In this insightful critique and intellectual history of the reigning “race relations” paradigm in American sociology, Stephen Steinberg forcefully challenges social scientists to examine the political consequences of our scholarship, as well as the failure of our analytical frameworks to explain the empirical world. The first two of the three chapters of the book are quite engaging in that they skillfully weave together a history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge production, and intellectual biographies of key figures in the sociological study of race.

The first chapter introduces us to the central puzzle animating the book. Steinberg takes us back to the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1963 at precisely the moment that the Civil Rights movement “reached its explosive climax” (p. 5). On the exact same day as the March on Washington, Everett Hughes, the president of the ASA, lamented in an address the failure of sociology to explain “the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society” (p. 10). For Steinberg, this “public confession of intellectual failure” (p. 10) was startling. But the bigger problem is that it was not startling enough for his discipline. Mainstream sociologists still clung to their intellectually outmoded and politically consequential “race relations” paradigm to explain the role of race in American society, leading the author to conclude that “the sorry end result is that a paradigm that was invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution continues as the reigning paradigm four decades after the Civil Rights Revolution” (p. 18). While overstating his case about that paradigm's influence in the social sciences today, the point is well taken about the inability of sociology, as well as the other social science disciplines, to explain the incredible events swirling around them. Explaining sociology's intellectual stasis “while Rome burned” (p. 8) takes up the rest of the book.

Steinberg has two complaints with his discipline, one political, the other intellectual. The political complaint is that sociology failed to “champion” civil rights and racial justice. Its lack of engagement in making the world more just, despite its Progressive-era origins and early social reformist impulses, deeply troubles him. The founding generation of sociologists were motivated by and engaged in politics to take on the pressing problems of inequality during our first Gilded Age. Even Albion Small, who founded the country's first Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, wrote in the American Journal of Sociology in 1896 that “scholars are shirkers unless they grapple with these problems” (p. 35). Yet because of intense pressure from university officials and a broader backlash against reform-oriented scholars in the academy, by the time Small hired Robert Ezra Parks a decade later, he had publicly eschewed the political ends of sociology for value-free and objective social science. This move had consequences, Steinberg argues, in that “a call to change the system is condemned as crossing the line from science into politics, but the obverse position—ratification of the status quo—is regarded as apolitical, faithful to the precept of ‘objectivity.’ Thus was the epistemological deck stacked in favor of the existing racial order” (p. 70).

The author's second intellectual complaint is equally compelling and insightful. Steinberg adeptly weaves through the century-long influence of “the intellectual legacy of the Chicago school of race relations” (p. 146) originated by Park, from its dominance in Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1996), through the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson, even to President William J. Clinton's “Race Initiative.” What was important about the evolutionary-oriented concept of “race relations” was that it fundamentally broke with and challenged the reigning Social Darwinist theories that explained racial difference and inequality as a result of immutable biological characteristics. Park, in contrast, provided a dynamic, mutable concept of race, arguably a key move toward what is now the dominant sociological understanding of race as a “social construction.” For this contribution, Park is rightly heralded as a “father” of race relations, and more broadly, the discipline of sociology. But for Steinberg, his race relations concept also had pernicious effects. According to the author, the so-called value-free scientific term race relations actually obscures systemic racial domination and inequality in U.S. institutions and society. Instead of focusing on the sources of unequal conditions between blacks and whites, the race relations framework, particularly its theoretical and methodological individualism, focused instead on changing whites' racial attitudes.

Steinberg unveils fascinating personal information about Robert Park that helps us understand how he arrived at his central conceptual contribution. For example, we learn about Park's preacademic career as a journalist and then as publicist and ghostwriter to influential African American political figure Booker T. Washington for nine years. For Steinberg, there is no doubt that Washington's political ideology as an “accomodationist,” “whose central feature was the avoidance of conflict and acceptance of the racial status quo” (p. 27), became ultimately expressed as Park's scientific theory of race relations.

There are two weaknesses of this book. First, the third chapter is only loosely tied to answering the animating puzzle of the book; it is more of a stand-alone critical essay on the inadequacies of social science models of immigrant assimilation. The second weakness of the book is that at moments, it oversimplifies what are seemingly contradictory or more complicated observations. For instance, what do we make of the fact that Park, as Steinberg tells us, produced several of the University of Chicago's first generation of black sociologists, all of whom had radically different and structuralist conceptions of race and racial inequality? While it is quite true that scholars like Oliver Cox were ignored, vilified during their careers, and relegated to second-class status within the academy, sociology's professional association has made official repentences by naming awards after many of these figures.

Despite those weaknesses and its focus on the concept of race relations in sociology, political scientists have much to learn from this deceptively short book. Our discipline's Progressive-era origins and trajectory are similar to sociology: rooted in often crude and racist assumptions about racial groups, exclusionary of nonwhite scholars, and exclusionary of issues of race in American politics for decades. Political science, too, relies on a “race relations” paradigm focused primarily on white racial attitudes to explain racially unjust outcomes. That paradigmatic dominance continues today, as arguably the most prominent and publishable work on race in political science is still primarily theoretically and methodologically individualist. As political science now grapples with attempts to understand the meaning of “race” in an Obama era, Steinberg's insightful book is an excellent source for learning from the failures of our sister discipline about this enduring issue in American politics.