It matters how people view the police—and that there is a substantial racial gap in these views. Research has primarily focused on police experiences to explain generally less-positive views among Black Americans. We recommend a subtle but vital shift in focus, seeking instead to explain the remarkably more favorable average views about the police among White Americans. Utilizing comparable data from two 2016 American National Election Studies surveys, we explore the role of contact with the police, politics, and three different dimensions of racial attitudes and views, finding views about the police among White Americans to be shaped in primary ways by concerns about Black Americans. These factors, and racial resentment in particular, explain a significant portion of the average difference in views of the police between Black and White Americans. We discuss the implications of this subtle shift in focus, particularly for work which sets positive views about the police as the goal.

This paper aims to explore attitudes toward immigration among two non-White groups, Asian Americans and Black Americans. For more than a decade, individuals from Asia have comprised the majority of immigrants entering the United States each year. Today, the majority of the Asian American U.S. population remains foreign-born. Yet using data collected from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the 2016 National Asian American Survey—a time period marked by high levels of saliency with regard to immigration issues—we find that Black Americans, the majority of whom are U.S.-born, exhibit even more progressive attitudes towards immigration, both legal and undocumented, than mostly foreign-born Asian Americans. Our research challenges economic and material theories related to immigration attitudes and suggests that political connections to and “linked fate” with other minorities better explain why Black Americans exhibit more progressive attitudes toward immigration than Asian Americans.

When deciding whether to provide job-matching assistance to formerly incarcerated job seekers, which factors do individuals with job information and influence privilege? Drawing from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 126 ethnoracially diverse jobholders at one large, public sector employer, I show that jobholders’ assistance relied on the cultural frames for action they deployed. Two frames dominated discussion—the second chance frame and the signaling change frame. Through the former, jobholders argued that all individuals were capable of change and entitled to more chances to prove themselves. These jobholders were strongly inclined to help. Through the latter, jobholders either referenced the nature of offenses for which job seekers were punished, a proxy for their ability to change, or they referenced evidence that job seekers had changed, a proxy for former prisoners’ commitment to do better. These jobholders tended to be noncommittal. Two frames were mentioned significantly less often—the rigid structures and the opportunities to assist frames. Neither implicated the former prisoners’ essential attributes but instead identified factors outside of job seekers’ control. A significant minority of jobholders also offered some combination of these four frames. Importantly, ethnoracial background, which informed the extent, nature and quality of jobholders’ experiences with the formerly incarcerated, also shaped which frame or set of frames jobholders deployed.

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.

Previous research has demonstrated that Black men are perceived to be more threatening than White men. Relatedly, public discourse suggests that respectable dress may reduce this perception. In this paper, we test whether professional attire reduces associations of threat with Black men. In three separate studies, participants completed a modified version of the Weapons Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Study 1, we tested whether Black men are associated with threat more than White men dressed in similar attire. In Study 2, we sought to test whether professional dress lessens the association between race and threat through intra-race comparisons. In Study 3, we assessed the perception of threat of Black men compared to White men when dressed in differing attire. Overall, findings indicate that participants associate Black men with threat more than White men, regardless of attire. Moreover, contrary to expectations, participants more strongly associate professional than casual dress with threat. The results have implications for public and scientific discourse regarding how contextual cues affect perceptions of Black men as threatening.

In discussions of political obligation, it is commonly assumed that duties follow from citizenship. However, the performance of a duty by aliens can lead to citizenship status in at least one critical case: service by noncitizen soldiers. While politicians and pundits recently have called citizenship a just reward for bearing arms and these “green card troops” another example of immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States, there is a good deal of ideological ambivalence about the policy. A clear discussion of its merits is crucial, particularly because in upending the traditionally accepted relationship between obligation and membership in a community, it gives new meaning to citizenship; it also forces a choice between our egalitarian and civic republican values. In this essay, I provide a theoretical framework for evaluating the policy normatively, as well as a political analysis of why—regardless of one's normative stance—the practice of granting citizenship for military service is likely to continue into the future.

