This paper examined the interface between “racial” and national identity from the perspective of two competing theoretical frameworks: the ideological asymmetry hypothesis and the thesis of Iberian Exceptionalism. In contrast to previous results found in the United States and Israel, use of survey data from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba showed some support for both theoretical positions. Consistent with the asymmetry thesis, there was strong and consistent evidence of racial hierarchy within all three Caribbean nations. However, contradicting the asymmetry hypothesis and more in line with the Iberian Exceptionalism perspective, there was a general tendency for all “races” to be equally attached to the nation in both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Somewhat unexpectedly, Cuban Blacks tended to be slightly more positively attached to the nation than Cuban Whites. These results suggest that the precise interface between racial and national identity will be acutely influenced by the specific socio-political context within each nation.

This article sets forth four modalities of the relationship between members of marginalized communities and the criminal justice system: subordination, consumption, resistance, and transformation. These modalities attempt to break out of traditional ways of thinking about community members’ formal roles in the system—defendants, witnesses, victims, judges, prosecutors, police officers, correctional officers, and the indeterminate but oft-invoked “community.” Instead, these modalities are fluid and situational. This article also calls for new research, scholarship, and advocacy that takes seriously how members of communities that the criminal legal system most deeply and directly affects engage in these fluid and situational modalities. Attention to the complexity of “community” is essential to creating lasting change in social systems of blame and punishment.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is considered one of the most prolific and brilliant scholars of our time. While his contributions to civil rights, sociology, history, African American studies, and urban studies are universally recognized, his legacy in the public health and epidemiology discourses is not as widely acknowledged by contemporary health researchers. His seminal work The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) and his report “The Health and Physique of the Negro American” (1906) may be considered early harbingers in general of public health—and more specifically, social epidemiology—research. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black and White differences in mortality and morbidity were largely attributed to notions of biological racial inferiority. Efforts by Du Bois to challenge these predominant notions resulted in the systematic empirical investigation of social factors contributing to Black health risk and health disparities. More than one hundred years after Du Bois's pioneering scholarship, racial/ethnic and social disparities remain a central challenge for public health and medical professionals. Given the persistence of health disparities and the increasing focus on neighborhood social and physical environments as fundamental factors contributing to health inequalities, this paper seeks to historically situate Du Bois's scholarship, describe the methodological and conceptual significance of his seminal studies, and articulate the importance of incorporating Du Bois's legacy to advance the next generation of racial/ethnic health inequality research.

Contemporary immigration is affecting U.S. society in many ways, particularly with respect to racial dynamics. Three aspects of these dynamics stand out: the conceptualization of race, the meaning of assimilation, and racial relations between groups. Although contemporary immigration, being largely non-White, is challenging U.S. society's entrenched conceptualization of race as revolving around a Black/White framework, this framework is not being rapidly overturned. Instead, immigrants are increasing social complexity by both adapting to the Black/White dichotomy and seeking alternatives to it through multiculturalism. The conceptualization of race is pivotally important because it determines the shape of assimilation, and, consistent with growing immigration-driven complexity, no one model of assimilation dominates the society. Instead, Anglo-conformity and multiculturalism are competing for preeminence. Blacks, because of U.S. society's failure to completely absorb them, helped to originate multiculturalism, but immigration is strengthening the model's appeal. Blacks and immigrants are adapting to U.S. society by utilizing both Anglo-conformity and multiculturalism. Immigration, increasingly, is also influencing race relations because of its volume and character. Even though Black/White conflict remains unresolved, future race relations will go beyond this nexus to incorporate other groups in complex interactions, revolving around the formation of coalitions and conflict situations as groups pursue particular interests.

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.

