Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Race and Family: A Structural Approach

The second edition of Race and Family maintains the book's distinctive feature-introducing students to key concepts through a structural lens-while featuring new material throughout. Race and Family focuses on structural factors impacting all families, such as demographic, economic, and historic trends, which illuminate the similarities and distinctions among and within racial and ethnic groups. After introductions to the study of race, ethnicity, and the family, the book explores various issues such as family structure, divorce, non-marital births, gender roles, racial identity formation, intergenerational roles, grandparenting, care of elders, and more. The book offers specific chapters on racial-ethnic groups including African American, Asian American, Latino American, Middle Eastern American, and Native American, while also discussing white families, multiracial families, the acculturation process, and more. Key updates to the second edition include recent census and survey data, a new chapter on Middle Eastern Americans, new material on multiracial and multicultural families, updated resources, and more. The second edition of Race and Family is a comprehensive introduction to race and family through a distinctive structural lens. The book provides structural factors, cross-cultural perspectives, and historical overviews that students can use to analyze the whys and ways of family across races and ethnicities. A complimentary test bank is available to adopters as a Word document or via the free program Respondus. Email textbooks@rowman.com for further details. Review In this updated edition of Race and Family, Roberta L. Coles provides readers with tools to analyze, contextualize, and more fully understand the experiences of families of color in the United States and does so with straightforward writing, engaging examples, and explanations that make sophisticated theoretical arguments accessible and clear.--Erin N. Winkler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Race and Family offers one of the most comprehensive explorations of family life I have encountered in my decades of teaching family courses. Professor Coles describes her book as providing an integrated structural approach to understanding families, and it succeeds in moving seamlessly across time, cultures, and nationalities to explain how historic and economic forces shape families. Using an engaging writing style, the book explores topics ranging from cross-national differences in gender relations to processes of acculturation among immigrant families. While the title Race and Family does aptly describe the book's focus, it almost belies the richness and scope of its contents.--Shirley A. Hill, University of Kansas A very useful book as a companion text for courses on race and ethnicity. . . . The chapters are easy to follow for undergraduate students.--Renxin Yang, Northern Michigan University Race and Family is a comprehensive introduction to the diverse literature on race, ethnicity, and culture as it relates to family. The book does a respectable job of guiding readers through the minefields created by historical and contemporary political controversies surrounding the ways that family is thought about in relationship to race, social class, culture, immigration, and gender.--Paul Rosenblatt, University of Minnesota About the Author Roberta L. Coles is professor of sociology at Marquette University. She specializes in the study of family and is the author of The Best Kept Secret: Single Black Fathers and coeditor of The Myth of the Missing Black Father.