Textbooks are explicitly racial texts that offer important insights into national memories of slavery and colonialism. The Dutch have long engaged in the social forgetting of slavery even as race served as an organizing principal during centuries of colonial domination of the Dutch West Indies and Suriname. While the Dutch have recently begun to address their history of enslavement, they have yet to sufficiently address how the discursive legacies of slavery continue to impact the lives of Afro-Dutch descendants of enslaved2 Africans and White Dutch in The Netherlands today. This paper uses qualitative content and discourse analytic methods to examine the depiction of slavery, The Netherlands’ role in the slave trade and enslavement, and the commemoration of slavery in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980 to address questions of whether textbooks feature scientific colonialism to perpetuate The Netherlands’ social forgetting of slavery in a nation that denies the existence of race even as racialized socioeconomic inequalities persist. A Eurocentric master narrative of racial Europeanization perpetuates Dutch social forgetting of slavery and scientific colonialism to both essentialize Afro-Dutch and position their nation squarely within Europe’s history of enslavement even while attempting to minimize their role within it. Findings have important implications for both The Netherlands and all nations with histories of enslavement as the discourses and histories presented in textbooks impact generations of students, who shape local and national policy regarding racial minorities, racial identities, and ideologies.

In recent decades the number of women and minorities elected to public office has increased significantly, prompting a wealth of studies examining the ways these different gender and racial identities shape elected officials’ appeals to constituents. However, much previous research focuses on representational differences among either men and women or Anglos and minorities, neglecting the intersection of race and gender. We seek to fill this void by examining differences in presentation styles among Latina and African American congresswomen, their Anglo female counterparts, and minority male peers. Relying on a detailed content analysis of the biographical pages available on U.S. Representatives’ websites, we conduct an exploratory examination of the differences in representatives’ presentation of self. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper identifies the unique ways minority congresswomen present themselves and issue positions to constituents. We conclude by considering the implications of our results for minority women holding and seeking public office.

Over the past four decades, increasingly punitive and enforcement-oriented U.S. immigration policies have been legitimized by a rhetoric of criminality that stigmatizes Latino immigrant workers and intensifies their exploitation. Simultaneously, there has been a sevenfold increase in the prison population in the United States, in which African Americans are eight times more likely to be jailed than Whites (Western 2006, p. 3). In this paper, I draw on scholarship in history and sociology, as well as my own anthropological research, to develop the argument that criminal justice policies and immigration policies together disempower low-wage U.S. labor and maintain categorical racial inequalities in a “postracial” United States. First, I review the historical role of race in U.S. immigration policy, and I consider the evidence for systemic racism in immigration enforcement in the contemporary period. Second, I discuss criminal legislation in the neoliberal era and examine the ways in which criminal legislation and immigration policies together disempower large segments of the U.S. workforce, satisfying employer demands for low cost and pliant labor. Finally, I argue that a political focus on immigrant workers' “illegality” masks the role of the state in (re)defining the legal status of low-wage workers and veils the ways in which punitive policies maintain historical racial and class inequalities.

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.

Dawson (1994) submits Black linked fate is a major predictor of Black political behavior. This theory conjectures that the experiences of African Americans with race and racial discrimination in the United States unify their personal interests under a rubric of interests that are best for the Black racial group. With increasing Black ethnic diversity in the United States, however, it becomes important to ascertain how African Americans perceive linkages across Black ethnic groups. This study examines African Americans' linkages with West Indian and African peoples in the United States, referred to here as diasporic linked fate. The study tests the influence of parent-child, intra-racial socialization messages on these linkages. Results suggest that, while a majority of African Americans acknowledge Black linked fate, they distinguish these linkages based on ethnicity and have more tenuous linkages with West Indians and Africans in the United States. While intra-racial socialization messages offer some import in explaining perceived differences in Black ethnic groups' living experiences, more frequent experiences with racial discrimination, and membership in a Black organization offer more import in explaining diasporic linked fate.

