Performing Racial Uplift
Did you watch last night's Grammy Awards? This week's review highlights the work of Black activist and music teacher E. Azalia Hackley and the power of “musical social uplift.”
Posted on in Review of the Week
Front of the House, Back of the House
Dining out this holiday weekend? Take a look at the dynamics, interactions, and inequalities of the restaurant world
Posted on July 5, 2021 in Review of the Week
Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers
Wilson, Eli Revelle Yano. New York University, 2020
240p bibl index, 9781479800612 $89.00, 9781479800629 $28.00, 9781479800667
This ethnographic analysis of restaurant work brilliantly highlights the micro-interactions and hierarchies in between and within the front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house restaurant jobs, which produce and reinforce systemic racial inequalities. Using his keen lens of participant observation and his powerful writing style, Wilson (Univ. of New Mexico) takes readers into the world of high-end dining in Los Angeles. He shares the often-unnoticed, taken-for-granted ways that managers, customers, and even workers themselves sort workers into different and unequal jobs rooted in systems of inequality and socially coded expectations that advantage some and disadvantage others. This book is a must read for students and scholars who are interested in the racialized coding of labor in US workplaces, and will be a seminal text for both the sociology of work and ethnographic studies.
Summing Up: Essential. All levels.
Reviewer: M. Gatta, CUNY-Guttman
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Latin American & Latina/o Studies
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Sociology
Choice Issue: Sep 2021
Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of Social & Behavioral Sciences titles:
- Lost and Found: Young Fathers in the Age of Unwed Parenthood
- The Arc of Love: How Our Romantic Lives Change over Time
- Obstruction
- Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis
- Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
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