This paper provides an overview of the current debate among economists pertaining to the effects of recent immigration on the earnings and employment of native-born workers. Since much of this debate revolves around methodological differences in research design, we devote much of our effort to discussing the various strategies that researchers have used to isolate immigrant competition effects, and attempt to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy. Our overall assessment is that the central tendency of the research evidence suggests that recent immigration has had only a modest effect on the labor market prospects of native-born Americans. Some potential hypotheses that may explain this lack of a large impact are capital accumulation and the imperfect substitutability between natives and immigrants.

Understanding how different dimensions of race relate to the lived experiences of Latinos may shed light on the assimilation trajectories of different segments of the Latino population. Existing research suggests that racial appearance influences Latinos’ socioeconomic outcomes due to discrimination. However, researchers have not examined how Latinos’ perceived race relates to their acceptance of other racial/ethnic groups, thus revealing their agency in the assimilation process and how it is shaped by existing racial structures. Using a sample of over 6000 profiles collected from an internet dating website, this study finds that considering others’ classifications of race in addition to self-identifications changes our understanding of Latinos’ acceptance of other racial/ethnic groups as dates. Latinos who appear White are most likely to exclude Blacks and include Whites as possible dates while the opposite is true for those classified as Black. Latinos perceived as Latino fall somewhere in between those with a White versus Black racial phenotype in their acceptance of Blacks and Whites. These findings suggest that neither external classifications nor self-identifications of race alone can adequately assess the assimilation prospects of self-identified Latinos: those perceived as White may be assuming the position of Whites in the racial hierarchy, those perceived as Black may be assimilating into the bottom of the racial hierarchy along with African Americans, while those perceived as Latino may be maintaining an in-between status.

In recent years, there has been a surge of discussion, debate, and research on the topic of implicit bias. Implicit bias has become the go-to form of racial bias that many academics, practitioners, and policy makers have identified as important and timely to study (Eberhardt et al., 2004; Levinson and Smith, 2017). Interventions to address implicit racial bias in policing have been particularly popular (Fridell 2008). Arguably, combatting implicit racial bias presents itself as a tool for protecting civil rights. This essay examines the emergence of the implicit bias paradigm as a way to address racial bias in justice system outcomes. The first part provides an overview of implicit bias, including how it is defined, how it is measured, and how it impacts the justice system. The second part examines the term “implicit bias.” This section assesses implicit bias as a social problem and considers whether the label illuminates or obscures the reality of racial bias in the criminal justice system. The discussion considers whether “implicit bias” is viewed as a more appealing approach for dealing with racial bias because it does not assign racial blame. The third part considers the contours of the relationship between implicit bias and explicit bias. The discussion highlights the interconnectedness between the two forms of racial bias. Is the implicit bias approach a signal of racial retrenchment? The final section considers how elementary and secondary education could be used as a proactive strategy for addressing implicit racial bias.

Drawing on insights from Critical Race Theory and framing theory, as well as previous research, this study ties together and analyzes public opinions about two racialized and politicized sports-related issues: (1) the financial compensation of college athletes, and (2) athlete protests during the national anthem. Consequently, we highlight racial/ethnic identities, racial attitudes, and political identities as predictors of these public opinions. Data for our analyses come from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults who were surveyed just prior to the 2016 presidential election. Descriptive results suggest that well over half of U.S. adults opposed having the NCAA pay college athletes; also, about two-thirds of adults viewed athlete protests during the national anthem as unacceptable. Regression results reveal that Black and Latinx adults were more supportive of paying college athletes and athlete protests during the national anthem than White adults. Other people of color were also more likely than White adults to support paying college athletes. Racial attitudes such as a lack of recognition of racial/ethnic inequalities in education and support for Black Lives Matter also shaped public opinions about these issues in expected ways. Finally, we find that political identities were linked to public opinions about these issues even after accounting for racial/ethnic identities and racial attitudes. Overall, this study documents public opinions about these prominent sports-related issues just prior to the 2016 election of a President who particularly racialized and politicized sports issues. Even then, these sports-related issues had been similarly filtered through both a White racial frame that encourages colorblind racism and a counter frame that promotes antiracist activism. Altogether, the present study offers further evidence of how sports provide cultural terrain for individuals to enact and negotiate racialized and politicized views of sports and society and illustrates how these processes were reflected in public opinions in 2016.

