The Perennial Struggle

Book excerpt: The Perennial Struggle integrates the richness of insight the various social science perspectives offer to the study of ethnic and racial relations into a consistent viewpoint. The Perennial Struggle is about race, ethnic, and minority group relations and how they interact in group politics in the United States. Understanding these relationships is critical to understanding American society in general and American politics in particular. The United States is a nation of nations; it receives more immigrants to its shores by far than does any other nation of the world. The authors wrote this book to integrate the various perspectives of the social science disciplines into courses such as Race and Racism, Roots of American Racism, and Minority Group Politics in the United States. If American society is to avoid the woes of a Darfur, Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, or Rwanda, or even to prevent the development of separatist movements as in French-speaking Canada, we need to better understand the perennial struggle of ethnic relations and its impact on politics and policy. We need to understand the history, contribution, and special problems of particular and often exemplary minority groups in American society. In short, we need to understand the how and the why of their perennial struggle.