ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the problems associated with the racial hierarchy and color line; reassess taken-for-granted understandings of whites and people of color. It illustrates weaknesses of the dominant and mainstream social structures, intellectual perspectives, and cultural practices. The book reviews how Eurocentrism continues to pollute much of social science and US society. It offers a critical take on society and human behavior, a position that challenges the often damaging mainstream understandings and narratives about people and the social. The book demonstrates the numerous serious fallacies and intellectual weaknesses of colorblindness and post-race/racism perspectives and of various class, culture, nationality, ethnicity, biosocial, and assimilationist perspectives that downplay or supplant a necessary focus on matters of systemic racism. It shows early developments of social sciences' misframing of racial matters and the systemically racist social contexts surrounding that development.
