Many commentators, both conservative and liberal, have celebrated the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, claiming the election signified America has truly become a “post-racial” society. It is not just Lou Dobbs who argues the United States in the “21st century [is a] post-partisan, post-racial society.” This view is consistent with beliefs the majority of White Americans have held for well over a decade: that African Americans have achieved, or will soon achieve, racial equality in the United States despite substantial evidence to the contrary. Indeed, this view is consistent with opinions found in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and elsewhere—attitudes that even the tragic events following the Katrina disaster had nothing to do with race.

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.

Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 255 pages, ISBN: 978-0-19-538720-9. Paper, $21.95.

Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. 303 pages, ISBN: 978-1-59420-150-9. Cloth, $25.95.

In recent years, sociologists have conducted enormously important research on the intersection of urban poverty, crime, and the racial divide. Quantitative stratification sociologist Bruce Western provides a meticulous tracing of the emergence of mass incarceration, tracking its steady development and identifying how and why—both economically and politically—this trend has fallen so heavily on low-income Black communities (Western 2006). Quantitative stratification sociologist Devah Pager carries out remarkably innovative and compelling field experiments showing the terrible toll incarceration takes on the employment prospects and, therefore, the greater life chances of former felons, particularly those who are Black (Pager 2007). And the combined efforts of quantitative criminologist Chris Uggen and quantitative political sociologist Jeff Manza reveal the extraordinary distortion of our local and national politics that results from the practice of felon disfranchisement (Manza and Uggen, 2006).

Does President Obama's momentous election victory signify a new, post-racism era in America? Many observers, such as a New York Times science editor, think so. But, unfortunately, this claim is premature for a host of reasons. [1] It took “a perfect storm” of interlocking factors to elect Obama. [2] Many bigots actually voted for Obama. [3] Two logical fallacies underlie this too-optimistic view. [4] Racist attitudes and actions repeatedly occurred throughout the campaign. [5] White Southern and older voters both demonstrated that rank racism remains. [6] Increased turn-out of young and minority voters was crucial. The paper closes by considering what changes in American race relations may take place during the Obama presidency.

The article evaluates Robert Putnam's discussion of two differing concepts of the role of the diversity perspective toward inter-ethnic/inter-racial relationships in American society since the 1960s—namely, the “contact theory” and the “conflict theory.” The former was initially formulated by Harvard social psychologist Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Putnam's analysis—published in the comparative politics journal Scandinavian Political Studies (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2007)—favors the “conflict theory,” which holds that diversity sharpens “us-against-them” inter-ethnic/inter-racial interactions. Putnam's view opposes diversity-influenced public policies. By contrast, “contact theory” holds that diversity erodes “us-against-them” interactions and thus eventually democratizes such interactions, and thereby American society generally. “Contact theory” influenced the NAACP-led civil-rights movement's quest for desegregation public policies during the 1950s, 1960s, and onward.

From 1959 to 1964, Prince Edward County, Virginia, dodged a court desegregation order by refusing to operate public schools. Though the county played an integral role in the national battle over civil rights, scholars and journalists have largely neglected Prince Edward's role in the national drama of race. In 1951, Black high school students went on strike to protest unequal school facilities. This strike led to an NAACP lawsuit that became one of five decided in Brown v. Board of Education. When faced with a final desegregation deadline in 1959, the county put itself in a unique position by becoming the only school district in the U.S. to close its public schools for an extended period of time rather than accept any desegregation. Most White students attended a private, segregated academy; over three-quarters of Black Prince Edward students lost some or all of those years of education. White county leaders believed they were creating a blueprint for defying desegregation in the rural South and perhaps, they hoped, throughout much of the United States. Using archival materials, interviews and secondary accounts, I explain how White county leaders made a public case for the school closings. These leaders' rhetorical strategy was a crucial early draft in the depiction of segregation as a natural state free of racial rancor. The segregationist rhetoric emanating from Prince Edward County was grounded primarily in arguments for privatization, local self-determination, and taxpayers' rights. Such arguments would come to dominate conservative rhetoric nationwide.

When students of race and racism seek direction, they can find no single comprehensive source that provides them with basic analytical guidance or that offers insights into the elementary forms of racial classification and domination. We believe the field would benefit greatly from such a source, and we attempt to offer one here. Synchronizing and building upon recent theoretical innovations in the area of race, we lend some conceptual clarification to the nature and dynamics of race and racial domination so that students of the subjects—especially those seeking a general (if economical) introduction to the vast field of race studies—can gain basic insight into how race works as well as effective (and fallacious) ways to think about racial domination. Focusing primarily on the American context, we begin by defining race and unpacking our definition. We then describe how our conception of race must be informed by those of ethnicity and nationhood. Next, we identify five fallacies to avoid when thinking about racism. Finally, we discuss the resilience of racial domination, concentrating on how all actors in a society gripped by racism reproduce the conditions of racial domination, as well as on the benefits and drawbacks of approaches that emphasize intersectionality.

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.

In the past two decades, migration scholars have revised and revitalized assimilation theory to study the large and growing numbers of migrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean and their offspring in the United States. Neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories seek to make sense of the current wave of migration that differs in important ways from the last great wave at the turn of the twentieth century and to overcome the conceptual shortcomings of earlier theories of assimilation that it inspired. This article examines some of the central assumptions and arguments of the new theories. In particular, it undertakes a detailed critique of their treatment of race and finds that they variously engage in suspect comparisons to past migration from Europe; read out or misread the qualitatively different historical trajectories of European and non-European migrants; exclude native-born Blacks from the analysis; fail to conceptually account for the key changes that are purported to facilitate “assimilation”; import the dubious concept of the “underclass” to characterize poor urban Blacks and others; laud uncritically the “culture” of migrants; explicitly or implicitly advocate the “assimilation” of migrants; and discount the political potential of “oppositional culture.” Shifting the focus from difference to inequality and domination, the article concludes with a brief proposal for reorienting our theoretical approach, from assimilation to the politics of national belonging.

We analyze historical data to conduct an exploratory structural investigation into the process that Harriet Tubman used to free her family and friends as a member of the New York State Underground Railroad (UGRR). We suggest that she accomplished this feat because of her ability to rely on embedded (Granovetter 1985; Uzzi 1996) network contacts that allowed her to bridge structural holes (Burt 1992) and link with people with whom she was not previously linked (Lin et al., 2001). We conclude by discussing the importance of network analysis for providing empirical meaning to historical events and episodes.

An editorial error was made in the article, “A Black Man in the White House?: The Role of Racism and Patriotism in the 2008 Presidential Election” (Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 193–217).