It is particularly fitting that Du Bois Review would publish a special feature titled “Varieties of Responses to Stigmatization: Macro, Meso, and Micro Dimensions.” In many ways, we can consider the management of stigma to be a quintessentially Du Bois topic. In his classical writings on double consciousness, this pioneering social theorist (2007) captured the complex psychological experience of managing a life where one feels divided within oneself. He focused specifically on African American identity defined by the tension of being two at once (American and Black): “The Negro ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 3).

Necrolinguistics refers to linguistic-death-in-life, a situation in which languages are incarcerated, leaving folk in linguistic limbo. It names the process by which people come to lack the ability to use at least one language well, and includes those who are tongue-locked because their languages are incarcerated in one or more ways. In illustrating how and why the linguistic experience of Black folk inspires the term necrolinguistics, examples from slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and neocolonialism are provided to document the reality of linguistic-death-in-life. The main assumption of this study is that we can investigate the humanism of institutions belonging to any epoch, regime, or society through its linguistic posture and practice. It is noted that many sub-Saharan African languages are on death row, with many of its speakers stranded in semilingualism (or plummeting linguistic competence), peculiar kinds of monolingualism, or a kind of unilateral bilingualism, asymmetrical bilingualism. Each of these states is elaborated using examples: a native American, “White Thunder” (semilingualism); Jacques Derrida, a Franco-Maghrebian Jew (discordant monolingualism); and the august personality of Léopold Sédar Senghor (unilateral bilingualism). But the paper ends on a bright note, recognizing that, though the linguistic muzzle muffles Black culture and humanity, the resilience of Black folk is evident through their development of patois, pidgins, and creoles.

Some of the more influential research on race and education published in the last few decades comes from the work of John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham (Fordham 1988; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu 1978, 1987, 1991, 2003). In Ogbu's writing about the oppositional culture hypothesis, he argued that Black students frame their relationship to schooling through the lens of their historic marginalization in the United States. Out of their understanding of their systematic disenfranchisement, Ogbu suggested that “they not only generate theories [that] contradict dominant notions of status attainment and produce disillusionment about the instrumental value of school; but develop substantial distrust for school and its agents which then suppresses commitment to school norms” (Lewis et al., 2008, p. 259). Together, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) expanded on these ideas in their article on the “acting White” hypothesis suggesting that students not only disengage from school themselves, they also put pressure on their Black peers not to work hard in school lest they be accused of “acting White.” Together these two interconnected theories have gained substantial notoriety and have become part of the general commonsense about why Black students are not doing better in school—“the problem,” it is believed, is the academic disengagement or “oppositional culture” of African American students.

Using data from the 2008 American National Election Studies (ANES) time series, and the 2008 ANES panel wave, this study examines whether the intragroup emotions Hillary Clinton elicits—gender affinity and pride—are predictive of political engagement for the group she represents: women voters. We focus on voters who report having participated in the primaries and the range of potential voters who proselytize during the primary season and express an intention to vote in the general election. Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably draw—that is, women rather than men would be more likely to support Clinton—the real question is: which women?

We test the popular claim that poverty and inequality were “dirty little secrets” until the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina exposed them to a wider public. If this account were on the mark, it would suggest that the absence of major antipoverty initiatives in the United States is partly attributable to public ignorance and apathy coupled with the narrowly rational decision on the part of policymakers to attend to other issues about which the public evidently cares more. Using the 2004 Maxwell Poll, we find strikingly high levels of awareness and activism on poverty and inequality issues even prior to Katrina, clearly belying the “dirty little secret” account. The follow-up Maxwell Poll, which was administered in 2005 immediately after Katrina, revealed only a slight increase in public awareness of poverty and inequality. The Katrina effect was evidently dampened because (1) the large number of preexisting poverty activists reduced the size of the residual population “at risk” for conversion to antipoverty activism, and (2) the remaining non-activists were ardently opposed to poverty activism and hence unlikely to be receptive to the liberal message coming out of Katrina.

