A Sociology of Race/Ethnicity Textbooks: Avoiding White Privilege, Ahistoricism, and Use of the Passive Voice

Despite the centrality of the study of race and ethnic relations within the discipline, few studies have analyzed the relative merits of race/ethnicity textbooks on the market today, nor how well they represent the current state of the research. This article addresses this problem through a content analysis of the five best-selling race/ethnicity textbooks in the field. The findings suggest that these sociology texts generally avoid the issue of white privilege, are often ahistorical, and usually adopt the use of the passive voice in accounting for racism. I argue that these problems not only fail to reflect recent developments in the sociology of race/ethnicity accurately, but they also interfere with a student's ability to understand race as a social construction and to place contemporary racial inequalities in an historical context. Additionally, by utilizing the passive voice in their discussion of racism in the United States, textbooks often fail to implicate the perpetrators of racism, generally whites, reinforcing the dominant ideology that American society reflects what Bonilla-Silva (2006 ) has termed "racism without racists."