Race and Reckoning: From Founding Fathers to Today's Disruptors

by Ellis Cose

Overview

Ranging from chattel slavery, through the New Deal to the Covid pandemic, a groundbreaking work that investigates how pivotal decisions have established and perpetuated discriminatory practices, even as the rise of disinformation and other modern advertising techniques have plunged democracy into an ever-deepening crisis. 

Throughout our nation’s history, numerous racialized decisions have solidified the fates of generations of citizens of color. Some of the earliest involved race-based slavery, the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands, and the exclusion of most Asians. More have proliferated over time. While America grew into a superpower in the twentieth century, it continued to discriminate against people of color—both soldiers who served overseas and civilians on the home front, herding Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II and denying Black citizens their right to vote. 

American Politicians have waxed eloquently and endlessly about bettering the nation. But bettering it for whom? journalist and cultural commentator Ellis Cose asks. From Reconstruction to the New Deal to the unceasing fight for civil rights, Cose reveals how the hopes of many Americans for a true multicultural democracy have been repeatedly frustrated by white nationalists skilled at weaponizing racial anxieties of other whites. 

In Race and Reckoning Cose dissects chapter-by-chapter how America’s overall narrative breeds racial resentment rooted in conjecture over fact. Through rigorous research and with astute detail, Cose uncovers how, at countless points in history, America’s leaders have upheld a narrative of American greatness rooted in racism, as he offers a hopeful yet clear-eyed vision of American possibility.

It is a story grounded in history, and it demolishes the myths that ultimately allowed one of the most ill-prepared, unethical, vindictive, and truth-challenged politicians in history to position himself as America’s savior by tapping into the nation’s darkest tendencies. 

A "pointed rebuke of American exceptionalism,” was Publishers Weekly's description of Race and Reckoning. 

Whereas many politicians argue for ignoring or rewriting unflattering history, this is a passionate and incisive argument for accepting—and learning from—historical truth and rejecting ignorance disguised as patriotism. An important work “that merits a place on ethnic studies—and American history—curricula,” observed Kirkus. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063072442
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,071,275
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ellis Cose was a longtime columnist and contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, the former chairman of the editorial board of the New York Daily News, and is the creator and director of Renewing American Democracy, an initiative of the University of Southern California, Northwestern, and Long Island University. He began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, and columnist and chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today. Cose has appeared on the Today show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC World News, Good Morning America, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of California, among others, and has won numerous journalism awards. Cose is the author of The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America, Bone to Pick, The Envy of the World, the bestselling The Rage of a Privileged Class, and several other books.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: The War over Who We Are 1

1 Choosing Slavery 9

2 A Vanishing Middle Ground 22

3 The South Secedes 36

4 A Taste of Freedom Before Re-enslavement 45

5 A Superpower Burdened with Apartheid 64

6 Who Deserves to Be American? 74

7 A New Deal for Whom? 88

8 War on Two Fronts 107

9 Ending American Apartheid 130

10 Rage, Resistance, and the Politics of Resentment 147

11 Selling Soap, Falsehoods, and Potential Presidents 166

12 Repeating the Past, Creating a Future 188

Acknowledgments 221

Selected Bibliography 225

Index 233

Editorial Reviews

06/27/2022

This blistering survey of racial inequality in America begins by deploring the “assault on the machinery of our democracy” launched by President Trump and his supporters in the wake of the 2020 election. However, contends journalist Cose (The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America), Trump “is only a man,” and his path to the presidency was paved by centuries of racism, exploitation, and discrimination. Spotlighting efforts by white Americans to preserve their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by denying those same rights to people of African, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous descent, Cose briskly recounts the Trail of Tears, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the ransacking of East St. Louis by white mobs in 1917, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit Riots” in 1943 Los Angeles. He argues that these and other episodes of racial violence and intolerance reveal the existence of a “belligerent minority that believes its self-selected rights are the only rights that matter,” and lucidly explains how the Electoral College, the filibuster, and voter suppression work to undermine the popular will and thwart racial equality. Much of this will be familiar to readers of American history and politics, but Cose draws incisive parallels between past and present. This is a pointed rebuke of American exceptionalism. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A book that merits a place on ethnic studies—and American history—curricula.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Blistering. . . . Cose draws incisive parallels between past and present. This is a pointed rebuke of American exceptionalism.” — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

02/01/2022

In Race and Reckoning, Cose (The Rage of a Privileged Class) argues that throughout U.S. history racial bias has always shaped key decisions and events (25,000-copy first printing). Ten years in the making, journalist Fairbanks's The Inheritors follows three everyday South Africans over five decades to reveal how the end of apartheid unfolded. From Hager, historian-in-residence at the Presidential Pet Museum, All-American Dogs is organized by historical era to chronicle the 31 U.S. presidents who have kept canines within petting distance at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (100,000-copy first printing; four-color illustrations). Ranging from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, Livingstone reveals the manifold accomplishments of The Women of Rothschild (40,000-copy first printing). In Code Gray, ER physician Nahvi highlights the daily ethical questions faced by doctors in his position (50,000-copy first printing). In Nerd, New York Times critic at large Phillips, who writes about theater and poetry as well as film, shows how pop-culture fan favorites from Star Wars to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Doctor Who have shaped her—and have much to tell us about society at large (50,000-copy first printing). A multi-award-winning British author who specializes in French history and culture—his biographies of Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac were all New York Times Best Books—Robb now gives us France from Gaulish times 'til COVID-19. Journalist-turned-money manager Steinmetz (The Richest Man Who Ever Lived) introduces us to an American Rascal—Jay Gould, richer than Rockefeller or even Croesus and the reason Wall Street's first financial reforms were instituted (50,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling science writer Yong reveals how animals other than humans perceive their surroundings in An Immense World.

Library Journal

2022-05-05
A survey of ethnic relations in America that links past and present injustices.

“To understand the current efforts to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters,” writes Cose, “you have to understand what happened at the end of Reconstruction.” The end of Reconstruction returned White conservative Southerners to power and introduced an era of Jim Crow laws that seem all too current today. At stake, notes the author, is the vision of an American nation made up of equals as opposed to one in which only some Americans are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, including voting rights. Cose begins at Jamestown and the introduction of African slavery to the American Colonies, showing how the enslavement of Blacks and the removal of Native Americans from their homelands were conjoined efforts to secure White supremacy. Every state was once complicit, given the requirements of such laws as the Fugitive Slave Act, which Cose examines through the lens of the real-life case that inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved—a book, he reminds us, that figured in a campaign ad for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as one to be banned in public schools. In many cases, Blacks enslaved before the Civil War became enslaved in practice, if not in name, afterward even as immigration officials tried to sort out other racial classifications. One such official, reported the Washington Post, held that “Syrians and their racial kindred…were yellow, not white, and that they were barred therefore from naturalization.” In the face of civil rights advances after World War II, racism is growing today through social media and dog whistlers such as Donald Trump, whom Cose links to a eugenicist from the previous century who complained that Latin American countries “furnish very undesirable immigrants.” The author ends with a well-reasoned defense for teaching this history against those who “doggedly refuse to acknowledge how our past affects our present.”

A book that merits a place on ethnic studies—and American history—curricula.

Kirkus Reviews