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Even though I recognize the value of using the mass media to teach sociological concepts and reveal racial biases, I caution against the use of classroom exercises that are developed solely in the context of whiteness studies. Overarching statements of white privilege mask complex race-class interactions generally and the mass media's stereotypical depictions of the white working class specifically. In this "conversation," I explain why the use of the concept white privilege in and of itself obfuscates more than it reveals complex race-class interactions today.

"Antiracist Education in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment" As a set of pedagogical, curricular, and organizational strategies, antiracist education claims to be the most progressive way today to understand race relations. Constructed from whiteness studies and the critique of colorblindness, its foundational core is located in approximately 160 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the past 15 years-identified through a comprehensive search of "Academic Premier Search, EBSCOMegaFile, Education Abstracts, JSTOR," and "SOCIndex." A critical assessment of these papers concludes that antiracist education is not a sociologically grounded, empirically based account of the significance of race in American society. Rather, it is a morally based educational reform movement that embodies the confessional and redemptive modes common in evangelical Protestantism. Inherently problematic, whether or not antiracist education achieves broader acceptance is open to debate.

The paper of authors, Harold Kerbo and L. Richard Della Fave on correlation between corporate linkage and control of the corporate economy is critiqued. Inspite of the paper's attempts to provide a clear correlation, the authors use of the study on voting rights to support a thesis of intercorporate control is unconvincing. The evidence which the authors evaluated is not new, therefore not relevant to the realities of corporate environments in the 1980s. Based on their analysis of the data, the authors made flawed conclusions. Studies that rely on multiple indicators of corporate control and multiple data sources usually come to the opposite conclusion of the paper, which stated that the most striking impression gained from a review of the data is how few families and individuals show up at all as having at least 0.2 percent of the stock votes in a corporation.

In this paper, I argue that the American sociology of racial and ethnic relations fails to make explicit the assumptions which define the nature of the state and its relationship to racial inequality, and that it accepts uncritically a liberal conception of the state. I identify a set of domain assumptions that are implicit in this conception and then raise several objections. Drawing upon structural theories of the state, I identify the domain assumptions of a conceptually more complex account of the relationship of the state to racial inequality and argue that they have several advantages in the abstract over a liberal account of the state. Although historically specific studies are required to test this alternative view—a difficult and problematic task—I conclude that the result may be a conceptually richer sociology of racial and ethnic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]