The House That Race Built is the response by some of this country's most admired intellectuals to the crisis of democracy represented by the recent, ominous shift toward a renewed white racial nationalism.

It is unified by a central argument that deserves to be at the heart of the national debate: that "race" and "racism" must be understood not just as referring to the relations between black and white Americans, but as constituting the central American dynamic by which a pervasive, antidemocratic social inequality is re-created, maintained, and justified to the detriment of all.

In a post-civil rights era of rapidly increasing economic and social apartheid, The House That Race Built makes us see how Americans' continuing delusory investments in the privileges of whiteness and the pathology of blackness uphold a social hierarchy that is destructive of democratic possibility. This book's analysis of race and racism extends to the complexities of within-the-group dynamics of black Americans.

How race is defined, and who gets to talk about it, determine how race and American whiteness will be understood and used: either to reconsolidate racial domination or to establish racial democracy.