The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement have brought ethnic and racial inequalities to the forefront of public conversation on both sides of the Atlantic. However, research shows that people routinely overestimate the progress made towards equality and underestimate disparities between racial and ethnic majority and minority groups. Common among the American public is a naive belief in equal opportunity that stands in sharp contrast to the reality of structural racial inequity. Across the Atlantic, Dutch people’s self-perception of a tolerant, progressive, and egalitarian society means that racism and discrimination are topics often avoided, rendering invisible the stigmatization of ethnic and racial minorities. The result is racism of omission: ethnic and racial disparities are minimized and attributed to factors other than discrimination, which leads to legitimize inequities and justify non-intervention. Against this background, we field an internationally comparative randomized survey experiment to study whether (willful) ignorance about racial and ethnic inequality can be addressed through the provision of information. We find that facts about ethnic and racial inequality, on the whole, (1) have the greatest impact on people’s perceptions of inequality as compared to their explanations of inequality and policy attitudes, (2) register most strongly with majority-group White participants as compared to participants from minority groups, (3) cut across partisan lines, and (4) effect belief change most consistently in the Netherlands, as compared to the United States. We make sense of these findings through the lens of how ‘shocking’ the information provided was to different groups of participants.

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court ended enforcement of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. As a result, over 3500 municipalities were released from the preclearance requirement to seek federal approval prior to enacting changes to elections. Despite the Court’s majority opinion that Section 5 was no longer needed, practices like enforcing strict voter ID requirements and last-minute polling place changes increased dramatically after Shelby County. However, one underexamined election change is changing municipal boundaries through annexations. Municipal annexations can weaken minority political representation in municipal elections if minority population shares decrease after annexation. Using difference-in-differences models, I analyze annexations for over 15,000 municipalities from 2007–2020 across all forty U.S. states with annexable land. I find no evidence that municipalities previously covered by Section 5 increased annexation activity or that they conducted more annexations that dilute Black and minority resident shares after Shelby County. Patterns of annexations pre-Shelby County suggest that the null finding can be explained by the limited effectiveness of Section 5 in preventing minority dilution through annexations when it was in place. This study underscores how municipal boundaries can be manipulated to perpetuate inequality and the limitations of federal legislation in preventing this practice.

While Republicans enjoyed unified control of the national government during the 1920s, scandals involving executive patronage and GOP state bosses in the South dogged the national party throughout the decade. The Republican Party in the South had been a set of “rotten boroughs” for decades, used by national politicians—especially presidents—for the sole purpose of controlling delegates at the Republican National Convention. This patronage-for-delegates arrangement was generally understood among political elites, but the murder-suicide involving a U.S. postmaster in Georgia in April 1928 brought the Southern GOP’s patronage practices to national light. This forced Republican leaders in an election year to call for a Senate investigation. Chaired by Sen. Smith W. Brookhart (R-IA), the committee investigation lasted for eighteen months, covered portions of two Republican presidential administrations, and showed how state GOP leaders in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas engaged in office selling. The fallout would be a thorn in the side of President Herbert Hoover, who tried to clean up the corrupt GOP organizations in the South—and build an electorally-viable Republican Party in the ex-Confederate states—but largely failed.

How was former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric crafted to appeal to a public that cross-cut class, racial, and ethnic boundaries? Significant scholarship has addressed the prevalence of racism and xenophobia in Trump’s language; nevertheless Trump was able to build a broad political coalition despite this derogatory speech. This article examines the ways in which Trump leverages producerist discourse by using race as a modality to construct a moral argument about the worthiness of the figure of the ‘maker’—the entrepreneurial protagonist of his rhetoric. Using a discourse analytic framework, it highlights how Trump uses stance to indirectly racialize and gender the subjects of his talk. The aim of this article is twofold. First, furthering scholarship on racialization and colorblind racism, it offers a discourse-based method for analyzing how an explicitly racist and exclusionary discourse can be interpreted by audiences as an inclusive one. Second, building on scholarship on Trump’s rhetoric, it shows how racialized, gendered, and anti-Semitic language is part of a discursive formation that makes the neoliberal ideal of producerism appealing to an expanding political coalition—paradoxically because it is a moralizing discourse that names outsiders. By analyzing stance-taking within discourses of ressentiment, it is possible to understand how racialized and gendered ideologies and anti-Semitism work together to simultaneously include and exclude non-White audiences.

