Within the last eighteen months we have seen both the Katrina disaster and the Obama candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination for president reshape the political landscape within the United States. Equally important, for our analytical purposes, both phenomena are strong indicators of the evolving nature of the American racial order. The Obama candidacy points to important changes in the racial terrain within the United States. His candidacy highlights the more tolerant nature of public racial discourse in the United States—it was not very long ago when a Black candidate for president was considered unelectable. Obama's candidacy also highlights how immigration from non-European countries has fundamentally reshaped the racial landscape. Obama is, of course, not the “traditional” Black candidate, as his African heritage is due to recent immigration, not the slave trade. Relatedly, his candidacy also highlights the evolving nature of, and contestation over, racial categories. Over the past decade we have seen similar processes transforming conceptualizations/categories such as Hispanic, Latino/a, and Asian American. With even more recent waves of immigration from Africa and the African diaspora, we are now seeing the category Black under heavy contestation—which was brought to the (White) public eye as a result of the furor over whether Obama is “Black” enough to garner African American support and whether (as Senator Joseph Biden implied) part of Obama's crossover appeal is the perceived absence of a “tainted” African American cultural heritage. The Obama candidacy is emblematic of one type of change that marks the American racial landscape.

White Americans have long resisted the idea of reparations to the descendants of slaves. We examine the psychological basis of such resistance, primarily testing the possibility that resistance may be a function of Whites' perception of the ongoing cost of being Black. White participants (n = 958) across twelve independent samples (varying in age, student status, and geographic location) were asked variations of the question: How much should you be paid to continue to live the remainder of your life as a Black person? Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost/White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations. Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black. The implications of our findings for color-blind and multiculturalist conceptual approaches are discussed.This work was facilitated by a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. In addition, we are greatly indebted to Hal Arkes for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Major questions remain about the extent and political significance of White racial attitudes. In this paper, we examine an alternative source of data on racial attitudes—actual voting on the purely symbolic repeal of antimiscegenation referenda. By applying cross-level (ecological) inference methods to this unique data, we find, surprisingly, that White voting behavior differs dramatically from what would be predicted based on previous survey research on public and private attitudes.

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.

How do White members of Black-White interracial families negotiate the meanings of race, and particularly Whiteness? Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness, this article argues that interracial intimacy is a microlevel political site where White people can acquire a critical analytical lens that we conceptualize as racial literacy. This article fills a gap in the empirical and theoretical literature on race and Whiteness by including gay, lesbian, and heterosexual families on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects involving one hundred and twenty-one interracial families in the United Kingdom and the eastern United States, we provide an analysis of how White people learn to translate racial codes, decipher racial structures, and manage the racial climate in their communities. We draw on “racial consciousness” interviews conducted with one hundred and one heterosexual families and twenty gay and lesbian families to present seven portraits that illuminate three dimensions of racial literacy: double consciousness, negotiation of local racial meanings, and seeing routine forms of everyday racism.We would like to thank Kathleen Blee, Maxine Leeds Craig, Charles Gallagher, Caroline Knowles, Yaba Amgborale Blay, Joan Grassbaugh Forry, Kaila Adia Story, and two anonymous reviewers at the Du Bois Review for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Winddance Twine also benefited from the comments of the audiences in the Sociology Seminar series at the City University of London, Cambridge University, and the University of Manchester. The title of this essay is taken from John Hartigan, Jr.'s (1997, 1999) provocative notion of a racial gap: a chasm across which everyday experiences of Whites “on the ground” map imperfectly onto a cohesive and unifying concept of Whiteness (Frankenberg 1997).

Using the critical tools of social science, W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the White supremacism of his era. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he presented his views on social inquiry in various programmatic pieces (e.g., “The Study of the Negro Problems” and “The Atlanta Conferences”), all the while conducting empirical research on the conditions and experiences of African Americans. This essay examines the ways in which Du Bois's programmatic statements were elaborated in his early works of social science, notably: his goal of scientific truth, the specificity of his research scope, and the research topics for investigation. Three of Du Bois's projects—The Philadelphia Negro; The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia; and the Atlanta University Publications—are detailed. In addition, this essay derives several insights from Du Bois that address issues common to debates in the philosophy of social science, such as the controversies over researcher neutrality and the rigor of politically engaged scholarship.

