Uneven Roads: An Introduction to U.S. Racial and Ethnic Politics provides comprehensive coverage of the political development of primary racial groups in the United States by exploring “when, why, and how race matters based on which groups…it differently advantages and disadvantages”. The authors explain in great detail the array of race- and ethnic-based barriers that have impeded various groups’ pathways toward full inclusion in the American polity. This is a groundbreaking textbook in its approach to racial and ethnic politics at both the micro- and macro-levels. It is suitable as a primary text for introductory and intermediate-level undergraduate courses, and as a secondary text in graduate courses on race and ethnic politics. It would also make a fine secondary text in more specific courses such as African-American politics, Latino/a politics, etc.

Uneven Roads is structured around two components. The first provides historical background by exploring the pathways toward political inclusion and influence taken by Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/as, Asian-Americans, and whites, respectively. As the title suggests, this section details the barriers that each group has encountered, and emphasizes that their roads to political inclusion and power are not equally straight or level. The second component provides an overview of policy questions and social issues such as voting rights, group identity, political behavior, education, criminal justice and immigration policies, diasporic politics and foreign affairs, and the intersections of race/ethnicity with class, gender, and sexual identity. Each issue is illustrated with examples for all of the groups noted above. This combination of historical, group-, and issue-based approaches to race and politics provides a necessary and uniquely holistic background to the evolution and dynamics of race, ethnicity, and politics in the United States. This approach is the book's key strength.

Another major strength of Uneven Roads is that it is extraordinarily informative, rich with content and explanations that are rarely offered in a single source, much less in such a coherent manner. This book is deeply historical, which helps counter common misperceptions that minority politics emerged out of a late-20th century vacuum, that diversity in the American polity is only a recent phenomenon, and that racial and ethnic groups are completely autonomous or antagonistic. This is one of those books that students of race and politics will refer to long after the class or writing project has ended.

Uneven Roads contains a wealth of classroom-friendly features such as chapter objectives, discussion questions throughout, and at the end of each chapter, key terms and a glossary. The authors provide ample illustrations, graphs, maps, photographs, and other images to reinforce key concepts and facts. These features are appropriately-placed throughout the text, and they all have very valuable content. The structure and organization of the book makes the narrative easy to follow, with informative section headings and subheadings. For a multi-authored textbook, the writing is consistently clear and engaging.

While Uneven Roads is wonderfully comprehensive and informative, it does skip or gloss over some important topics, and will be even stronger if the authors address these issues in future editions. For example, there was no discussion of post-racialism. Granted, the resurgence of overt white supremacy has shown that concept to be a fiction. Still, the authors missed several opportunities to deconstruct it as they deconstructed other myths about race, racism, color-blindness, and the like. In addition, the historical chapters covered racial and ethnic groups starting from the 1500s. Yet for whites, the book's account begins at 1780; this is rather curious. The chapter on Latino politics made little or no mention of the Chicano or Aztlán movements, the Brown Berets, or the Young Lords. The discussion of Asian-American politics left out their civil rights activism, including coalitions with the Black Panthers. While the discussions of mass incarceration were fairly thorough, there was minimal attention to the racist history of felon disenfranchisement laws, and of their implications for African-American voting and representation in particular. The coverage of voter identification laws was also somewhat minimal and diffuse. Given that more than 30 states have passed such laws in the last decade, the topic could merit its own section. In the discussion of persistent barriers to African-American voting, there was little or no mention either of successful voter mobilization efforts like early voting, same-day registration, and Sunday voting, or of restrictions on those provisions in some states. Moreover, that subheading's focus on the South was too narrow, and thus somewhat misleading. With respect to the sections on public policy, there was minimal discussion of school vouchers and charter schools. The sidebar discussion of the DREAM act was very informative, and could have used pointers from the main text. The section on race and LGBTQ politics offered no lead-up to the Supreme Court's decision extending 14th amendment protection to same-sex marriage. Finally, and quite notably, there was no mention of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Taken as a whole, nonetheless, the strengths of Uneven Roads far outweigh its drawbacks. This is a very welcome update and reconfiguration of texts such as Browning et al.’s Racial Politics in American Cities (Pearson 2002), McClain and Stewart's Can We All Get Along? (Westview 2017), and Walton and Smith's American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom (Routledge 2017). It is well worth repeating that one of this book's key strengths is its full historical foundation for the study of contemporary race, ethnicity, and politics. Moreover, its attention to public policies provides valuable insights on both the results and the processes of the American political system more broadly. Finally, it is reasonably priced for a textbook.

For all these reasons, I am eager to assign Uneven Roads in my course on African-American politics, and I strongly recommend it to those who teach similar courses.