On the surface, these two books on race could not be more dissimilar. Minority Report is a careful statistical analysis that digs deeply to address one specific question about democratic responsiveness. Twenty-First Century Color Lines contains a wide array of broader and more speculative essays on everything from politics to music and the arts. Minority Report is about what has happened—specifically aimed at understanding how policy views have affected policy outcomes. The focus of Twenty-First Century Color Lines is, as the title implies, on what will happen—namely, what the contours of America's racial divide will look like in the context of an increasingly diverse and multiracial population.

Nevertheless, a deeper appraisal of both books indicates that they have much in common. One commonality is quality. These are two excellent books that represent the cutting edge of research on race and ethnicity. John D. Griffin and Brian Newman's book is at the forefront because it addresses age-old questions about democracy and fairness in a novel, comprehensive, and convincing fashion. The edited volume engages new and different questions and in doing so offers an innovative research agenda and uncovers patterns that are critical to understanding of tomorrow's racial dynamics. In very different ways, reading either book will help you to understand how race “works” in this nation.

Twenty-First Century Color Lines is ambitious. Andrew Grant-Thomas and Gary Orfield set out to “jump start a second civil rights movement.” The editors do not quite accomplish that task in 300 pages of text, but they do a lot. By considering race in a range of novel ways, the chapters taken together present a fairly honest and rigorous inventory of the state of racial inequality in this country. These patterns will not immediately spark a new social movement but they do help to identify what some of the parameters of that movement could be. With few exceptions, the essays in this anthology represent original contributions. You learn new things rather than read well-known stories. If there is a theme to this eclectic mix, it is to highlight again and again the myriad ongoing racial disparities that shape this nation. As such, the volume is a good counterargument to those who would offer a celebratory narrative about the postracial nature of America's political and social structures.

As with any edited volume, the research is sometimes uneven. Particularly impressive are chapters by Grant-Thomas, Nilanjana Dasgupta, and Patricia Gurin and colleagues. One particularly compelling essay, “The Past as Racial Prologue?” by Grant-Thomas, carefully shows how past decisions and entrenched practices are maintaining an enduring and largely invariant racial hierarchy. The chapter by Nancy McArdle presents a treasure trove of data that should be especially helpful to newcomers to the field. Her goal—a well-achieved one—is to provide an efficient statistical summary of racial inequalities across a wide array of indicators. Dasgupta offers an insightful introduction to the burgeoning literature on implicit stereotyping. Researchers are making considerable progress in understanding the importance of unconscious bias, and this chapter not only distills those insights into readily understandable language but also argues for a new research agenda that could minimize those impacts. An excellent chapter by Grant-Thomas and John A. Powell attempts to show more concretely how structural racism works to hinder the opportunities of individual minorities. It is particularly effective at arguing and showing the jointly reinforcing effects of several different institutions. John Mollenkopf also contributes a highly informative overview of patterns of descriptive representation in New York and Los Angeles that contains interesting preliminary analysis of the dynamics of intergroup competition and coalition building in the electoral arena. Finally the chapter by Gurin and colleagues provides some sorely needed analysis of whether racial diversity is beneficial. By measuring the diversity of college experiences and then following college graduates well into adulthood, the authors convincingly demonstrate the positive, long-term impact of diversity. Political scientists, on the other hand, will likely find the methods and substantive subjects of the chapters on the racialization of the Bay Area Hip Hop underground and the role that arts and culture play in fostering racial understanding much less compelling. Chapters on Puerto Rican racism and transracial adoption are interesting but fairly narrow.

The only real flaw to the volume is that it is more descriptive than prescriptive. We learn a lot about what is wrong but learn very little about how to fix it. Emblematic of this is the Christina Gomez chapter on Latino identity and the ambiguous choices that Latinos face in identifying as white, black, or other. The chapter rightly notes that how Latinos choose and why they choose one racial identity over another have the potential to dramatically alter the dynamics of race in this nation. But after highlighting the importance of the decision, there is only limited analysis of that decision and, thus, little insight into how we should proceed.