Crime alerts are meant to raise community awareness and identify individual criminal suspects; they are not expected to affect attitudes and beliefs toward the social group to which an individual suspect belongs. However, psychological principles of learning, categorization, and memory predict that what is learned about an instance can color perception of an entire category. At the intersection of psychology, criminal justice, sociology, and media studies, two experiments were conducted to test the effect that providing individual racial identity in crime alerts has on racial group stereotypes. In Experiment 1, participants visualized four scenarios involving Black or White would-be criminals. Results revealed that in the case where Black would-be criminals were made salient in memory, participants demonstrated significantly more negative implicit stereotypes toward Blacks as a group compared with a condition in which White would-be criminals were more salient in memory. In Experiment 2, participants read a written description of a crime scene with a suspect who was either depicted as White or Black, and then imagined the suspect. On both implicit and explicit measures of group stereotypes obtained afterward, participants who read about a Black criminal reported and revealed more anti-Black/pro-White stereotypes than did those who read about a White criminal. Crime alerts that mention racial identity, whatever their benefit, come with the burden of shifting stereotypes of social groups. In this context, the value of racial identification in crime alerts warrants reconsideration.

This article explores the suffering and resilience of Black women who were impacted by Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005. It also explores the ways in which the pre-existing national discourse on poverty, race, and gender set the stage for victim blaming and the neglect of poor Black women and children after the storm. African American women in the Gulf Coast region are some of the poorest in the nation. Women in general are more vulnerable in times of natural disaster because they are the primary caretakers of the young and the old. These factors and others meant that poor Black women were among those most severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina. They also had minimal resources to cope with the disaster and its aftermath. However, instead of sympathy and support, some conservative pundits have sought to link the suffering caused by Katrina to the lack of patriarchal Black family structures, which they argue could have helped individuals survive in the crisis. Contrary to these stereotypes, many Black women have not only been resilient and self-reliant, but creative and heroic in the face of crisis. It is their stories that offer hope for the future of New Orleans and our nation.

Americans like to believe that “we are all in the same boat” when disaster strikes. Using a Du Boisian framework, this article provides a multivariate analysis of survey data from victims of Hurricane Katrina to determine whether there were racial differences in their perceptions about rescue and relief efforts. The data collected from survivors show that Blacks and Whites drew very different lessons from the tragedy. There was widespread agreement among Black survivors that the government's response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm's victims had been White. Whites, in contrast, were more likely to feel that the race of the victims did not make a difference in the government's response. Less than half of White victims, but more than three-quarters of Black victims, held that Hurricane Katrina pointed out persisting problems of racial inequality. There were, however, few racial differences in perceptions about the role of income in the aftermath of Katrina. Most Blacks and Whites agreed with the idea that low-income and middle-income victims of the hurricane received similar treatment. But when asked a similar question about the role of race, racial differences reemerged. Also, rather than this being a difference of opinion only between poor Blacks and middle-class Whites, these results suggest that there were also differences between the lowest-income Blacks and middle-income Blacks and perhaps an even larger difference between middle-income Blacks and middle-income Whites in terms of how they viewed the government's response. Income and other sociodemographic differences did not explain racial differences in perceptions about the role of race in the aftermath of the hurricane. The article concludes that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed the wide gulf between the nation's haves and have-nots as well as the nation's persistent racial divide.

