A Sociology of Race/Ethnicity Textbooks: Avoiding White Privilege, Ahistoricism, and Use of the Passive Voice

Abstract

Despite the centrality of the study of race and ethnic relations within the discipline, few studies have analyzed the relative merits of race/ethnicity textbooks on the market today, nor how well they represent the current state of the research. This article addresses this problem through a content analysis of the five best-selling race/ethnicity textbooks in the field. The findings suggest that these sociology texts generally avoid the issue of white privilege, are often ahistorical, and usually adopt the use of the passive voice in accounting for racism. I argue that these problems not only fail to reflect recent developments in the sociology of race/ethnicity accurately, but they also interfere with a student's ability to understand race as a social construction and to place contemporary racial inequalities in an historical context. Additionally, by utilizing the passive voice in their discussion of racism in the United States, textbooks often fail to implicate the perpetrators of racism, generally whites, reinforcing the dominant ideology that American society reflects what Bonilla-Silva (2006) has termed “racism without racists.”

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Gustavo Mesch, editor of Sociological Focus, Dr. Anthony Ladd, and two anonymous reviewers for their assistance in improving the quality and substance of the manuscript. This article is a substantially revised version of earlier papers presented at the American Sociological Association 2012 Annual Meetings, the Loyola University New Orleans Department of Sociology Faculty Research Seminar 2009, and at the Oklahoma State University Research Symposium in 2009.

Notes

¹I am currently writing a race/ethnic relations textbook. My editor shared this list of best-selling race/ethnicity textbooks for the year 2008 with me and has given me permission to use the information here. McGraw Hill gets their sales information from a company called Bowker's PubTrack, which provides sales data from bookstores across the country. While some of the texts I surveyed are more recent than this sales data, there is no evidence there has been any significant shift in the race/ethnic relations textbook sales market. In other words, each book surveyed here is capturing about the same market share as it was in 2008.