Monika Gosin’s The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles for Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami focuses on the perennial White-Black dialectic in the Miami Cuban, Anglo, and African American communities within Florida and broadly in the United States. Gosin echoes familiar themes of forced feeling of “otherness” in minority communities going back to luminaries including Frederick Douglas (1818–1895), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), Maya Angelou (1928–2014), and Cesar Chavez (1927–1993). Gosin’s well-sourced and thoroughly researched book is important because she not only uses an exemplary case study but also threads the past through the present and projects into the future. This work captures the manipulation by White power structures of what it is to be “American” to maintain the “otherness” of non-Whites and new immigrants. Arguably, this “otherness” stretches even further back to Hegel’s Eurocentric biases buttressed by his contemporaries, including Kant, Hume, and Rousseau, who carefully construct...
University of California Press