Counterrevolution: The Crusade to Roll Back the Gains of the Civil Rights Movement

by Stephen Steinberg

Overview

In Black Reconstruction W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away. As history testifies, revolution nearly always triggers its antithesis: counterrevolution. In this book Steinberg provides an analysis of this backlash, tracing the reverse flow of history that has led to the current national reckoning on race.

Steinberg puts counterrevolution into historical and theoretical perspective, exploring the "victim-blaming" and "colorblind" discourses that emerged in the post-segregation era and undermined progress toward racial equality, and led to the gutting of affirmative action. This book reflects Steinberg's long career as a critical race scholar, culminating with his assessment of our current moment and the possibilities for political transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503630024
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stephen Steinberg is a sociologist and Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a foremost scholar of the political economy of race, having conducted research and published in race and ethnicity for more than forty years. He is the author of The Ethnic Myth (1981. 1989. 2001); Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995, 2001), which received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship; and Race Relations: A Critique (2007).

Table of Contents

Introduction: "Race Relations": An Obfuscation
Part I: Counterrevolution in Theoretical and Historical Perspective
1. Nails in the Coffin of the Civil Rights Movement
2. How Daniel Patrick Moynihan Derailed the Civil Rights Movement
3. Nathan Glazer and the Assassination of Affirmative Action
4. The Comeback of the Culture of Poverty
Part II: Deconstructing Victim-Blaming Discourses
Chapter 5: The Role of Social Science in Legitimating Racial Hierarchy
Chapter 6: Is Education a False Panacea for the Racial and Class Inequalities of Capitalist America?
Chapter 7: The Myth of Ethnic Success: Old Wine in New Bottles
Chapter 8: "Making It": Fact Versus Fiction
Chapter 9: Race and the Fallacy of the Goose-Gander Rule: Implications for the Black Lives Matter Movement
Chapter 10: The Political Uses of Concentrated Poverty
Part III: From Backlash to Frontlash
Chapter 11: Decolonizing Race Knowledge: Exorcising the Ghost of Herbert Spencer
Chapter 12: The Myth of Black Progress
Chapter 13: Systemic Racism: The Elephant in the Room
Chapter 14: Bring Back Affirmative Action
Chapter 15: Trump, Trumpism, and the Resurgence of White Supremacy

Editorial Reviews

"In this book, Stephen Steinberg concludes his incisive meditation on the race relations paradigm, the discipline of sociology, and what he now calls the 'frontlash' of the contemporary surge of the U.S. toward a revanchist anti-Black society. Steinberg accomplishes the rare feat of producing a third volume of a trilogy—Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy and Race Relations: A Critique—that raises the project to dazzling new heights. He does this by illuminating the depths to which contemporary U.S. racial ideology and policy have plummeted. At the core of Steinberg's analysis, he resurrects the unrealized possibilities of affirmative action to power a third Reconstruction by tracing its birth, murder, death, and transmutation into diversity."

Universityof Illinois Urbana-Champaign, - Sundiata Cha-Jua

"Steinberg's Counterrevolution is a harrowing and important read. Striking a cautionary tone, he warns of the dangers of ignoring the whittling down of hard-fought civil rights gains. As the rights of minorities are trounced in this reactionary response to their political, social and economic gains, Steinberg's book is well researched and of crucial importance in the current socio-political landscape."

Ethnic and Racial Studies - Denise N. Obinna

"Stephen Steinberg has done it again! With the wit, verve, and intellectual rigor that we have come to expect from him, Steinberg exposes the zeal with which conservatives (and their white liberal accomplices) worked to roll back the gains of the US civil rights movement. Counterrevolution paints a harrowing picture of the revanchist intellectual and political forces that coalesced in opposition to Black freedom and equality in the United States in the period between the 1960s and 2010s. The depth and breadth of Steinberg's scholarship will surely make the book essential reading for a new generation of scholars and activists fighting against racial oppression today."

