The Urban Racial State

Managing Race Relations in American Cities

By (author) Noel A. Cazenave

Publication date:

16 April 2011

Length of book:

224 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442207752

The Urban Racial State introduces a new multi-disciplinary analytical approach to urban racial politics that provides a bridging concept for urban theory, racism theory, and state theory. This perspective, dubbed by Noel A. Cazenave as the Urban Racial State, both names and explains the workings of the political structure whose chief function for cities and other urban governments is the regulation of race relations within their geopolitical boundaries.

In The Urban Racial State, Cazenave incorporates extensive archival and oral history case study data to support the placement of racism analysis as the focal point of the formulation of urban theory and the study of urban politics. Cazenave's approach offers a set of analytical tools that is sophisticated enough to address topics like the persistence of the urban racial state under the rule of African Americans and other politicians of color.

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Urban Racial State: An Overview

Chapter 1: Understanding the Urban Racial State
Chapter 2: Programming Race Relations through Community Action
Chapter 3: The Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and Conflict over the Use of Community Action to Support African American Insurgency
Chapter 4.:Maximum Feasible Participation Meets Black Power and the White Backlash: The Struggle over Community Action in Syracuse
Chapter 5.:Black Rebellion, White Repression, and the Transformation of Community Progress, Inc. and Urban Politics in New Haven
Chapter 6: Recent Examples of the Urban Racial State
Conclusion: Summaries of Findings, Lessons Learned for Understanding Today's Urban Racial State, and What We Still Need to Know

Notes
Index
About the Author

In this pathbreaking study, Noel Cazenave introduces a revelatory concept—the urban racial state—which brings to light the pivotal role that the state plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities. Instead of devising policies to address such fundamental problems as ghettoization, poverty, and labor market discrimination, mayors and heads of governmental agencies see their function as one of managing race relations, which they do by appeasing protest groups with minor reforms or co-opting their leaders. The end result is pacification rather than social justice and, tragically, maintenance of the racial status quo.