In this book, Stephen Steinberg concludes his incisive meditation on the race relations paradigm, the discipline of sociology, and what he now calls the 'frontlash' of the contemporary surge of the U.S. toward a revanchist anti-Black society. Steinberg accomplishes the rare feat of producing a third volume of a trilogy–Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy and Race Relations: A Critique–that raises the project to dazzling new heights. He does this by illuminating the depths to which contemporary U.S. racial ideology and policy have plummeted. At the core of Steinberg's analysis, he resurrects the unrealized possibilities of affirmative action to power a third Reconstruction by tracing its birth, murder, death, and transmutation into diversity.–Sundiata Cha-Jua "University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,"