Racial Propositions Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California

"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