This article examines the determinants and the substantive content of racial socialization strategies among African Americans. Existing studies have established that most Black parents socialize their children to race. However, studies have yet to determine whether assimilation trajectories and commitments to Black social heritage influence racial socialization outcomes. This article addresses this void within the context of a new, assimilation-based theory of adult Black identity—the investment in Blackness hypothesis. Findings from a national probability sample of African Americans suggest that there is a relationship between degree of assimilation into the mainstream and racial socialization strategies among parents. The implications of these findings are discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

The U.S. criminal justice system is defined and fueled by foundations and principles that uphold harmful power dynamics such as white supremacy, further destabilizing communities that face intersecting structural barriers. This paternalistic system is characterized by the imposition of punishments—including fees, fines, penalties, and deprivation of freedom and even life—that are meted out disproportionally to people of color and people living in poverty. More often than not, policymakers and justice practitioners fail to solicit the views, experiences, and expertise of community members and justice system-involved individuals, leading to policies and practices crafted under the auspices of promoting safety that undermine community stability instead. Consistent with Square One ’s charge to “reimagine how we create justice,” this paper describes approaches that communities around the country employ to craft, lead, and participate in their own public safety strategies. The paper will offer examples of crime prevention work, investment and divestment efforts, and policy reform initiatives developed and guided by people most likely to experience crime and the heavy hammer of the traditional justice system. This paper will explore the promises, strengths, and challenges associated with each approach, presenting a range of creative strategies for residents—in partnership with the broader community of advocates, activists, and researchers—to adapt, own, and implement.

While most Americans agree that government officials failed to act promptly to provide food, water, shelter, and other relief to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they disagree about the racial relevance of this negligence. Nevertheless, the unavoidable images of the storm's disproportionately high number of African American victims among those unable to flee a foretold disaster brought into view the specter of racial inequality. While most theorists and commentators have used race and poverty as the primary lenses through which to view Katrina's human toll, this paper utilizes linguistic rubrics and relative immigration status to address inequities globally suffered by people of African descent. In the case of American Blacks, our emphasis is on Blacks with ancestral ties to enslaved Africans, since those who suffered most in the wake of Katrina were not merely Black, but also direct descendants of American slaves of African origin. Framing the discussion in terms of linguistic ancestry, its relationship to slavery, and instances of (c)overt social and educational apartheid born of statutory racial segregation, I develop a Historical Hardship Index as an alternative way to advance equality in the period after the end of African slave trade. The proposed Historical Hardship Index can be applied—with slight regional modifications—to anyone, anywhere, without reference to race.

Although Hurricane Katrina generated a compassionate public response toward those affected, it did not lead to a serious discourse about the nature of poverty in America, nor did it lead policymakers to re-examine antipoverty policies. In this paper, we present data on long-run trends in the economic status of African Americans and Whites. We demonstrate that even though earnings are lower and poverty rates are higher for African Americans than for Whites, the economic experiences of poor Americans have been similar over the last three decades. The period since the early 1970s has been an era of slow growth in median earnings for all workers and falling real earnings for less-educated men. Although the economy has generated increasing economic hardship for less-educated workers, antipoverty policies have not taken up the slack. If the United States had in place a more comprehensive safety net, the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the poor would have been smaller than they were. We discuss a series of policies that address the broad poverty problem that persists. However, since these safety net reforms are not likely to be implemented, we also propose a “disaster-assistance safety net” that could better serve the poor in the aftermath of any future natural or other disaster.

While many sociological studies analyze the causes, conditions, and mechanisms perpetuating American racial inequality, the literature on how African Americans understand and explain these inequalities is less developed. Drawing on 150 interviews with middle-class and working-class African American men and women, this paper analyzes inductively how respondents define and conceptualize the most pressing obstacles facing their group when probed on this question. We find that middle- and working-class respondents alike identify the problem of racism as the most salient obstacle facing African Americans. Class differences appear with respect to what other obstacles are singled out as salient: while middle-class respondents focus on lack of racial solidarity among Blacks and economic problems (in this order), working-class respondents are more concerned with the fragility of the Black family followed by the lack of racial solidarity. This analysis discusses the relevance of considering how groups make sense of obstacles, and of racism and discrimination in particular, for the study of destigmatization and antiracist strategies of stigmatized minorities.

Barack Obama's election as the first Black president of the United States has stimulated much discussion about progress toward racial equality in the United States. Opinion surveys document that White Americans reliably perceive the rate of progress toward racial equality as greater than do Black Americans. We focus on two psychological factors that contribute to these diverging perceptions: (1) the tendency of White Americans and Black Americans to adopt different reference points to assess racial progress, and (2) the general tendency to frame social change as a zero-sum game in which Black Americans' gains entail losses for White Americans. We review research examining how these two factors contribute to racial polarization on the topic of progress toward equality. We also draw on excerpts from Barack Obama's speeches and writings to demonstrate that he often frames issues in ways that, our research suggests, has the potential to substantially bridge these racial divisions.