Latino racial/ethnic intermarriage has grown over time, increases with each generation in the United States, and occurs most frequently with non-Hispanic Whites. This article answers the question: How does intermarriage change racial/ethnic consciousness for both partners? Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty intermarried Latinos and non-Hispanic Whites, I critique assimilation, Whiteness, and colorblindness theories, finding two predominant racial consciousness outcomes of intermarriage: race cognizance and racial colorblindness. First, intermarriage can enhance Whites’ understanding of race/ethnicity and racism, a phenomenon I call race cognizance. Second, intermarriage can produce colorblind discourse that focuses on similarity, yet in ways inconsistent with colorblind racism. Racial consciousness varies by ethnicity: most intermarried Whites reported race cognizance, an outcome unforeseen by traditional theories of integration, whereas Latinos more often espoused colorblindness. These understandings are used in different contexts: race cognizance is stimulated by the public domain, whereas colorblindness is evoked in private space. These findings demonstrate that racial consciousness is fluid, and influenced by intermarriage and ethnicity.

The increasing bi/multiracial1 community in the United States has generated much literature about racial identity and social psychological well-being. Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews with Black/White biracial Americans, this paper shifts the theoretical focus from identity and well-being to the conceptual development of how race shapes bi/multiracial Americans’ social interactions with both Whites and Blacks. The majority of participants reported interacting differently when in predominately White settings versus predominately Black settings. I offer the concept of “racial capital” to highlight the repertoire of racial resources (knowledge, experiences, meaning, and language) that biracial Americans use to negotiate racial boundaries in a highly racialized society. These findings reveal the continuing significance of racial boundaries in a population that is often celebrated as evidence of racial harmony in the United States.

Understanding racial dynamics and power relations in comparative, cross-spatial perspective is a topic which should have an extensive archive in the literature of comparative politics. Yet, the field of comparative racial politics remains at its infancy. While we have witnessed a resurgence in the study of race and ethnicity in the social sciences and humanities, much of the debate has been concerned with the meaning and relevance of the race concept, rather than its implementation. The authors believe comparative politics has a potentially distinctive and important contribution to make in the study of racial politics, as opposed to race relations, by foregrounding the role of politics in the social and political mobilization of various social groups premised upon the race concept, racial hierarchy, and distinction. This article provides a categorical review of the major trends and approaches to the comparative study of race in the social sciences, and provides an alternative conceptualization of racial politics.

The remarkable increase in immigration from Asia and Latin America requires a rethinking of multiracial analyses of neighborhood racial-composition preferences. This research addresses two interrelated questions: (1) since spatial mobility is so central to social mobility, how do recent Asian and Latino/a immigrants develop ideas about the racial and ethnic composition of the neighborhoods in which they want to live; and (2) what are the implications of processes of immigrant adaptation for the likely dynamics of race and ethnic relations in increasingly diverse communities? Guided by Massey's spatial assimilation model and previous studies of neighborhood racial-composition preferences, this research underscores the critical importance of immigration and assimilation as influences on preferences for same-race, White, and Black neighbors. Data are from the 1993–1994 Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality (N = 1921). Results point to the critical role of acculturation—the accumulation of time in the United States and English-language proficiency/use, as well as racial attitudes—in understanding what motivates preferences for these diverse groups, and to the complexities of accurately modeling preferences among largely foreign-born populations. Preferences for both same-race and White neighbors vary by the length of time that immigrants have accumulated in the United States and their ability to communicate effectively in English. English-language fluency is a particularly salient predictor of preferences among recent immigrants. Consistent with prior research on preferences, racial stereotypes stand out as particularly potent predictors of preferences; however, their influence is weakest among the most recent immigrants, coming to resemble those of the native-born with increasing years of U.S. residence.

Xenophobic narratives that describe Latinx immigrants as culturally deficient, threatening, and undeserving lawbreakers have received extensive scrutiny from the public and academics alike. However, few scholars have examined the positive narratives that surround this group, an especially important line of inquiry given the nature and prevalence of colorblind racial ideology today. In this paper, we consider how (seemingly) positive elite news media discourse contributes to the racialization of Latinx immigrants. We analyzed 1383 frames derived from newspaper articles appearing on the front page of The New York Times between 2001 and 2019. We found that even supportive articles contribute to the racialization of this group by subtly reinforcing boundaries between “us” and “them,” especially when compared to positive articles about non-Latinx immigrants. Specifically, positive newspaper articles portrayed Latinx immigrants as economically exploitable, as vulnerable but blameworthy, and as mostly illegal. We also found that positive newspaper articles portrayed both Latinx and non-Latinx immigrants as devoted to their families and traditional gender roles. However, we argue that this depiction reinforces a hierarchy based on White notions of deservingness. Our analysis shows the flexibility of colorblind discourse to prop up existing racial hierarchies in U.S. society and to “Other” racial and ethnic minorities.

