Discussions of complexity and change in matters of ethnoracial relations often obscure as much as they describe and illuminate. In part, this is so because such distinctions, racial ones in particular, are not now nor have they ever been fixed, static, and natural categories. They are instead malleable social constructions. In part, it is so because expressly ideological projects are typically embedded within the claims scholars make about ethnoracial patterns. Consider the assertion that hybridity and mixture are ending the relevance of race, or that global population flows, massive immigration, and “super-diversity” will, likewise, render notions of race passé. The trouble here is that the crossing of socially imposed lines of race and ethnicity, as well as contact among diverse peoples, has long characterized the human experience.

Generating new understandings of the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899) for sociology and social science more generally, this article posits that the urban analysis provided in the book demonstrates how interwoven cultural and economic factors undergird the social organization of urban communities more so than any pragmatic economic pattern or logic. It is the interwoven nature of these factors (defined in this article as the counterintuitive economic logics of the study) that have been insufficiently acknowledged in recent decades of social scientific urban studies research. Exploring the interwoven nature of cultural and economic factors in the sustenance of Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward, this article suggests that the agency of African Americans is a critical, yet undervalued, aspect of their urban living. This article situates W. E. B. Du Bois as the first of some later voices (mostly within urban ethnography) that offer a corrective and alternative to urban spatial conceptual frameworks that did not and do not fully account for the persistent influence of race and the agency of racial minorities on the landscape of American cities.

Since 1981, there has been a sea change in longstanding policies of jus soli, or birthright citizenship, reinforcing the global divide between affluent spaces of whiteness and impoverished spaces of nonwhiteness. I argue that these moves highlight the global system of citizenship as an increasingly consequential aspect of what Charles Mills terms the Racial Contract: the set of agreements, historically explicit and currently tacit, that divides the earth's peoples into full persons—Whites—and subpersons—nonwhites—such that the latter are constitutive outsiders to the political, moral, and epistemological norms that structure the White social world. Mills posits that the present phase of the Racial Contract disconnects present geographies of inequality from the violent history of the earlier phase that brought them into being, thereby moving them outside the realm of redress. I focus on formal citizenship as a central locus of such erasure, using the figuration of the undocumented mother in the controversy over U.S. birthright citizenship as a case study. I argue that the global regime of citizenship perpetuates White supremacy in two ways: first, through a Westphalian map of citizenship, and second, through gendered and raced neoliberal norms of citizenship. The alchemy between these two rationalities both entrenches and hides the violence of the Racial Contract. Building upon Mills' standpoint epistemology, I analyze arguments from both sides of a 1995 congressional hearing on birthright citizenship. I argue that the arguments opposing birthright citizenship exhibit what can be thought of as a White epistemology of citizenship, which relies upon a profound amnesia about the exclusionary and violent history of the global regime of citizenship.

Using previously untranslated Chinese sources, this article adds dimension and insight into the visits of W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois to the People's Republic of China in 1959 and 1963. After discussing Du Bois's earlier writings and visit to China in 1936, the article reveals the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) awareness of Du Bois's favorable commentary on the nation during the 1950s. Using articles from the People's Daily (Renmin ribao) and other Chinese sources, I argue that the CCP and the Du Boises gained mutual benefit from the visit outside of the “arranged reality” of such political tourism. The CCP gained increased legitimacy among African nations as a nation of color. Du Bois widened his famous dictum about the importance of the color line in the twentieth century to include Asians. In a preface to a 1959 Chinese translation of the Souls of Black Folk (published to commemorate his visit), Du Bois amended his argument about the color line to emphasize the international struggle of the working classes. In addition to discussion on W. E. B. Du Bois's writings about China following the 1959 visit, I focus on Shirley Graham Du Bois's interactions with the Chinese, their knowledge of her scholarship about Paul Robeson, the celebrated Black American singer, actor, and communist, and her politically sympathetic actions toward China. After the death of her husband, Graham Du Bois sustained involvement with China throughout the Cultural Revolution until her death in 1977 and interment in the Babaoshan Cemetery for Revolutionary Heroes in Beijing. Her burial fixed an appropriate identity with China. While her husband's grave site was in Ghana, an unfriendly military government controlled that nation and the United States was no longer her home country. China became her permanent home.

