Race: A Study in Social Dynamics

by Oliver Cromwell Cox

"I welcome this new edition of Oliver Cromwell Cox's brilliant work. Published amid Cold War repression and postwar racist violence, and kept in print by Monthly Review Press since, it is as fresh and urgent as ever. It stands not only as one of the most incisive materialist analyses of race and racism but as a true classic in the sociology of race."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, New York University

First published in 1948, this pioneering work investigates how racism began and why it remains a persistent problem in the United States, tracing racial inequality to the social and economic system that generates it.

Race, the unexpurgated final section of Caste, Class, and Race, makes a touchstone work accessible to a new generation. Two major contemporary black intellectuals, Adolph Reed and Cornel West, offer commentary on the study's lasting importance.

Genres: Race, History

1 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Oliver Cromwell Cox (1901–1974) was a Trinidadian-American sociologist noted for his early Marxist viewpoint on fascism. Cox was a Marxis who criticized capitalism and race in Foundations of Capitalism (1959), Capitalism and American Leadership (1962), Capitalism as a System (1964) and his last, Jewish Self-Interest and Black Pluralism (1974). Perhaps Cox's most profound and influential book was Caste, Class and Race, published in 1948. Also in 1948 Cox published Race: A Study in Social Dynamics.

In a scathing "Introduction" to The Black Anglo Saxons by Nathan Hare, Cox ridiculed what he regarded as a misguided approach to the study of race relations he called "The Black Bourgeoisie School" headed by E. Franklin Frazier. The title of Caste, Class and Race referred to the vigorous criticism of W. Lloyd Warner's caste conception of race in the USA.