Who Is Antiracist?

George Yancey is Professor of Sociology at Baylor University. He is author of Who is White: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide, and co-author of Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach.Hayoung David Oh, MPH, is the Community Affiliate Research Coordinator at the Woodson Center in Washington, DC.

“Most studies of antiracists are small-sample, qualitative projects on committed activists. Yancey and Oh’s book flips this script to make a new contribution to the field. The authors have constructed an antiracist attitude scale using national representative survey data, correlating it with other political variables, with the potential to be used in any number of fruitful ways by antiracist scholars in the future. By framing antiracism as a cluster of political outlooks rather than as an activist identity, their work suggests that antiracism’s fusion with one side of a two-party political system in the United States may be limiting its reach Yancey and Oh provide valuable measurement tools to advance antiracist scholarship as the movement continues its inroads into popular culture.”-Eileen O’Brien, Professor of Sociology at Saint Leo University, and author of Whites Confront Racism: Antiracists and Their Paths to Action “With Who Is Antiracist? Yancey and Oh have provided a provocative and empirically informed description of the characteristics, political leanings, and social positions of individuals who can be identified as antiracists within the United States. Adopting a framework that is part sociology and part political science, Yancey and Oh have gifted academics, political actors, and social activists important perspectives on the intersection of antiracist attitudes and political ideology. Who Is Antiracist? is a timely and important reminder of the ongoing role of race and racism in American society and is essential reading across the various political, social, and racial divides that confront us.”-Alex L. Pieterse, Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Culture at Boston College, and coauthor of Measuring the Effects of Racism: Guidelines for the Assessment and Treatment of Race-Based Traumatic Stress Injury "[T]he book will be an important basis for engaging with the antiracist movement when it inevitably returns in one form or another during the next political cycle.... The book immediately brings rare clarity and insight into a topic that is routinely obscured by emotion and hyperbole.... Yancey and Oh have produced a vital contribution to the intersection of antiracism and political progressivism, and therefore, American race relations more broadly. This should be considered essential material for anyone-left, right, or center-who wishes to engage on this issue in the future for a more racially healthy society."-Law & Liberty