The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century

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by Thomas C. Holt

Harvard University Press

Due/Published February 2001, 166 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674004434

This brief book speaks to the question of how the circumstances of race and racism have changed in our time--and how these changes will affect our future; how the problem of the color-line, as DuBois put it, continues to be the problem of the twenty-first century, despite the shifts in the boundaries that define it.

Foremost among the book's concerns are the contradictions and incoherence of a system that idealizes black celebrities in politics, popular culture, and sports even as it diminishes the average African-American citizen. The world of the assembly line, boxer Jack Johnson's career, and The Birth of a Nation come under Holt's scrutiny as he relates the malign progress of race and racism to the loss of industrial jobs and the rise of our modern consumer society. Understanding race as ideology, he describes the processes of consumerism and commodification that have transformed, but not necessarily improved, the place of black citizens in our society. Holt explores the radical nature of change as it relates to race and its cultural phenomena and offers conceptual tools and a new way to think and talk about racism as social reality.