Minority Report is impressive. This study by Griffin and Newman may focus only on one question but it is a very big question: Who wins and loses in American democracy? The goal is to see if the political arena responds to the interests of minorities as much as it does to the interests of whites. The question of responsiveness is not just a big question. It is a difficult one to address. Although countless studies have attempted to assess the influence of different groups in American politics, none has been able to offer anything close to a comprehensive evaluation of the relative influence of America's racial groups. This study comes amazingly close to offering just that. The two authors have managed to come up with a series of innovative and rigorous tests that get at the heart of responsiveness. We learn not whether one set of elites in one city responded to minority interests in one policy arena at one point in time. Instead, we learn or come very close to learning whether American democracy writ large is equally responsive to the combined interests of all whites and all minorities. Given the importance of the question and the compelling nature of the analysis, I would rank this book among the best on race politics in the last decade.

The first chapter lays the conceptual and theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book by defining political representation, offering three standards by which we might evaluate political equality, and reviewing what we already know about political equality. Chapter 3 then sets the stage for the ensuing empirical work by detailing how policy preferences differ across racial and ethnic groups. The bulk of the manuscript consists of a series of tests designed to identify how government responds to those different preferences. The analysis, at its heart, is fairly straightforward. In a variety of ways, the authors look to see if different measures of minority preferences are more or less highly correlated with government policy and congressional voting patterns than are similar measures of white preferences. The first test is the most basic and perhaps the most telling. In chapter 4, the authors examine how closely annual changes in federal government spending in different policy areas match up with aggregate white, African American, and Latino opinion. The conclusion, as many would suspect, is that the system advantages whites. When whites want government spending to increase or decrease, they are much more apt to get their way than are African Americans or Latinos.

Chapter 5 probes the link between group preferences and legislative behavior. The test here is to see if senators' and House members' voting records are more closely correlated with the ideology and issue positions of their white constituents than they are with the positions of their black or Latino constituents. This is, to my knowledge, the first test of the relative responsiveness of legislators to different racial constituents. Once again, the results indicate that white views are more likely than minority views to be translated into governmental action. Also in chapter 5, the authors show that the distance between individual constituent ideology and representative ideology (as measured by Nominate scores) is significantly greater for blacks and Latinos than it is for whites. Notably, this “proximity gap” is much greater across racial groups than it is across any other demographic characteristic. All told, the results suggest that members of Congress are about twice as responsive to individual whites' preferences as they are to individual black or Latino preferences.

In the next three chapters, the authors look for exceptions to the pattern with the hope of identifying ways to reduce inequality. The first and arguably the most important exception concerns issues that are especially salient to minority groups. On these issues (which include welfare, health care, and crime), federal spending and individual legislative behavior are driven as much or more by minority opinion than they are by white views. In essence, when the minority cares more about the issue than does the majority, representatives often side with the minority. Descriptive representation also narrows the racial gap—although that effect is largely because black and Latino representatives tend to be Democrats. Finally, Griffin and Newman assess how heightened political participation affects the political representation of minority groups. Unfortunately, although greater minority participation can increase responsiveness, the authors find that the rewards of voting are generally greater for whites. Each of these individual tests would say a lot about the relative standing of different racial groups in American democracy. Combined, they provide an almost definitive account of how equal our democracy really is.

As with any book, there are areas for possible improvement. In assessing responsiveness, one could argue that the authors do not pay enough attention to proportionality. It is one thing to show that changes in federal spending correlate more closely with average white opinion than with average black opinion when average white opinion incorporates 70 percent of all Americans. It is quite another to show that senators weigh an individual white constituent's views more heavily in their voting calculus than an individual black constituent's views. Given that most readers are likely to believe that a group's influence should be roughly proportional to its size, a proportionality test should probably have been the core test in the analysis. Griffin and Newman do not ignore proportionality, as many of their tests either implicitly or explicitly incorporate group size. But in some cases it is unclear if group size is being considered, and in others it is largely ignored. Another relatively minor issue is that in proceeding through each of the many tests of responsiveness, the authors tend to get bogged down in the details of each test, occasionally allowing the reader to lose sight of the big picture. Additionally, it is worth noting that the patterns in racial inequality that the authors reveal all occur during an era of conservative retrenchment. That does not refute any of the conclusions, but it is possible that responsiveness to nonwhites could be much greater in times of liberal expansion. Finally, although the authors do offer an impressive assessment of responsiveness in federal policymaking, a complete portrait of responsiveness would have to include at least some attention to state and local policy.

Both books make important contributions to the study of racial politics in the United States. At the same time, both contain gaps, leaving the reader wanting more. On both counts—what they teach us, and how they open up lines of further inquiry—these books deserve to be read.