In Finding Oprah's Roots (2007), featuring Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s search for answers to questions about Black genealogy, Gates explains that one of Oprah's grandfathers stopped his formal schooling at an early age to work on a plantation so that he could help provide an education and opportunity for his sister instead. The grandfather did this in an attempt to protect his sister so that she could escape rape and other forms of gender oppression from both White men and women. Gates's explanation reflects both the way that gender, sexuality, and race defined life in the old South and their consequences for Black life, Black relationships, and Black destinies. This personal sacrifice, in defense of Black women, was commonplace—not at all particular to Oprah Winfrey's family. In fact, John Gwaltney collected several essays of Black men and women describing similar actions in his book Drylongso (1981).

The assessment of multiracial status in U.S. health research is fraught with challenges that limit our ability to enumerate and study this population. This paper reconceptualizes the assessment of multiracial status through the development of a model with three dimensions: mixed ancestry multiracial status, self-identified multiracial status, and socially assigned multiracial status. We present challenges to studying multiracial populations and provide recommendations for improving the assessment of multiracial status in health research.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the politics of race, poverty, and inequality to broad public view for the first time in a generation. But the storm and its aftermath also constituted a metaphor for the deep tension between color-blind and race-conscious models of politics that has long been one of the central and defining themes of U.S. politics. In this essay, I explore Hurricane Katrina as a window onto this fundamental dualism in U.S. political culture, its ambivalent embrace of both color blindness and race consciousness. In the storm's immediate aftermath, President George W. Bush became the unlikely mouthpiece of this dualism, and I examine his contradictory statements about race in the storm's wake and place them in historical context. I connect these presidential statements to the broader political context that shapes race policymaking in order to ask whether Katrina and the political response it provoked might generate a policy response that takes seriously the problem of racial inequality exposed by the storm. A brief account of a parallel historical example of race-conscious policy emerging from political conditions apparently dominated by color blindness, the emergence of affirmative action in employment in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizes the mixture of ideological and strategic, political factors that shape U.S. race politics and policy, and suggests a set of ideological and institutional conditions that may be necessary to generate such a dramatic change in policy direction. I conclude by drawing some lessons from this history for post-Katrina race politics.

In this paper I develop a race-centered, intersectional critique of concerted cultivation. First developed by Annette Lareau in Unequal Childhoods to describe the dominant middle-class cultural style of parenting, this powerful concept continues to shape scholarship on parenting and the social reproduction of social inequality through culture and class. I critique and reconstruct this concept based upon: 1) Existing research on racial identity and racial socialization, and racialized parenting techniques, and 2) Alternative readings of selected ethnographic material presented in Unequal Childhoods. First, I argue that concerted cultivation is a racialized parenting practice and that families negotiate and navigate a complex race- and-class-based social context of childrearing. Second, I present a re-reading of excerpts from Unequal Childhoods to show how families of color, and in particular Black families, cultivate racial knowledge and skills in their children. Third, I make a case for the larger sociological usefulness of a layered race and class analysis of parenting culture, and argue that such a framework adds more depth to core arguments made by Lareau. In the last section, I discuss the social tensions that exist within concerted cultivation and intensive parenting culture. I reflect on possible implications for normative parenting culture that matches well with neoliberal market rationality, exists within racial capitalism, but at the same time connects to anti-racist socialization and rejection of hegemonic cultural ideologies.

In recent decades, dramatic developments in genetics research have begun to transform not only the practice of medicine but also conceptions of the social world. In the media, in popular culture, and in everyday conversation, Americans routinely link genetics to individual behavior and social outcomes. At the same time, some social researchers contend that biological definitions of race have lost ground in the United States over the last fifty years. At the crossroads of two trends—on one hand, the post-World War II recoil from biological accounts of racial difference, and on the other, the growing admiration for the advances of genetic science—the American public’s conception of race is a phenomenon that merits greater attention from sociologists than it has received to date. However, survey data on racial attitudes has proven to be significantly affected by social desirability bias. While a number of studies have attempted to measure social desirability bias with regard to racial attitudes, most have focused on racial policy preferences rather than genetic accounts of racial inequality. We employ a list experiment to create an unobtrusive measure of support for a biologistic understanding of racial inequality. We show that one in five non-Black Americans attribute income inequality between Black and White people to unspecified genetic differences between the two groups. We also find that this number is substantially underestimated when using a direct question. The magnitude of social desirability effects varies, and is most pronounced among women, older people, and the highly-educated.