W. E. B. Du Bois once remarked that “It was in Germany that my first awakening to social reform began” (Aptheker 1982, p. 275). This essay examines the intellectual impact of Du Bois's voyage to Berlin from 1892 to 1894. His acquisition of empirical social research methods under the tutelage of German historical economists, particularly Gustav von Schmoller, armed him with the intellectual and methodological tools he needed in his effort to attack pervasive biological determinist theories in the United States. Using empirical techniques grounded in a “system of ethics” as his conceptual guideposts, Du Bois analyzed race as not a biological but a social phenomenon. To be sure, this was no easy task. He was also a “race man,” who, loyal to his moral commitment to building a program of racial uplift, sought legitimacy as a social scientist from his fellow American sociologists, who summarily ignored his work. Struggling to serve his roles as both scientist and race man, Du Bois functioned within an intellectual space of double consciousness, constantly vacillating between two communities and two voices. In the end, Du Bois would successfully bring the scientific method to the race question, using inductive methods in his sociological studies on the African American experience. This approach made possible his seminal work The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and, subsequently, his research at Atlanta University. In the final analysis, his empirical research stood its ground, successfully advancing a new paradigm for examining race based on the idea that the putative racial hierarchy, theoretically grounded in biological determinism, was nothing more than a social artifact buttressed by racism. He further demonstrated how the economic disparity between Whites and Blacks functioned as the prime catalyst for “a plexus of social problems” that plagued African American life (Du Bois 1898, p. 14). His conclusions were a radical departure from the work of many American sociologists, many of whom were sympathetic to social Darwinism—his most formidable challenge.This essay would not have been conceived without the steady support and constant pushing of my dear friends and colleagues, all of whom have read or heard this paper at various stages: Anne Harrington, Robert Brain, Stephen C. Ferguson, Fanon Che Wilkins, Craig Koslofsky, Matti Bunzl, Peter Fritzsche, Frederick Hoxie, Dianne Pinderhughes, Jason E. Glenn, Bernadette Atuahene, Adam Biggs, Charlton Copeland, and Bikila Ochoa.

There are some telltale signs that we might really be living in the kind of moment that academic provocateurs have labeled “postracial” (i.e., indifferent to historically self-evident expectations about race relations and race-based identifications): Duke lacrosse players, all of them White, who taunt a Black collegian-cum-stripper with carefully crafted quips better suited for a comedy club than a Klan rally (“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”); a Black Ivy League professor testifying under oath that a baseball bat-wielding White vigilante who begins pummeling a Black man in Brooklyn by calling his victim a “nigger” does not necessarily harbor any race-specific animus; a former Education Secretary seemingly shocked and appalled that African Americans would be shocked and appalled by his comments regarding the hypothetical abortion of African American babies as a technique for lowering crime rates; and any of the dissenting judicial opinions penned by the lone Black justice on the nation's highest court. Race is doing some very strange things these days.

One of the most interesting developments in recent years in the field of African American studies has been the expansion of its horizons beyond the North American theater of Black life and expression that has for so long been featured as its principal focus, and often, in many academic departments, as the only one. Yet, as the early scholarship which serves as the foundation for the field demonstrated, the Black experience in the New World has always presented a continental dimension that provides the concrete grounding for the historical perspective from which that experience must be viewed and understood. This was the methodological premise underlying the work of scholars such as Melville Herskovits (1941) and Roger Bastide (1967), who ranged throughout the Black world in quest of the lived connections that gave an original African imprint to the Black experience, while providing theoretical validity to the very concept of a Black world. In the works of such scholars, the consciousness of a continuum that connects Africa to the Black experience in the New World underlies the effort to comprehend the Black diaspora itself in its manifold wholeness.

