Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Associate Professor of American Social and Cultural History at Syracuse University, received her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945, University of North Carolina Press (1993), winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Award, along with numerous essays and reviews.

Lasch-Quinn, has just published Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (W.W. Norton & Co.). In the book, Lasch-Quinn traces the evolution of racial discourse in the U.S from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to today. Her pointed and highly controversial analysis indicates that the wane of the civil rights movement and the more recent boom in psychotherapy have given the so-called "race experts" - therapists, social psychologists, diversity trainers, and educators - an opportunity to create a whole new lens through which Americans view racial matters. Lasch-Quinn charges that this new lens has helped prolong old racial tensions andpromises to foster new misunderstandings and anxieties.

  In Black Neighbors, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn analyzes this reluctance of the mainstream settlement house movement to extend its programs to African American communities, which, she argues, were assisted instead by a variety of alternative organizations.  For a full description of the book.  Please click on the Picture.