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This book upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States—and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles—this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. The book shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The book emphasizes that Black Power's reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.

This book, now in its second edition, tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. In the late 1790s, Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, acquired an African slave named Doll. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom. The book vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century. Updated with a new preface and an appendix of key primary sources, this remains an essential book for students of Native American history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity in the United States.

This is an intellectual, political, and institutional history of scientific racist thought focused on the Carnegie Corporation’s antipoverty philanthropy with “poor whites” in South Africa (1927–1932). I trace the origins, analysis, and outcomes of the Carnegie Commission in apartheid law and in cultural and social organizations that synchronized Afrikaner Nationalism. I study the conditions that shaped the study and of how the study was used in building South African social science about race and poverty. This case study analyzes how a global racial order—“global whiteness”—working with the racial logic of white vulnerability, provided the conditions for the Carnegie Poor White Study. In discussing the theory of global whiteness, I demonstrate that white supremacy has been essential for constituting both epistemic knowledge in academic disciplines and for constituting nation-states. The influence of international philanthropy on the creation of a distinctly racial conception of citizenship and democracy in South Africa during the consolidation of grand apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism indicates a need for research on racial polities that foregrounds race in the making of international affairs. Waste of a White Skin addresses how non–South African philanthropic institutions were invested in making white identity and entrenching racialized citizenship and democracy. The Carnegie Corporation’s focus on “poor whites” expanded the politics of scientific racism and the idea of a civilizing mission that had South African society and social science as its beneficiaries. I extend our understanding of the history of apartheid to include pre-World War II U.S.-based racial philosophies and policies; I reveal how the racialization of poor whites functioned with other processes to establish “grand apartheid” in 1948; and I articulate a theory of global whiteness that emerges from the literatures on race in international relations and racial blackness and empire. Through this, I raise questions about how international debates on race affect domestic racial citizenship. I point to how a global racial regime—global whiteness—constitutes domestic racial policies and, in some ways, animates black consciousness. I also indicate that the supposed discontinuity of racial geography is, in fact, porous and nearly always permeable.