Racism in the Neoliberal Era: A Meta History of Elite White Power
Racism in the Neoliberal Era explains how simple racial binaries like black/white are no longer sufficient to explain the persistence of racism, capitalism, and elite white power. The neoliberal era features the largest black middle class in US history and extreme racial marginalization. Hohle focuses on how the origins and expansion of neoliberalism depended on language or semiotic assemblage of white-private and black public. The language of neoliberalism explains how the white racial frame operates like a web of racial meanings that connect social groups with economic policy, geography, and police brutality. When America was racially segregated, elites consented to political pressure to develop and fund white-public institutions. The black civil rights movement eliminated legal barriers that prevented racial integration. In response to black civic inclusion, elite whites used a language of white-private/black-public to deregulate the Voting Rights Act and banking. They privatized neighborhoods, schools, and social welfare, creating markets around poverty. They oversaw the mass incarceration and systemic police brutality against people of color. Citizenship was recast as a privilege instead of a right. Neoliberalism is the result of the latest elite white strategy to maintain political and economic power.
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Randolph Hohle is an associate professor of sociology at Fredonia, SUNY. His previous books include Black Citizenship and Authenticity in the Civil Rights Movement (Routledge, 2013) and Race and the Origins of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2015).
"In Racism in the Neoliberal Era Randolph Hohle provides a well-researched and argued racism-centered analysis of the origin, growth, and consequences of American neoliberalism. Its insights are especially relevant in explaining the convergence of today's perfect storm of covert institutionalized racism, white nationalist politics, the control of all levels and branches of government by the economic elite, and rampant racial and economic inequality."
Noel A. Cazenave, University of Connecticut, USA and author of Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accomodative Language
"Randy Hohle traces the ways in which neoliberalism recast the culture of racism, allowing white elites to limit blacks' voting rights and access to social benefits, while reinforcing de facto segregation and subjecting blacks to random and lethal police violence. This book is timely and important."
Richard Lachmann, State University of New York at Albany, USA
"Randolph Hohle provides great insight into how elite white oligopoly capitalists (aka neoliberals) use white-racist framing to con white Americans into accepting large-scale austerity and privatization schemes (public = black/bad, private = white/good) that maintain or increase racial and class inequalities. Since the 1960s civil rights movement this white male elite has thereby schemed to weaken meaningful racial desegregation and firmly maintain their centuries-old control over US society."
Joe Feagin, Texas A&M University, USA and author of Racist America
"For those wondering how social divisiveness and wealth inequality have gotten so out of control in the U.S., Randolph Hohle's latest book provides a much needed explanation. Providing something of a revelation for all those interested in social problems and social justice, Hohle ties the abandonment of support for minorities, the poor, and the education of children to the hegemonic takeover of public policies by neoliberalism at all levels of the State. Hohle's connection between the decline of American democracy and Neoliberal social policy requires us all to pay attention before current social cleavages become irreversible."
Mark Gottdiener, University of Buffalo, USA