We examine mainstream U.S. print news depictions of the 2006 immigration policy debate. Using critical discourse analysis informed by cognitive metaphor theory, we analyze a substantial sample of mainstream U.S. print news reports in May 2006, at the height of national attention on the “Great May Day” demonstrations across the country. We compare it to a second sample of print news media articles from October 2006, at the time of the passage of the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Mainstream print media represented immigrants with a noteworthy balance between human and nonhuman language during the time of the Great May Day marches. However, the media did not sustain a balanced representation of immigrants in the ensuing months. The conceptual metaphor immigrant as criminal is predominant during both periods. We explore the implication of the language used to frame the immigration policy debate.

In this essay we argue that the ideology of colorblind justice has made resisting the retreat from public school desegregation a hard sell in postracial America. We do not believe that desegregation is the silver bullet for solving all the problems with public education. Nor do we believe that it alone can close the racial achievement gap. Yet there is convincing evidence regarding the potential benefits of desegregation and evidence on its negative consequences is weak. Therefore we believe that it is a policy still worth pursuing. Our hope is that by casting light on the anatomy of colorblind justice and its limits we can contribute to ongoing efforts to ensure that desegregation remains in the conversation about how to address the unfinished business of racial justice.

On 14 June 2014 the Council of the University of Cape Town (UCT) voted to change race-based affirmative action in student admissions. The Council was ratifying an earlier decision by the predominantly White University Senate. According to the new policy race would be considered as only one among several factors, with the greater emphasis now being economic disadvantage. This paper argues that the new emphasis on economic disadvantage is a reflection of a long-standing tendency among left-liberal White academics to downplay race and privilege economic factors in their analysis of disadvantage in South Africa. The arguments behind the decision were that (1) race is an unscientific concept that takes South Africa back to apartheid-era thinking, and (2) that race should be replaced by class or economic disadvantage. These arguments are based on the assumption that race is a recent product of eighteenth century racism, and therefore an immoral and illegitimate social concept.

Drawing on the non-biologistic approaches to race adopted by W. E. B. Du Bois, Tiyo Soga, Pixley ka Seme, S. E. K. Mqhayi, and Steve Biko, this paper argues that awareness of Black perspectives on race as a historical and cultural concept should have led to an appreciation of race as an integral part of people’s identities, particularly those of the Black students on campus. Instead of engaging with these Black intellectual traditions, White academics railroaded their decisions through the governing structures. This decision played a part in the emergence of the #RhodesMustFall movement at UCT.

This paper argues that South African sociology must place Black perspectives on race at the center of its curriculum. These perspectives have been expressed by Black writers since the emergence of a Black literary culture in the middle of the nineteenth century. These perspectives constitute what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a shared “text of Blackness” (Gates 2014, p. 140). This would provide a practical example of the decolonization of the curriculum demanded by students throughout the university system.

In this case study, I look at Benton Harbor, Michigan’s tenure under a state-appointed “emergency manager,” with extensive local powers replacing all local elected government, and a single imperative to balance the city’s budget. The law, ostensibly race-neutral, wound up targeting almost all of Michigan’s cities with significant Black population. The law ultimately disenfranchised half the state’s Black population but only two percent of Whites. This law invalidates a basic civil right and prerequisite for urban political theory: electoral democracy. Who holds power in the urban regime when the state takes over? Drawing on forty-four interviews, observations and archival research, I argue a White urban regime governs without elected representation in this majority-Black city. The ideological framing of emergency management as “neutral,” and Black politics as “corrupt” or “self-interested,” provides the logic to blame Black governance for structural disinvestment and White-led extraction.

