ""the problem of the twentieth century."" Breaking from traditional paradigms, Holt, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, focuses on ""what work race does""--that is, what role it plays in the economy and in consumer culture. Taking his cue from Du Bois's idea that ""slavery was the first truly global market of exchange,"" Holt details how shifting conceptions of race have dovetailed with the realities of the U.S. economy before and after Ford's invention of the assembly line and mass production. Within this framework, he examines myriad phenomena of consumer culture, such as the NAACP boycott of Birth of a Nation and Michael Jordan's Nike endorsements. His major point is that the Civil Rights movement (unlike many other worldwide movements of people of color) failed to emphasize forging alliances with labor. Though he doesn't have the name recognition outside the academy of a Henry Louis Gates Jr. or Cornel West, Holt writes in clear, precise prose (these essays were originally given as the Nathan I. Huggins lectures at Harvard) and makes an important contribution to both public and academic discussions of race and labor and their intersections in U.S. politics. (Feb.)