Race, Ethnicity, and the American Urban Mainstream

What role does racial or ethnic membership play in establishing Americans' rootedness in an enigmatic society? Throughout this book Doob grapples with that question in the setting of the urban mainstream and its varying access to opportunities. The work builds on C. Wright Mills's powerful principle declaring that a synthesis of history and biography manifests the sociological context shaping contemporary life. History, which stretches across time into the present, analyzes macrosociological forces root¬ing people into the social world. The historical material helps explain the book's focus on city life, where the most central of the society's developments and changes have originated. Many Americans, including some sociologists, view historical information skeptically, feeling it bears little clear and significant relationship to current realities and serves mainly as a distraction from all-important recent events. In this book Doob presents segments of histori¬cal data as essential ingredients for grasping modem racial and ethnic groups' life-shaping experiences. The biographical aspect of rootedness examines individuals' involvement in social systems, where one's race or ethnicity can be an important, even critical, factor in deter-mining access to such basic resources as housing, schooling, and jobs, and where location outside the mainstream can be highly depriving. In both the biographical and historical areas, Doob suspects that everyone has a chance to learn about others whose race- or ethnicity-related experiences and opportunities have differed from their own. Throughout the chap¬ters African Americans' consistently oppressive historical and biographical experience receives the most detailed attention. Sociological ideas guide a reader's perception of material. In a textbook some teachers might expect a heavier dose of sociological thought and analysis. However, while still maintaining effective explanation, Doob has presented only those select concepts and perspec¬tives that prove helpful in developing an intimate sense of how racial and ethnic member-ship affect people's lives. This approach has taken me on an exciting, complex journey that has arrived at provocative outcomes. The author seeks to engage the reader in a continuous interplay between conception and activity. With that in mind, he develops a narrative flow, featuring Sociological Illustrations as well as a steady stream of brief encounters and quotations, which weave through each chapter to display a detailed sense of participants' behavior. Such information helps promote an interactive classroom setting.