The question of who holds responsibility for racial uplift within African American communities is an enduring one. This paper investigates the understanding of racial obligation on the part of Black elite philanthropic donors. Through in-depth interviews with twenty elite donors, I investigate whether African American elite donors use philanthropic activity to realize their racial obligations by supporting Black nonprofit organizations and charitable causes that directly benefit Black people. I find that Black donors are deeply ambivalent about their position as members of a racial group that is marginalized while they are individually privileged because of their class position. They attempt to reconcile this ambivalence through their philanthropic giving. Donors at times embrace the importance of their racial identity as a principle that organizes their giving practices, but in other instances the very same donors reject race as a factor orienting how they think about their charity. Donors express this inconsistency through three different giving strategies. First, Black donors advocate for what they consider to be Black causes within mainstream organizations—initiatives they believe will directly and positively benefit Black people. Second, while they may support Black nonprofit organizations, they qualify the types of Black organizations worthy of their support. Third, donors reject race as an orienting principle altogether. Indeed, while there are few distinctive patterns among Black elite donors, no matter how they give they do so with an eye towards maintaining a mainstream sensibility that emphasizes integration, efficiency, and success. It is perhaps the diversity of contradictory strategies that poses the most fundamental challenge to the notion of community that permeates discussions of race and responsibility. I conclude by arguing that the ability to define when and how race matters to them is a particular privilege of the Black elite.

Using Black women's responses to same-race sexual assault, I demonstrate how scholars can use interpersonal violence to understand social processes and develop conceptual models. Specifically, I extend the concept of racial appraisal by shifting the focus from how indirect victims (e.g., family and friends) use race to appraise a traumatic event to how survivors themselves deploy race in the aftermath of rape. Relying on 111 interviews with Black women survivors in four cities, I analyze how race, gender, and class intersect and contour interpretations of sexual assault. I argue that African Americans in this study use racially inscribed cultural signifiers to root their understandings of rape within a racist social structure (i.e., a racial appraisal)—which they also perceive as sexist and, for some, classist—that encourages their silence about same-race sexual assault. African and Caribbean immigrants, however, often avoid the language of social structure in their rape accounts and use cultural references to distance themselves from African Americans. Last, I discuss the implications of my findings for Black feminist/intersectional theory.

In this paper, we examine how community-based organizations (CBOs) and their leaders negotiate and expand the boundaries of the communities they serve and represent. Drawing upon interviews with organizational leaders and documentary data from Asian American CBOs in the San Francisco Bay Area, we find that nearly all of the organizations in our sample engaged in cross-racial work, incorporating other racial groups into their programs, campaigns, and partnerships. However, leaders varied in how they understood this work as tied to maintaining or expanding their community of focus. The majority of the leaders in our sample discussed cross-racial work as a way to accommodate other racial groups while maintaining a focus on Asian Americans or Asian-ethnics. Other leaders included other racial groups, mainly Latinos and African Americans, in expanded missions and goals, broadening not only resources and collective action efforts, but also community boundaries through racial inclusion. We argue that pressures and incentives related to funding, shared interests, and organizational survival may encourage CBOs to engage in cross-racial work, but these factors do not necessarily sustain racial inclusion over time. Instead, how leaders identify and construct a sense of expanded group boundaries for the community that they serve and represent helps an organization to commit to racial inclusion.

This study examines how African Americans perceive and manage race and region as they migrate to the U.S. South—a region with a tenuous image of racial prejudice. The analysis is juxtaposed to literature that provides an inconsistent view of regional differences in prejudice. Some researchers argue that regional differences in levels of prejudice are now small, while other researchers argue that the South continues to be a place of much greater racial hostility. Guided by a spatial boundaries approach and using 127 narrative interviews with Black interregional migrants to Charlotte, North Carolina, results indicate that Black migrants focus less on levels of racial prejudice across regions and focus more on six dimensions of everyday racism they consider during migration. These dimensions include—the overtness/subtlety of prejudice, verbal and physical harassment, group economic opportunity, physical distance, racial symbols, and paternalism. Among these migrants, there is no consensus that the South is more or less racially hostile than other regions. They perceive most saliently that they are trading more subtle prejudice, higher levels of racial residential segregation, and greater constraints on Black economic opportunity in the North, for more overt prejudice, greater paternalism, and exposure to Confederate symbols in the South. Patterns also emerged in perceptions of regional boundaries based on class, motivation for moving, gender, and generation. Implications for theories of race and regionalism are discussed.