Although there is an impressive body of research on the U.S. Congress, there has been limited discussion about the central role race plays in the organization of this political institution. While some scholars have documented Congress’ racist past, less is known about the present significance of race in the federal legislature. Throughout the day, African Americans routinely nod to one another in the halls of the Capitol, and consider the Black nod as a common cultural gesture. However, data from over sixty in-depth interviews suggest there is an additional layer of meaning to the Black nod in Congress. From the microlevel encounters, I observed and examined, I interpret the nod as more than a gesture that occurs in a matter of seconds between colleagues or even among perfect strangers in the halls of Congress. The Black nod encompasses and is shaped by labor organized along racial lines, a history of racial subordination, and powerful perceptions of race in the post-Civil-Rights era on the meso-, and macrolevels. Using this interpretive foundation, this article will show how the nod is an adaptive strategy of Black staffers that renders them visible in an environment where they feel socially invisible. The nod becomes an external expression of their racialized professional identity. I argue that the congressional workplace is a raced political institution and that the microlevel encounters I observed delineate and reproduce its racial boundaries. This article represents perhaps the first sociological study of Congress and provides an unprecedented view into its inner workings and the social dimensions that organize workplace relationships.

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, an article that drew explicitly on Black feminist criticism, and challenged three prevailing frameworks: 1) the male-centered nature of antiracist politics, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual Black men; 2) the White-centered nature of feminist theorizing, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women; and 3) the “single-axis”/sex or race-centered nature of antidiscrimination regimes, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women and Black men. Crenshaw demonstrated how people within the same social group (e.g., African Americans) are differentially vulnerable to discrimination as a result of other intersecting axes of disadvantage, such as gender, class, or sexual orientation.

This essay builds on that insight by articulating a performative conceptualization of race. It assumes that a judge is sympathetic to intersectionality and thus recognizes that Black women are often disadvantaged based on the intersection of their race and sex, among other social factors. This essay asks: How is that judge likely to respond to a case in which a firm promotes four Black women but not the fifth? The judge could conclude that there is no discrimination because the firm promoted four people (Black women) with the same intersectional identity as the fifth (a Black woman). We argue that this evidentiary backdrop should not preclude a finding of discrimination. It is plausible that our hypothetical firm utilized racially associated ways of being—performative criteria (self presentation, accent, demeanor, conformity, dress, and hair style)—to differentiate among and between the Black women. The firm might have drawn an intra-group, or intra-intersectional, line between the fifth Black women and the other four based on the view that the fifth Black woman is “too Black.” We describe the ease with which institutions can draw such lines and explain why doing so might constitute impermissible discrimination. Our aim is to broaden the conceptual terms upon which we frame both social categories and discrimination.

For over a century, scholars have traced higher levels of serious crime in minority compared to White neighborhoods to stark socioeconomic inequality. Yet, this research is largely cross-sectional and does not assess how ethnoracial differences in crime patterns evolve over time in response to shifting structural conditions. The new century witnessed substantial changes to the circumstances that undergird the ethnoracial divide in neighborhood crime as well as a national crime decline. How are the changing dynamics of urban inequality reinforcing or diminishing racial and ethnic disparities in neighborhood crime in the context of the “Great American Crime Decline”? We address this question by first identifying distinct paths of violent and property crime change between 1999 and 2013 for almost 2700 neighborhoods across eighteen cities. We then assess how initial and changing levels of disadvantage, housing instability, and demographics explain divergent crime trajectories within neighborhoods. We find that most neighborhoods have lower levels of homicide and burglary than fifteen years ago. However, homicide and burglary increased in some neighborhoods, and this trend is largely limited to Black neighborhoods. Disadvantage and the housing crisis are critical in accounting for the heightened risk of neighborhoods having increasing rather than decreasing crime trends. In contrast, immigration is linked with declining and stable trends in violent and property crime. Overall, results indicate a widening of the racial-spatial divide for the most marginalized communities in the United States.

The current popularity of “racial capitalism” in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti- and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself.

Response to Hurricane Katrina and public commentary by high-profile individuals has made race a focus in the media and brought racial inequality to the attention of people in the United States. Analyzing responses to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I find that, even after this very public event that brought race to the forefront in the U.S., people relied on the ideologies of meritocracy and color blindness to rationalize inequality. Findings of how the myth of meritocracy is utilized, along with how people argue against it, can be used to keep race at the forefront of the nation's attention while furthering discussions of inequality. The academic community is challenged to keep the voices of alternative ideologies in the spotlight and to use the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to create change.