Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Race is a collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Targeted to undergraduates, it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do.

Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a post-race world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

“Hazel Markus and Paula Moya have assembled an all-star roster of scholars to put to rest, once and for all, the fallacy that ‘race doesn’t matter.’ This volume is absolutely necessary and will fast become a landmark of scholarship on race and ethnicity.” ~ Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

“Doing Race provides a sane and balanced guide to the debates over race that shows how race continues to determine our social lives even though race itself is a complex process undergoing constant change. Moya and Markus’s introduction is also invaluable for teaching, with helpful analyses of typical conversations about race that offer critiques with a light touch.” ~ Linda Martin Alcoff, Hunter College

“This stunningly comprehensive and accessible volume covers all the bases. Engaging the essays as a whole, we come to realize, understand, and appreciate how race can be simultaneously a matter of identity, structural inequality, representation, and performance.” ~ Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley

“The editors’ introduction provides an important theoretical scaffolding that alone is worth the price of the volume; however, when in concert with the essays that follow, the result is an instant classic, one that will reverberate across disciplines for years to come.”  ~ Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine

“Students who have not thought much about race, especially about their own race, will find this work to be a non-threatening introduction to the many ways that we unwittingly ‘do race’ to one another, often without awareness or intention. The diversity of perspectives offered in the essays, however, also guarantees that even the most serious race scholars will learn quite a bit from Doing Race.” ~ Jennifer A. Richeson, Northwestern University