As people who cross racial boundaries in the family formation process, the experiences of interracial couples can actually reveal the nature of racial boundaries within and across societies. I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with eighty-seven respondents in interracial Black and White couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro to compare perceptions of public stigmatization by outsiders, a term I call “boundary-policing.” I find that couples in Los Angeles perceive gendered, Black individuals as perpetrators of this boundary-policing. In Rio de Janeiro, couples perceive regionalized and classed, White perpetrators. These findings suggest that in the United States and Brazil, racial boundaries are intertwined with class and gender boundaries to shape negotiation of boundary-policing in the two contexts. This analysis builds on previous studies of ethnoracial boundaries by showing how individuals reinforce and negotiate them through interpersonal relations. It demonstrates the similarities and differences in the negotiation and reinforcement of racial boundaries in the two sites.

Despite shared colonization histories between the United States and Latin America, research examining racial disparities in health in the United States has often neglected Latinos. Additionally, descendants from Latin America residing in the United States are often categorized under the pan-ethnic label of Hispanic or Latino. This categorization obscures the group's heterogeneity, which is illuminated by research showing consistent differences in health for the three largest segments of the Latino population—Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. We examine whether the patterns of infant mortality associated with race in the non-Latino population also follow for Latinos. We also examine whether we can attribute patterns of infant mortality between the three largest Latino sub-groups to a process we term segmented racialization. We find that race operates for Latinos the same way it does for the non-Latino population and that there seems to be some evidence to support our segmented racialization hypothesis. The results point to the need to abandon the practices of combining Latino sub-groups as well as ignoring the racial diversity within the Latino population in health research.

As the White populace in the United States moves toward numerical minority status by 2042, how might Whites respond to impending threat of losing their dominant group position? In particular, how will Whites react at selective, elite universities, where Asians are increasingly prominent and other non-Whites are maintaining or capturing a larger share of enrollments? Drawing on group position theory, I test White commitment to meritocracy as a public policy, using a survey-based experiment (599 California adult residents) to examine the importance grade point average should have in public university admissions. Whites decrease the importance that grade point average should have when Asian group threat is primed. However, White Californians increase the importance that grade point average should have when thinking about group threat from either Blacks or Blacks and Asians simultaneously. Ethnoracial outgroup threat shifts White support for meritocracy in different directions.

This interview is part of a larger project on the Black prophetic tradition and its impact on today's ongoing struggle for justice and equality. We are concerned with the special challenges facing Black public intellectuals and activists, particularly with the impediments deriving from their position as outsiders in society; we consider the philosophical and political voices that helped form their own thinking as well as the social conditions that shaped them; and we reflect on the role of religion in their lives and its specific function in the Black community.2

Some of the more influential research on race and education published in the last few decades comes from the work of John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham (Fordham 1988; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu 1978, 1987, 1991, 2003). In Ogbu's writing about the oppositional culture hypothesis, he argued that Black students frame their relationship to schooling through the lens of their historic marginalization in the United States. Out of their understanding of their systematic disenfranchisement, Ogbu suggested that “they not only generate theories [that] contradict dominant notions of status attainment and produce disillusionment about the instrumental value of school; but develop substantial distrust for school and its agents which then suppresses commitment to school norms” (Lewis et al., 2008, p. 259). Together, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) expanded on these ideas in their article on the “acting White” hypothesis suggesting that students not only disengage from school themselves, they also put pressure on their Black peers not to work hard in school lest they be accused of “acting White.” Together these two interconnected theories have gained substantial notoriety and have become part of the general commonsense about why Black students are not doing better in school—“the problem,” it is believed, is the academic disengagement or “oppositional culture” of African American students.

For the last decade, scholars have pondered how the changing ethnoracial demographics of the United States would influence the country's racial, social, political, cultural, and economic landscape. Latinos are now the country's largest ethnoracial minority and the 2012 election provided an indication of just how significant this group will be for shaping the future of the United States. Scholars of race in particular have speculated how the ethnic and racial diversity of Latinos will change existing U.S. racial dynamics with some arguing that the historical Black/White binary will remain intact with Latinos falling on one or the other side of the binary. Yet, other scholars suggest that the Black/White binary will shift to a Black/non-Black binary in which Blacks will remain at the bottom of the U.S. ethnoracial hierarchy while Asian Americans and Latinos will be grouped with Whites. Going even further, another set of scholars argues that the size of the Latino population and its more fluid racial boundaries will trigger a Latin-Americanization of U.S. race relations such that Whites will remain at the top of the hierarchy, with Blacks and a few other lower-socioeconomic-status (SES) minority groups at the bottom while there will be an intermediate group between, “the Honorary Whites,” that consists of mixed-race individuals and higher SES Asians and Latinos.