Publications about multiracial identity and the multiracial population increased significantly prior to the 2000 U.S. Census. Most of these publications emerged after 1997—a significant year in the recent history of studies on the multiracial population, as this was the year the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established new guidelines for collecting data on race, allowing people to choose more than one race (Office of Management and Budget 1997). It quickly became evident that this change in how the federal government tallies race was a significant event that merited the attention of academics. This surge in research on multiracial identity and the multiracial movement reflected, on the one hand, a push by multiracial advocates for more attention to the complexities of “being multiracial” and, on the other hand, a group of scholars interested in understanding the unfolding of these events.

Erica Chito Childs's article “Looking Behind the Stereotypes of the ‘Angry Black Woman’,” published in Gender and Society in 2005, represents an important empirical contribution to studies of interracial intimacy. Black women's voices are routinely marginalized during analyses of interracial dating, and, worse, their real-life experiences and first-person interpretations are replaced by demeaning, racist stereotypes of angry Black womanhood. Childs recognizes this tradition and acts to interrupt the cycle of Black female marginalization and insult through situating Black women in context and presenting their narratives with little interruption and interpretation.

Few Black women are tenured faculty in academia, and the statistics are quite stunning. The Almanac of the Chronicle of Higher Education (2004–2005) shows that, in 2001, 1% of all faculty at the rank of professor were Black females—only 5% of all females at that rank. The numbers are only slightly better for the rank of associate professor, the only other rank where one is likely to be tenured. Of all faculty at the associate professor level, only 2% are Black women; among women at that rank, only 6% are Black. Of assistant professors, 3% are Black females (7.5% of all female faculty at that rank); Black females comprise 8% of female instructors (4% of all faculty at that rank); and 3% of lecturers (5% of all female lecturers).

“Looking Behind the Stereotypes of the ‘Angry Black Woman’: An Exploration of Black Women's Responses to Interracial Relationships,” published in Gender and Society in August 2005, was an effort to bring those voices routinely marginalized or ignored into the debate on contemporary interracial relationships. In 2004, I was writing Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (2005), the culmination of years of qualitative research on societal responses to interracial relationships and the opposition that still exists toward Black-White relationships in White and Black communities. In my research, as well as previous research on interracial relationships, couples consisting of Black men and White women would recount stories of “angry Black women” who harassed them, “rolled their eyes” at them, and were constructed as a “problem.” These stories are the ones most often heard because most studies of Black-White couples consisted of more Black-man/White-woman couplings, given that they are more common than are Black-women/White-man couplings. Similarly, numerous quantitative studies posit Black women as the least accepting of interracial unions. For my work, I was also analyzing media and film images of interracial unions using films such as Waiting to Exhale (1995) and Jungle Fever (1991), which depict scenes of a group of Black women lamenting the loss of Black men to interracial dating, among other things. From all of these various academic and popular culture sources, the message was clear that Black women are generally opposed to interracial relationships, but very rarely are their own voices actually heard. Instead, at best, their stories have been retold.

Kathryn Takara's “A View from the Academic Edge” is a commendable effort to speak to the unique problems confronted by Black women in academia. Many of the concerns raised by the author are elaborations of arguments made by other Black feminist intellectuals, who highlight the ways in which race and gender intersect to produce experiences that alienate and stigmatize Black women in academic settings. Takara relies heavily on these previous works at times, which may lead some to ask exactly what her original contribution to this body of knowledge is supposed to be. While she defines her primary focus as “the institutional features of the academy which help to explain the particularly bad situation of Black females in the academy,” the greatest strength of the essay is its attention to forms of racism and exclusion that are both institutional and interpersonal. Though the author does not explicitly make this distinction herself, the coexistence and interdependence of both institutional racism and habitual, interpersonal race/gender-based exclusion is what motivates her to write this piece, and it is the need to address both of these areas that makes the message of “A View from the Academic Edge” valuable.

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).

I'm writing in response to “Can Public Schools Save America? Culture, Race, Academic Achievement, and the American Dream,” a review essay published in the Du Bois Review (Volume 2, no. 1, 2005, pp. 127–136) by James Anderson, which includes a discussion of my book (co-authored with Nathan Scovronick), The American Dream and the Public Schools (2003). We are, of course, very pleased to have the book reviewed in this journal since it is read by many people with whom we would like to discuss these issues. The review, however, distorts our argument in ways that warrant correction.

Contributors.