There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support for Black nationalism a function of time? Some scholars note that Black nationalism takes on the character of its material context and that it cannot be easily subsumed into a trans-historical ideology (Reed 2002; Robinson 2001). We indirectly test these hypotheses by examining the relationship between two components of Black nationalism—Black separatism and Pan-Africanism. To test these hypotheses, we analyze data from the 1979–1980 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA). Overall, we establish the determinants of support for Black separatism and Pan-Africanism while distinguishing these ideologies' similarities and differences.

Despite the long history of racial hostility, African Americans after 1990 began moving from the city of Detroit to the surrounding suburbs in large numbers. After World War II, metropolitan Detroit ranked with Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee for having the highest levels of racial residential segregation in the United States. Detroit’s suburbs apparently led the country in their strident opposition to integration. Today, segregation scores are moderate to low for Detroit’s entire suburban ring and for the larger suburbs. Suburban public schools are not highly segregated by race. This essay describes how this change has occurred and seeks to explain why there is a trend toward residential integration in the nation’s quintessential American Apartheid metropolis.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Claude, what exactly is “stereotype threat”? And why does it matter for the intellectual performance of Black youth at school?

Claude M. Steele: Stereotype threat is a very simple experience that everybody has, I believe, a couple times a day. It refers to being in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities—your age, your race, your gender—is relevant to you. You know then that you could be seen and treated in terms of that stereotype. And if you care about what you're doing, the prospect of being judged and treated this way can be upsetting, distracting, and can interfere with your functioning in the situation.

Whites’ sense of their racial vulnerability has been established as a key facet of U.S. post-civil rights racial ideology. This paper analyzes Whites’ victim claims attached to a historical era, via recent in-depth interviews with elder White Southerners, and argues that, through invoking civil rights-era racial vulnerabilities—mistreatment from social changes and African Americans—White Southerners downplay institutional racism, delegitimize the Civil Rights Movement, and construct White innocence and Black pathology. In contrast, younger Whites’ victim claims assert Whites as racially innocent and equitably vulnerable to racism, but these narratives of the racial past achieve similar ends. By constructing the civil rights era as dangerous and unjust, elder White Southerners lay claim to a lifelong nonracist identity and deny systemic racism. This analysis suggests that White threat and victim narratives are not products of a post-civil rights milieu, but rather are generated by Whites’ use of racial framing to construct a sense of self, other, and society.

This article focuses on the construction and reconfiguration of race in the U.S. South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much literature on race is designed to show that race is socially constructed, with the inference that race is merely a social construction. Thus, talk about race, which is not demonstrably grounded in human biology, must be akin to talk about unicorns. But so what? Does race being a social construction make any difference to the historical accounts we give of how racial practices work? This article suggests that it can if we focus on the process of construction itself, in a particular time and place, and ask how race was socially constructed. I trace how race was made, unmade, and remade in the years between 1865 and 1920. During the postemancipation era, Southern White elites constructed race as and through naturalized relations of dependence and independence. This construction was held in place and then undermined by the prevailing social order. I offer an account of the sharp increase in racist practices at the turn of the century, focused on the notion of mobility. I show how, in the decades since the war, mobility undermined race as it had been socially constructed.

Does elite rhetoric influence how Latinos view their relationship with African Americans? In this paper, we provide a systematic empirical assessment of the impact that elite messages have on Latino perceptions of economic and political commonality by drawing on two unique data sources: the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS) and a survey experiment embedded in the September 2010 Latino Decisions Tracking Poll (LDS). Our analysis reveals that the attitudinal effects of exposure to elite messages are strongly conditioned by one's political partisanship. To be more precise, we find that although exposure to elite messages leads Democrats to express more in common politically with African Americans, it fails to exert any significant influence among other groups and on different dependent variables. Specifically, the evidence presented here shows that reception of persuasive messages from like-minded political leaders contributes nothing to our understanding of how attitudes on economic commonality are formed and very little to our understanding of the source from which perceptions of political commonality arise among Republicans and Independents. In addition to making significant contributions to the literatures on commonality, multiracial coalitions and public opinion, these findings also make a strong case for further evaluating the role of political leadership in forging bonds of cooperation across racial lines.

The social category “people of color” has been born twice from the mixing of peoples in the United States. This article seeks to explain the category’s emergence and varied boundaries in the late 1700s and early 1800s, its decline in the mid-1800s, and its re-emergence and spread in a related meaning of enlarged scope since the 1970s. In both phases, “people of color” has served as a bridging identity across racial lines for those not included among whites; both times it has served primarily as a term of respect, not abuse. The category’s revival has rested on a contested people-of-color equation—the equating of other minorities with Black people—and has come in four stages: 1) the advent of a new configuration of governmentally recognized minorities in the 1960s and 1970s; 2) the adoption of “people of color” as a collective identity for those groups, initially among Black, progressive, and feminist activists; 3) the polarized diffusion of “people of color” in the media; and 4) the emergence among activists of second thoughts about the category “people of color” as insufficiently specific. The article concludes with a brief discussion of whether the traditional color line is being redrawn as a people-of-color line.