For the past several years, affirmative action policies and their implementation have constituted a field of debate and academic research, in dialog with social movements and public policies carried out by various Latin American and Caribbean states, to mitigate persistent historical inequalities related to discrimination and racism. This article presents the results of the implementation of affirmative action policies for Afro-descendants in Uruguay in the workplace between 2014 and 2019, the first five years of implementation of Law No.19122 (which establishes a period of fifteen years in total for its validity). These results were obtained through interviews with key informants and through documentary analysis of the annual reports of the National Civil Service Office for the period under consideration.

During the 1930s and 1940s, W. E. B. Du Bois was not only interested in European colonialism in Africa, but he also approached the racial situation in the Americas, particularly Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba. In this article, I examine how Du Bois engaged strategically in a critique of racism in Cuba and the United States. I analyze how Du Bois discussed the Cuban color line as linked to colonial dispossession and explore the formation of the anti-colonial critique within global sociology. Du Bois’s letters, manuscripts, and field notes during his first visit to Cuba in 1941 reveal how, to a large extent, Du Bois shared the prevailing vision of Cuba as a society free from racism. Although Du Bois only partially captured how racism worked in Cuba, he constantly affirmed how the analysis of the Cuban color line implies dealing with the analysis of American imperialism. Thus, Du Bois’s approach to Cuba was fundamental in two senses. First, it led him to consider the contradictions between cultural integration and social and economic equality in a setting other than the United States. Second, Du Bois developed the fundamental place assigned to the critique of U.S. imperialism within global sociology. At the same time, Du Bois’s connection with Cuba elaborates the understanding of Du Bois’s global sociology.

Different aspects of the African American experience during World War One have been covered since the release in 1974 of Florette Henri’s and Arthur E. Barbeau’s The Unknown Soldiers: African American Troops in World War I. All these studies concur in their assumptions that World War One opened up a new quest for full citizenships and galvanized soldiers and officers alike. A new era started right in the middle of the conflict fueling African American units with hope of change. World War One turned into the matrix for a new form of militancy. However, perhaps World War One did not only trigger a new form of militancy among African Americans. Something else might have snapped in African American (and perhaps African) leaders of the time. What if World War One had nurtured the awakening of a “colored manifest destiny”?

Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” has yet to receive a critical analysis congruent to the ethos of Black Studies, which impels us to contextualize struggles over knowledge formation as part of struggles for, against, and over Black community. In this article, I situate the early Patterson not only within an imperial academy but also within its contested Black spaces of post-emancipation independence. I demonstrate how Patterson’s intellectual path was shaped by his interactions with the Rastafari movement around the cusp of Jamaica’s independence. But I also argue that in his evaluation of the movement Patterson denuded Rastafari of reason. Examining the same concerns of Patterson but through Rastafari reasoning demonstrates that his concept of “social death” might be problematic in some important ways to the purposes of Black Studies.

In this article, I argue that Du Bois’s Japan—despite displaying his myopic failure to critique non-Western imperialism—served as a potential model for his reimagining transnational democratic leadership beyond Western-centric models and their legacies of White supremacy and democratic despotism. Du Bois’s reflections from the 1890s to the 1960s generally demonstrate a sustained, seven decade-long fluid commitment to realizing a vision of transnational leadership that was accountable to the democratic masses, whether in Asia, Africa, the United States, or elsewhere. Such reflections hold importance now (even as they did in Du Bois’s time) as we continue to grapple with the legacies of Western “democratic” dominance, especially in international institutions designed to facilitate global governance.