Barack Obama was elected president of the United States shortly before this issue of the Du Bois Review went to press. The historic nature of the 2008 presidential campaign was evident early in the process, particularly as it became clear that the Democratic Party would nominate either a woman or an African American as its standard-bearer. As scholars who have devoted our professional lives to studying the cancerous effect that racial disadvantage has on American society and politics, we are well aware of the profound hope that many place in the president-elect. We are also aware of the many pitfalls and challenges that await not only President Obama but the nation as well, whose citizens must sort out the new (and old) features of the nation's increasingly complex racial terrain. We devote the next two issues of the Du Bois Review (volume 6, numbers 1 and 2) to scholarship focused on the 2008 presidential campaign and the implications of that campaign going forward. In this issue we focus on research assessing where we have been and where we are regarding racial dynamics within the United States.

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 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.

Two indicators of race relations in the United States are interracial marriage and transracial adoption. We examine the salience of race in the romantic involvements of Korean adoptees, and we argue that mainstream racial discourses influence romantic preferences across variations in personal experience, local demographics, and social distance. Applying a dating-history approach to a probability sample of semistructured interviews with fifty-eight adult Korean adoptees, we demonstrate how racial discourses influence romantic preferences by shaping adoptees' interpretations of their romantic involvements across a range of structural conditions, and we also identify specific conditions that limit their salience. In brief, we introduce a conception of romantic preference that bridges the existing constructs in the qualitative and the quantitative literatures on interracial marriage.

This article examines how a nonprofit organization prepares low-income students of diverse racial backgrounds to enter elite private high schools in the fall of the ninth grade. Combining ethnographic fieldwork completed during the program with follow-up interviews with ten students after their first semester at boarding school, this article addresses how students interact with and integrate into wealthy, predominantly White schools in an attempt to gain social mobility. Looking at how students interpret their surroundings, the article argues that students are trained to view themselves as “diversifiers” in order to successfully adapt to their new schools. In this role, students perceive themselves as especially serious and motivated students, and their elite peers as naïve, and find satisfaction in teaching others how to interact with people from different class and racial backgrounds. The paper concludes by considering the ramifications of the diversifier concept on efforts to diversify elite institutions and proposes further possible research sites where the concept may be applicable.

As a graduate student, Du Bois studied with two of the most important figures within what is today remembered as the German historical school of economics—Gustav Schmoller and Adolf Wagner. By taking seriously Du Bois's early ambitions in the field of economics, and rereading his early work as a social scientist in the context of early twentieth-century economic thought, the following article makes the case that Du Bois should be credited with having made several important contributions to U.S. economics. The article suggests that our failure to remember Du Bois as an economist is a joint consequence of two independent causes. The first is the racist attitudes of the U.S. academy of his time that simply would not accept a highly qualified African American as a colleague. The second is the sweeping changes that have so profoundly modified the method, form, and substance of U.S. economics over the past century.

This article brings Frazier's ideas about male and female family roles into focus. Although Frazier was at the forefront of arguing for racial equality in the 1930s, his ideas remained limited by his belief that African Americans should assimilate into the gender and sexual ideals of patriarchal U.S. culture. At the center of this article is Frazier's conviction that middle-class egalitarian marriages, women's participation in the waged work force, and increased consumption of material goods would perpetuate or worsen African Americans' family health. Importantly, this article argues that Frazier's socialist political alignments and his suspicion of bourgeois norms were inseparable from his suspicion of middle-class Black women and notions of morality. Ultimately, it suggests that his mistrust of women colors social scientists' treatments of Black Americans throughout the twentieth century.

Throughout their histories, civil rights organizations have chosen to advocate on behalf of the poor, despite disincentives. This paper examines SNCC's and the NAACP's activities concerning the Economic Opportunity Act during the early and mid-1960s. First, I establish the level of attention SNCC and NAACP devoted to the War on Poverty. Based on analysis of the groups' archives, I find that both groups increased their attention to antipoverty policy during a period when other issues were salient to all African Americans. Second, I assess why these shifts in organizational priorities occurred. My findings indicate that competition among civil rights organizations drove the NAACP and SNCC to commit attention to antipoverty issues, and to focus attention on grassroots organizing concerning the War on Poverty. Differences in the organizations' structures mediated what form this attention would take.

This article presents an analysis of the limits of “power to” and agency through an examination of the Barry administration in Washington, DC. I begin by asking why this administration, born of the civil rights movement and tremendous optimism, was unable to live up to its expectations. I provide an in-depth examination of Barry's efforts at reform, his popular appeal, and his appeal to business within the context of Washington's local political history. I find that Barry's power was constrained by a combination of structural factors, personal choices, the legacy of racism and racist exclusion, and a failed identity-deployment strategy. The findings have broader implications for the use of identity-deployment strategies for minority political leaders generally.

This article examines attitudes toward mainstream society among Caribbeans and South Asians in Britain. Conventional wisdom predicts that Caribbeans should be more likely than South Asians to have positive attitudes toward British society, in part because Caribbeans are more socially and culturally assimilated. In addition, much of the current debate around ethnic minority alienation in Britain focuses on the fact that recent terrorist activity has primarily been committed by Muslim South Asians. This article presents evidence that runs counter to these predictions, with data suggesting that South Asians are more likely than Caribbeans to have high levels of positive national identification, high levels of trust, and less pessimistic expectations for discrimination in Britain. To account for these dynamics, I develop an argument about the importance of ethnic minority migrants' expectations. I claim that cultural and social assimilation increases expectations for incorporation. When migrants with high expectations face incorporation difficulties, they will be more likely to develop pessimistic attitudes. In comparison, cultural and social segregation lowers expectations for incorporation prospects. When migrants with lower expectations face incorporation difficulties, they will be less likely to have pessimistic attitudes. I use this argument to explain why Caribbeans are less likely than South Asians to have positive attitudes toward mainstream British society.