As the rest of the US watched, California voters banned public services for undocumented immigrants, repealed public affirmative action programs, and outlawed bilingual education, among other measures. This book reveals the controversial history of California's ballot measures over the years.
"With narrative fluency and deftness, constructed on a bedrock of prodigious archival research, HoSang's book provides a sorely needed genealogy of the 'color-blind consensus' that has come to define race and recode racism within US politics, law and public policy. This will be a book that lasts."-Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
"An important analysis of both the exact contours of white supremacy and the failures of electoral anti-racism."-George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
"Racial Propositions brilliantly documents the history of race in California's post-World War II ballot initiatives to show that nothing is what it seems when it comes to race and politics in America's ethnoracial frontier. Daniel HoSang provides readers with a sharply focused interdisciplinary lens though which to see how the language and politics of political liberalism veil what are ultimately racialized ballot initiatives. If California is a harbinger for the rest of the country, then HoSang's tour de force is required reading for anyone interested how the United States will negotiate diversity in the 21st century."-Tomás R. Jiménez, author of Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity
“An important book. . . . Effectively challenges narratives that depict white supremacy as static and doomed to eradication by progress.”
