The Heart of the Politics of Race

This piece confronts a serious deficiency in the literature on racial politics. The defining works of White racial attitudes fail to grapple with the complexities of African American political thought and life. In these studies, Black people are a static object about which White people form opinions. This article offers a critique of the field of race politics by outlining the con-sequences of a failure to seriously include African Americans in theoretical and empirical analyses of American race.