"I welcome this new edition of Oliver Cromwell Cox's brilliant work. Published amid Cold War repression and postwar racist violence, and kept in print by Monthly Review Press since, it is as fresh and urgent as ever. It stands not only as one of the most incisive materialist analyses of race and racism but as a true classic in the sociology of race.""--Robin D. G. Kelley, New York University" First published in 1948, this pioneering work investigates how racism began and why it remains a persistent problem in the United States, tracing racial inequality to the social and economic system that generates it. Race, the unexpurgated final section of "Caste, Class, and Race," makes a touchstone work accessible to a new generation. Two major contemporary black intellectuals, Adolph Reed and Cornel West, offer commentary on the study's lasting importance.