Between Fear and Hope - by Andrew L Barlow (Paperback)

About the Book

This book provides a structural analysis of race, and a methodology for connecting global to national and local racial processes.

Book Synopsis

Globalization is transforming societies everywhere in paradoxical and contradictory ways. This book examines globalization's impact on race in the United States since the mid-1970s. On one hand, globalization is creating conditions that support intensified efforts to claim white privileges. But globalization also creates new possibilities for anti-racist movements, and thus the potential to undermine racial privileges. Globalization is thus transforming the terrain of all racial projects in the United States.

This book is an original contribution to the study of race. It provides a structural analysis of race, and a methodology for connecting global to national and local racial processes. Written in a lively and down to earth style, this book is a call to action in a time of fear and hope.

Review Quotes

"In this carefully and convincingly argued exposition Andrew Barlow demonstrates how market globalization is intensifying a new 'color-blind' racism. At the same time, social globalization of peoples promotes a countervailing antiracist consciousness and resistance that could profoundly reconfigure U.S. politics. Between Fear and Hope is a major contribution, a provocative social analysis that is at once sobering and hopeful." --Robert L. Allen, senior editor, The Black Scholar

"At a time when racism seems to be growing, Barlow both provides much-needed clarity of analysis and points the way toward greater racial justice and equality." --Howard Winant, director, Center for New Racial Studies, University of California Santa Barbara; author, The World Is A Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II

"It is the rare treatise that contributes to and advances a more fundamental understanding of race as a relationship to power and privilege. Andrew Barlow's magisterial Between Fear and Hope is just such a book-broad in scope and richly theoretical, yet always maintaining a balanced focus on the local and mundane ways in which class, race, and ethnicity interpenetrate and shape our daily lives." --Troy Duster, Emeritus Chancellor's Professor, University of California, Berkeley

"Between Fear and Hope gives us a cogent and insightful analysis of how globalization makes it harder to remedy the wrongs of racism in the contemporary United States while at the same time focusing our attention on strategies of fighting for racial justice in a globalized world. Barlow has provided a roadmap of where we have been and where we might go that is both readable and well-researched." --Peter Evans, University of California at Berkeley

"In this bleak world, however, there is a glimmer of hope for racial justice if immigrants, workers, and, yes, their middle-class allies, mobilize in solidarity to build a new civil rights, human rights, and labor movement. Recommended." --Choice Reviews

"An inspiration for activists in the movements for social justice. This book is a must-read for those seeking to understand not only the complex realities of globalization, race, and class, but also how to work for justice in these times." --Anamaria Loya, executive director, La Raza Centro Legal, San Francisco

"Barlow has written an engaging and provocative story, one that may be particularly liked by critics of globalization. It offers an original perspective on the local effects of globalization and provides good syntheses of the literatures on the topics of globalization, racism, and the U.S. Civil Rights movement." --Contemporary Sociology

Between Fear and Hope gives us a cogent and insightful analysis of how globalization makes it harder to remedy the wrongs of racism in the contemporary United States while at the same time focusing our attention on strategies of fighting for racial justice in a globalized world. Barlow has provided a roadmap of where we have been and where we might go that is both readable and well-researched.

An inspiration for activists in the movements for social justice. This book is a must-read for those seeking to understand not only the complex realities of globalization, race, and class, but also how to work for justice in these times.

At a time when racism seems to be growing, Barlow both provides much-needed clarity of analysis and points the way toward greater racial justice and equality.

Barlow has written an engaging and provocative story, one that may be particularly liked by critics of globalization. It offers an original perspective on the local effects of globalization and provides good syntheses of the literatures on the topics of globalization, racism, and the U.S. Civil Rights movement.

In this bleak world, however, there is a glimmer of hope for racial justice if immigrants, workers, and, yes, their middle-class allies, mobilize in solidarity to build a new civil rights, human rights, and labor movement. Recommended.

In this carefully and convincingly argued exposition Andrew Barlow demonstrates how market globalization is intensifying a new 'color-blind' racism. At the same time, social globalization of peoples promotes a countervailing antiracist consciousness and resistance that could profoundly reconfigure U.S. politics. Between Fear and Hope is a major contribution, a provocative social analysis that is at once sobering and hopeful.

It is the rare treatise that contributes to and advances a more fundamental understanding of race as a relationship to power and privilege. Andrew Barlow's magisterial Between Fear and Hope is just such a book-broad in scope and richly theoretical, yet always maintaining a balanced focus on the local and mundane ways in which class, race, and ethnicity interpenetrate and shape our daily lives.

About the Author

Andrew L. Barlow, a long-time civil rights activist, is visiting associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and professor of sociology at Diablo Valley College.