Using the praxis and persecution of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as a case study, this article analyzes the ways in which anticommunism became a tool of investigating, policing, discrediting, and ultimately curtailing what I call “Radical Black Peace Activism.” During the Cold War, the U.S. state apparatus treated this form of activism as an anti-American, foreign-inspired threat to national security attributable to the Communist “peace offensive.” Radical Black Peace Activists linked the end of global conflict, disarmament, and non-proliferation with antiracism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. They argued that progress and justice could only be realized through international cooperation and peaceful coexistence. In other words, they demanded a new world order that would displace the United States, and its relentless militarism, as the world’s police. The investigation, indictment, and defamation of W. E. B. Du Bois, which coincided with the intensification of the Korean War, is illustrative of how Radical Black Peace Activism was treated as a form of Soviet-backed subversion. Through anticommunism, the U.S. state apparatus deemed the use of anti-Black and antiradical repression imperative to its security, stability, and status as the global defender of freedom and democracy.

This paper examines Korean-Latino relations based on the results of my own research in New York City and review of other empirical studies conducted in New York and Los Angeles. Korean-Latino relations have been established mainly through the employment of Latino immigrants in Korean-owned stores. Since Korean immigrants' heavy dependence on very disadvantaged Latino workers involves labor exploitation, it has been a source of Korean-Latino conflicts. There have been many cases of picketing against Korean stores by Latino employees in both New York City and Los Angeles. But Korean-Latino business-related conflicts have been much less serious than Korean-Black business-related conflicts. Moreover, the relationships between Koreans and Latinos have some positive aspects. First, due to cultural similarities and mutual benefits derived from the employer-employee relationship, many Korean merchants maintain strong personal ties with Latino employees, informally helping them and often sponsoring their applications for green cards. Second, Korean ethnic organizations staffed by 1.5- and second-generation Koreans in Korean enclaves in Los Angeles and New York City have recently expanded their services to Latino immigrant workers and Latino children. In particular, the efforts of the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates in Los Angeles to protect Latino workers from exploitation by Korean merchants have greatly contributed to establishing cultural, social, and organizational linkages between the two communities.

This article explores grassroots practices of community safety and security in Brooklyn, New York through a framework that centers the abolitionist practices imbedded in Black neighborhood collective action. Literature on safety and security often conflates the two concepts, not considering how grounded applications of the two may produce different outcomes and approaches to community well-being. Additionally, we know little about how Black communities build safety and security from the ground up. And while academic scholarship on abolition provides a robust theoretical foundation, more examples of how communities could and do employ police abolition are needed. Utilizing archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that a crisis of police legitimacy compelled alternatives to formal policing in New York City during the urban crisis, or the postwar period of massive urban divestment and hyper-ghettoization. These efforts included masculinized security practices such as neighborhood patrols and protests, while community safety practices included forms of neighborhood sociality grounded in feminized and queer relationships of care and concern. These efforts, which critiqued institutional racism and neglect and emerged from the indigenous knowledge base and social networks of community members, provide considerations for recovering abolitionist practices in Black neighborhood collective action and implications for building alternatives to policing. This article contributes to literature on Black communities, collective action, and abolition by offering an intersectional analysis of the various ways Black social and political engagement centers on practices of safety and security and does not always fixate on conscripting a police response.

How do citizens interpret contentious symbols that pervade their community? And what downstream effects does state protection of these symbols have on how citizens of different backgrounds feel they belong in their community? We approach these questions through the lens of race and Confederate monuments in the American South. We rely on two original surveys to illustrate 1) the symbolic meanings Americans attach to these monuments and 2) how state protection of them impacts residents’ feelings of belonging. We find that perceptions of Confederate monuments vary by race: White U.S. residents are drastically less likely to perceive them as symbolic of racial injustice than are Black U.S. residents. Further, state protection of Confederate monuments leads to a diminished sense of belonging among Blacks, while leaving Whites unaffected. This research moves beyond scholarship examining simple support for or opposition toward contentious symbols, developing a deeper understanding of what meaning those symbols can hold for individuals and what their impacts are on individuals’ feelings of belonging and engagement in their communities.

A succession of policies aimed at inclusion and accommodation of racial and ethnic groups in the United States is tied together by scholars who assert that the last forty years witnessed a broad “Minority Rights Revolution.” Nevertheless, subnational policies addressing racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities vary greatly and hardly resemble a uniform orientation; this variation provides compelling reasons as well as an analytical opportunity to explore the relationship between policies considered part of the minority rights transformation. Using state civil rights policies from the 1960s as a proxy, we find that an egalitarian tradition within states consistently explains the variation in contemporary multicultural policies and policies regarding immigrant access to social welfare benefits.This research was funded in part by a grant from the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado. The authors would like to thank Andrew Thangasamy for his research assistance.