Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.

‘… Marx's book is the only systematic and detailed comparison of race and racism in all three countries yet to appear … his bold and provocative argument illuminates an important and previously neglected facet of the comparative history of race relations. He has brought the state into the discussion of how race is made in a way that will make it impossible to ignore in the future’.

Source: The New York Review