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The Culture of Intolerance: Chauvinism, Class and Racism in the United States. By Mark Nathan Cohen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 320p. $27.50.
Tony Affigne, Providence College
For the most part, political science has held itself well back from the cutting edge of race theory. As a general rule, political scientists have adopted minimalist approaches to explicating the racial upheavals of recent decades. Perhaps we find it easier to squeeze "new" racial variables into familiar equations developed from earlier, whiter generations of data than to reconsider our basic assumptions. We have left most of the really hard thinking about the American scholar's own racial attitudes, and how these affect our work, to practitioners of the sister sciences, especially sociology, anthropology, and history. If greater knowledge and crosscultural understanding are the solution, then much of political science has been, the author of Culture of Intolerance might argue, part of the problem.
Many political scientists will thus want to, and should, read this engaging and well-crafted book by anthropologist Mark Nathan Cohen, an eminent scholar best known for histories of human health and the development of agriculture. Conversant in human prehistory and evolution, comparative culture, language, and social organization, Cohen synthesizes from these disparate fields an impressive argument against racism and for cultural relativism and tolerance. How, the author wonders, might our society overcome its profound cultural chauvinism, especially white racism, the peculiar and persistent prejudice that sets European and European colonial culture above all others?
In part, Cohen's book is a...