Race Becomes Tomorrow

In Race Becomes Tomorrow Gerald M. Sider weaves together stories from his civil rights activism, his youth, and his experiences as an anthropologist to investigate the dynamic ways race has been constructed and lived in America since the 1960s. Tacking between past and present, Sider describes how political power, economic control, and racism inject chaos into the lives of ordinary people, especially African Americans, with surprising consequences. In addition to recounting his years working on voter registration in rural North Carolina, Sider makes connections between numerous issues, from sharecropping and deindustrialization to the recessions of the 1970s and 2008, the rise of migrant farm labor, and contemporary living-wage campaigns. Sider's stories—whether about cockroach races in immigrant homes, degrading labor conditions, or the claims and failures of police violence—provide numerous entry points into gaining a deeper understanding of how race and power both are and cannot be lived. They demonstrate that race is produced and exists in unpredictability, and that the transition from yesterday to tomorrow is anything but certain. 

"Sider's stories—whether about cockroach races in immigrant homes, degrading labor conditions or the claims and failures of police violence—provide numerous entry points into gaining a deeper understanding of how race and power both are and cannot be lived.", "... students said that Race Becomes Tomorrow significantly advanced their understanding of race in the United States. This is an important achievement. Undergraduates, graduate students, and seasoned scholars will find value in Race Becomes Tomorrow. Indeed, the book is appropriate for anyone interested in a vivid ethnographic account of what race does in the United States.", "While [Sider] claims that his book is for a new generation of activists, as someone who has done research for years on race formation in the United States I would add that it is a book for scholars as well.", "Anthropologists who regard their discipline as inseparable from radical politics will welcome this book.", “Race Becomes Tomorrow offers us tools for struggle built from the tactics that vulnerable populations have always used in order to make livable worlds for themselves.”

Gerald M. Sider is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and the author of Skin for Skin: Death and Life for Inuit and Innu, also published by Duke University Press.