CUNY Graduate Center - Jeff Maskovsky

"This is an important intervention in the post-Floyd national debate about why the problem of race in the republic has been so long-lasting."

author of Black Rights/White Wrongs - Charles W. Mills

"This is an important intervention in the post-Floyd national debate about why the problem of race in the republic has been so long-lasting."—Charles W. Mills, author of Black Rights/White Wrongs

"In this book, Stephen Steinberg concludes his incisive meditation on the race relations paradigm, the discipline of sociology, and what he now calls the 'frontlash' of the contemporary surge of the U.S. toward a revanchist anti-Black society. Steinberg accomplishes the rare feat of producing a third volume of a trilogy—Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy and Race Relations: A Critique—that raises the project to dazzling new heights. He does this by illuminating the depths to which contemporary U.S. racial ideology and policy have plummeted. At the core of Steinberg's analysis, he resurrects the unrealized possibilities of affirmative action to power a third Reconstruction by tracing its birth, murder, death, and transmutation into diversity."—Sundiata Cha-Jua, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Stephen Steinberg has done it again! With the wit, verve, and intellectual rigor that we have come to expect from him, Steinberg exposes the zeal with which conservatives (and their white liberal accomplices) worked to roll back the gains of the US civil rights movement. Counterrevolution paints a harrowing picture of the revanchist intellectual and political forces that coalesced in opposition to Black freedom and equality in the United States in the period between the 1960s and 2010s. The depth and breadth of Steinberg's scholarship will surely make the book essential reading for a new generation of scholars and activists fighting against racial oppression today."—Jeff Maskovsky, CUNY Graduate Center

"Steinberg's Counterrevolution is a harrowing and important read. Striking a cautionary tone, he warns of the dangers of ignoring the whittling down of hard-fought civil rights gains. As the rights of minorities are trounced in this reactionary response to their political, social and economic gains, Steinberg's book is well researched and of crucial importance in the current socio-political landscape."—Denise N. Obinna, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"We have needed this book. Stephen Steinberg has produced a brilliant overview of the decades-long campaign by business and the organized right to reverse the victories of the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.... What makes this book so valuable is the force of its argument about how the counter-revolution gains by moving relentlessly from one civil rights rollback to the next, culminating in the ongoing Republican campaign to limit voting rights, especially the voting rights of African Americans."—Frances Fox Piven, New Politics

From the Publisher

2021-11-30
A critical examination of the erosion of civil rights over the past few decades.

One of the veteran sociologist’s targets in his unsparing assessment is the bland phrase race relations. Here he quotes Charles Blow: “From the beginning, the racial dynamics in America have been about power, equality and access, or the lack thereof….So what are the relations here? It is a linguistic sidestep that avoids the true issue: anti-Black and anti-other white supremacy.” The better and more comprehensive term, he suggests, is racial oppression, which gets to the point of a power dynamic that privileges White supremacy over all. In that vein, Steinberg examines the steady emergence of the idea of a “model minority”—at first, Jews, most of whom arrived on these shores as impoverished immigrants and carved out a place in American society, and lately Asians, who, in excelling in business and academics, are held up as somehow different from Black Americans. Though certainly not treated without prejudice, they suffer less from the systemic racism that holds Black citizens back. Steinberg considers the dilatory, blame-the-victim effects of the 1965 Moynihan Report, much of which was written by Nathan Glazer, a sociologist who held by commission or omission that Blacks were the authors of their own problems of poverty and other hurdles that could instead be reasonably attributed to systemic racism. Responded one Black activist at the time, “we are sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended.” The White supremacism implicit in the report came to the fore in the Reagan years, disguised in terms such as states’ rights and limited government. It emerged in full fury during the Trump regime, which achieved disenfranchisement by suppressing the Black vote—a process that is ongoing in many states.

An alarming report on the state of civil rights today, which favors White supremacy over any other consideration.

Kirkus Reviews