Sociologists have not attempted to explain the causes of higher levels of perceived job insecurity among racial/ethnic minorities than those of Whites in privileged occupations. This study examines two possible explanations for this finding among White, African American, and Latino professionals and managers. The first emphasizes the discrimination-induced, structural marginality experienced by minorities in the workplace (the marginalized-worker perspective), and the second emphasizes learned dispositions—i.e., fatalism and mistrust—that are brought to the workplace (the dispositional perspective). Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and ordered probit regression analyses for both men and women, our findings provide greater support for the marginalized-worker perspective. Results reveal African Americans and Latino men and women have a greater fear of job loss than their White counterparts, regardless of their human capital credentials (e.g., education, work experience) and job/labor market advantages (e.g., job authority, job autonomy, unionized status, favorable market sector). Along these lines, these traditional, stratification-based predictors provide greater insulation from perceived job insecurity for Whites than racial/ethnic minorities. Less support is found for the dispositional perspective: one disposition—fatalism—is associated with greater fear of job loss for African American men and women compared to Whites.

As our nation and our neighborhoods increasingly diversify, we should understand how to sustain integrated communities that are equally beneficial for all residents. Though our policies encourage diversity as a theoretical social good, we actually know little about what happens on the ground in multiethnic neighborhoods. We conduct a comparative case study of the only two Boston neighborhoods to have maintained at least 10% representation of four racial and ethnic groups over the past two decades. Using survey data and ethnographic field observations, we examine residents’ experiences in these two consistently multiethnic, yet very different, neighborhoods. We find that neighborhood socioeconomic and racial inequality and disadvantage matter for residents’ access to neighborhood resources and constraints, and their perceptions of sense of community. Notably, in the highly unequal South End, Whites and homeowners have greater access to amenities and have higher perceptions of sense of community in comparison to racial and ethnic minorities and renters. Socioeconomic disadvantage matters in Fields Corner, as evidenced by lower overall perceptions of sense of community and greater exposure to safety concerns among all groups in this neighborhood compared to residents of the South End. In the end, we argue that having multiple groups simply sharing neighborhood space over a stable period is not enough to overcome the social problems associated with residential segregation and isolation. In order to support equitable neighborhood integration amid the changing face of diversity, we should take cues from “diverse by direction” neighborhood models that include active organization and coalition building among dissimilar racial and ethnic groups.

Aggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States’ largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its “Stop, Question and Frisk” policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process in the death world, Stop and Frisk transforms urban space from a resource to a source of danger; induces perceptual dysfunctions that stymie possibilities for Black engagement with the state and make blackness a metonym for crime and disorder; depletes economic and civic resources; and is embodied, by imprinting on the Black body, physically and mentally. Taken together this policing practice induces stress, fear and trauma, marks the Black body as the proper target for erasure by those who would restore the moral order of the polity, and sets Black lives on a trajectory of debility. Stop and Frisk, whatever its intent, is a necropolitical project. Though Achille Mbembe defined necropolitics as the sovereign determination of who lives and dies, we argue that necropolitical projects need not produce a dead body immediately to function. We extend Mbembe’s concept to include diffuse, environmental factors that scale up from individual encounters to Black communities. Though Foucault’s widely cited analysis sees the prison as central in the management and regulation of populations, we hold that Stop and Frisk has more in common with necropower than with biopower, producing dysfunctional bodies awaiting death.