The Latino population has grown significantly over the last few decades in the United States and population projections suggest that the number of Latinos will increase disproportionately, relative to other immigrant groups, in the coming decades. These trends have resulted in great concern among some who fear that Latinos, especially Mexicans, are not acculturating and assimilating into mainstream, White America. Fears of the “browning of America” and of Latinos' presumed threat to the American way of life have led some to call for measures to ensure the preservation of America's national identity. Samuel Huntington is the latest public figure to make such claims. This paper provides an overview of Huntington's claims as well as the responses that his work has drawn from supporters and critics. Using data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample, we assess the validity of Huntington's claims by examining the extent to which Mexicans, the largest Latino subgroup, have integrated into the United States, basing our assessment on a variety of selected demographic, social, and economic indicators. The results suggest that Mexicans have integrated in various dimensions, with the level of integration increasing with length of residence in the United States. We conclude with a discussion of the historical and contemporary context in which Mexicans have been racialized in the United States.

We ask how Black Protestants frame the connection between religion and science, analyzing fifty in-depth interviews with Black Protestants of different socioeconomic backgrounds who attend churches in two U.S. cities. Although individuals across the sample observe some tension, or incompatibility, between religion and science, Black Protestants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tended to perceive much more tension when compared with those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. However, when science is thought to contribute to improving health conditions (e.g., medical improvements to diagnose or prevent birth defects), individuals from both SES backgrounds framed religion and science as compatible. This lack of tension in regards to medicine challenges prevailing wisdom about lower-income African Americans’ attitudes towards medicine. We draw out the implications of these findings for larger discussions about trust toward science and scientific communities, elucidating Black Protestant particularities and perspectives in tensions between science and religion as a foundation for further research.

Increasingly, African Americans find themselves living side-by-side with immigrant newcomers from Latin America, the largest source of today’s immigrant population. Research on “Black/Brown” relations tends to a priori define groupness in ethnoracial terms and gloss over potential nuance in inter-group relations. Taking an inductive approach to understanding how African Americans interpret the boundaries that result from immigration-driven change, this paper draws on fieldwork among African Americans in East Palo Alto, California, a Black-majority-turned-Latino-majority city, to examine how African Americans construct multiple symbolic boundaries in the context of a Latino-immigrant settlement. Blacks’ rendering of these boundaries at the communal level invokes ethnoracial boundaries as a source of significant division. They see Latinos as having overwhelmed Black material and symbolic prowess. However, accounts of inter-personal interactions evince symbolic boundaries defined by language and neighborhood tenure that render ethnoracial boundaries porous. Respondents note intra-group differences among Latinos, pointing out how the ability to speak English and long-time residence in the neighborhood are important factors facilitating ties and cooperation across ethnoracial boundaries. The findings point to the importance of intra-ethnoracial-group differences for inter-ethnoracial-group attitudes and relations. Adopting ethnographic and survey research practices that treat boundaries as multiplex will better capture how growing intra-ethnoracial-group diversity shapes inter-ethnoracial-group relations.

Over one hundred years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois (1899) documented large, pervasive, and persistent racial inequities in health. While the current demography of racial groups in the United States is radically different compared to the times when Du Bois first discussed issues of race and health, many of the significant developments in research on racial differences in health in the last century can be traced to his seminal work (Williams and Sternthal, 2010). Du Bois recognized that the limited access to economic resources and the social marginalization of some racial groups could have dire social, physical, and psychological consequences for them. Current research studies continue to document that racial groups with a long history characterized by economic exploitation and geographic marginalization—Blacks or African Americans, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders—have markedly poor health outcomes compared to the dominant White population. Immigrant Asians and Hispanics tend to have better health than the U.S. average, but their health tends to worsen over time and across subsequent generations. Despite Du Bois's prescience and the advances made by contemporary researchers, there are many substantive theoretical and methodological challenges confronting scholars who study the health of diverse racial and ethnic groups. This special issue of the Du Bois Review provides a state-of-the-art overview of some of these unanswered questions and critical research directions for the study of racial inequality in health.

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 United States today has the highest incarceration rate, as well as the largest number of people living under correctional control more broadly (including probation and parole), than any other country on the globe. The size of the American criminal justice system is not only internationally unparalleled, but it is also historically unprecedented. This apparatus is also deeply racialized. African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous populations (Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Native American), are all represented in U. S. jails and prisons in numbers dramatically disproportionate to their representation in the population as a whole, and every non-White population is incarcerated at a rate far surpassing that of Whites. Notably, however, while the scale of today’s criminal justice system is unsurpassed and unprecedented, its severe racial disproportionality has always been a defining feature. Only by taking a close look at the long and deeply racialized history of the American criminal justice system, and more specifically at the regularly discriminatory application of the law as well as the consistent lack of equal justice under the law over time, can we fully understand not only why the American criminal justice system remains so unjust, but also why prison populations rose so dramatically when they did.

Since 1981, there has been a sea change in longstanding policies of jus soli, or birthright citizenship, reinforcing the global divide between affluent spaces of whiteness and impoverished spaces of nonwhiteness. I argue that these moves highlight the global system of citizenship as an increasingly consequential aspect of what Charles Mills terms the Racial Contract: the set of agreements, historically explicit and currently tacit, that divides the earth's peoples into full persons—Whites—and subpersons—nonwhites—such that the latter are constitutive outsiders to the political, moral, and epistemological norms that structure the White social world. Mills posits that the present phase of the Racial Contract disconnects present geographies of inequality from the violent history of the earlier phase that brought them into being, thereby moving them outside the realm of redress. I focus on formal citizenship as a central locus of such erasure, using the figuration of the undocumented mother in the controversy over U.S. birthright citizenship as a case study. I argue that the global regime of citizenship perpetuates White supremacy in two ways: first, through a Westphalian map of citizenship, and second, through gendered and raced neoliberal norms of citizenship. The alchemy between these two rationalities both entrenches and hides the violence of the Racial Contract. Building upon Mills' standpoint epistemology, I analyze arguments from both sides of a 1995 congressional hearing on birthright citizenship. I argue that the arguments opposing birthright citizenship exhibit what can be thought of as a White epistemology of citizenship, which relies upon a profound amnesia about the exclusionary and violent history of the global regime of citizenship.

In this paper I argue that time is a social determinant of health, and one that perpetuates racial health inequalities. Specifically, Black people in the United States experience time losses across numerous domains throughout the life course, putting them at risk of disproportionate morbidity and mortality. Fundamental cause theory holds that social conditions structure health through pathways to resources including money, knowledge, power, prestige, freedom, and social networks. Racialized time indirectly harms health by disrupting or denying access to these flexible resources and by undoing utility among those that are obtained. Racialized time harms health directly when it produces stress and exacerbates conditions of racial subordination. I examine racialized time in three categories: 1) Black people spending too much time to meet basic needs; 2) Black people having less time spent on them than is required; and 3) lost years of (good quality of) life. Linkages between time and health disadvantage exist in material resources, interactions with the state, intimate lives, public space, and cognitive processes.

Since the early 1960s, there has been a movement among activists, scholars, and policymakers to redefine racism as a psychopathological condition, identifiable and treatable through psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. This development reflects, and is reflected by, the popular framing among mass media and ordinary social actors of racism and racist events as individual pathology rather than as a social problem. This shifting perspective on racism, from a social problem and a system to an individual pathology, has increasingly become a part of academic and psychiatric discourse since Jim Crow. In this article, we have two aims: first, to trace the emergence of “psychopathological racism”; second, to illustrate the relationship between “psychopathological racism” and “colorblind racism” in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the psychopathological view of racism compliments colorblindness in that larger structural issues are dismissed in favor of individual pathos. Furthermore, psychopathological explanations for racism dismiss socio-political contexts, eschewing the contributions of well over fifty years of social scientific research in the process.