Many commentators have described Barack Obama as a ‘deracialized’ politician. In contrast to ‘racialized’ Black candidates, deracialized politicians are said to deemphasize their Black racial identity, downplay the racial legacies of American inequality, and favor race-neutral over racially targeted policies. Puzzlingly, this narrative of Obama’s racial politics sits incongruously with his political curriculum vitae, spent largely in contexts which are difficult to describe as deracialized. This article holds that commentators have misjudged Barack Obama’s racial politics by conflating a contingent electoral strategy with a deeper expression of Obama’s racial philosophical commitments. In explaining these commitments, the article finds the deracialized/racialized framing inadequate. Instead, it favors the typology of racial policy alliances situating Obama within the “race-conscious” policy alliance rather than the “color-blind” alliance. By returning to the site of Obama’s political development, Hyde Park in Chicago, the paper uncovers a tradition of racial politics in which Blacks formed coalitions with progressive Whites but also embraced Black racial identity, acknowledged the enduring legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and supported targeted policies to overturn these racial legacies. The article argues that Obama was an inheritor of this tradition.

This article engages in a theoretical discussion and application of Du Boisian double consciousness to understand the formation of the Muslim American self. Du Boisian double consciousness, and its three elements (the Veil, Twoness, and Second Sight) are used to understand phenomenological processes of Muslim American self-formation as being situated within and conditioned by structural contexts of racialization. By drawing on critical scholarship that highlights the operation of the Muslim racial project in contemporary U.S. contexts, I show how double consciousness emerges through the Othering of Muslim Americans at the macro, meso, and micro levels of society, which then defines them as outside of the U.S. national imaginary, and denies them their equal civic status as citizens of the state. By utilizing double consciousness to understand the Muslim American self as it is embedded in racialized U.S. contexts, this article fills a crucial gap in the literature by theoretically expanding on racialized processes of Muslim American identity formation in the racialized contexts of the United States.

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960–2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.

This article explores grassroots practices of community safety and security in Brooklyn, New York through a framework that centers the abolitionist practices imbedded in Black neighborhood collective action. Literature on safety and security often conflates the two concepts, not considering how grounded applications of the two may produce different outcomes and approaches to community well-being. Additionally, we know little about how Black communities build safety and security from the ground up. And while academic scholarship on abolition provides a robust theoretical foundation, more examples of how communities could and do employ police abolition are needed. Utilizing archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that a crisis of police legitimacy compelled alternatives to formal policing in New York City during the urban crisis, or the postwar period of massive urban divestment and hyper-ghettoization. These efforts included masculinized security practices such as neighborhood patrols and protests, while community safety practices included forms of neighborhood sociality grounded in feminized and queer relationships of care and concern. These efforts, which critiqued institutional racism and neglect and emerged from the indigenous knowledge base and social networks of community members, provide considerations for recovering abolitionist practices in Black neighborhood collective action and implications for building alternatives to policing. This article contributes to literature on Black communities, collective action, and abolition by offering an intersectional analysis of the various ways Black social and political engagement centers on practices of safety and security and does not always fixate on conscripting a police response.

A body of scholarship interrogates conventional notions of citizenship, viewing full social inclusion beyond formal status and as a matter of belonging. This paper integrates the perspective of anti-Blackness with that of belonging and theorizes anti-Black non-belonging. Based on more than a year of fieldwork in the Lisbon metropolitan area, I illustrate how the reality of anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal means that African-descendant women are vulnerable to racist, everyday practices in public space that impact their individual and group reality and feelings of national belonging. Employing a counter narrative methodology, I argue that Cape Verdean women’s narratives of anti-Black non-belonging illustrate the agentic strategy that they deploy to carve our alternative modes of belonging as they navigate their everyday lives. Their accounts illustrate the continued need for African-descendant women to draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to employ resistance, whether through their own parenting or through their own reactionary voices in public space. Anti-Black non-belonging is therefore both a form of racialization and a matter of resistance; as African-descendent women are racialized as foreign, non-being, and out of place, they also challenge the ideology of Portuguese anti-racialism that places Africans and African descendants outside of European citizenry.

In March of 1969, a Black man from Detroit named Abdul-Rasheed Karim arrived at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, after spending two years locked up in prison and a psychiatric ward for a fight that started when he was assaulted by three White boys, then brutalized by the police who responded. Mr. Karim, who suffered two broken ribs, a cracked tooth, and a deep skull laceration, made the mistake of hitting one of the officers who were beating him with clubs. As Metzl quotes, the clinical evaluation that led to Mr. Karim's transfer to Ionia noted “cultural retardation is thus a significant factor in his schizophrenic disease” because he had been “socialized toward ghetto survival” (p. 143) as a child. The doctor interpreted Mr. Karim's Islamic beliefs as “religious delusions,” writing, “his identification with the Black Muslim group is a projection of his feelings of inadequacy” (p. 143). Once at Ionia, doctors treated Mr. Karim's hostility toward authority figures by confining him to a maximum supervision ward where he was injected daily with escalating doses of antipsychotic drugs.

The federal government created America's historic 1964 Civil Rights Act during a period of low immigration. The primary goal was to create equal opportunities for African Americans by ending Jim Crow discrimination in the South. Focusing on the issue of employment discrimination, and specifically employer preferences for immigrants, this article shows how the current period of high immigration from Latin America and Asia has created new challenges and dilemmas for Title VII, the employment discrimination title of the Civil Rights Act. Specifically, sociological evidence indicates that U.S. businesses are engaging in race-conscious employment focused on the perceived value of racial skills (special abilities of certain racial groups at particular jobs) and racial symbolism (organizational benefits from displaying certain races on the work force). Businesses hire Asians and Latinos, and especially immigrant Asians and Latinos, because of the perceived racial skills of these groups at low-status jobs that require strong work ethics and obedient attitudes. Corporate employers seeking skilled workers do not necessarily prefer immigrants. Instead, they seek minorities for the symbolic value of their diversity, for their general racial skills at bringing new ideas to the workplace, and for their racial marketing skills for growing non-White markets. I assess these developments from a legal perspective, showing that a combination of a lack of litigation and some key court decisions have prevented Title VII from regulating racial skills and racial symbolism and/or from offering protection for immigrants themselves.

Social scientists in a variety of fields have long relied on economic-structuralist theories to understand the ascendance and hegemony of the modern Conservative Movement in the United States. In the materialist theory of political change (MTPC), structural crisis in the 1970s destabilized Keynesian-managerialism, and paved the way for neoliberalism. Key weaknesses of this approach include its relatively aspatial scope—comparatively less attention to the spatial variation of neoliberalism’s popularity—and its demotion of other elements of the Conservative Movement into a veritable super-structure of secondary movements. This paper offers a “racial amendment” to the MTPC, and an application to electoral geographies in the state of Ohio since 1932. This amendment synthesizes group threat theory, critical historiography, and Du Boisian theories of Whiteness to suggest that the growing influence of suburban conservatism is not reducible simply to class interest.

On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a man of White American and Peruvian descent, shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was walking back to the home where he was a guest in Sanford, Florida. For many, Trayvon Martin is this generation’s Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling in a White woman’s presence. In fact, several scholars have highlighted similarities between the Till and Martin tragedies. One unexplored commonality is the manner in which defense counsel in both the Till and Martin trials used the trope of protecting White womanhood to get the jurors to psychologically identify and empathize with the defendants. Employing Multidimensional Masculinities Theory, this essay seeks to expose the role that the protection of White womanhood (and thus the preservation of White manhood) played in the killings of Till and Martin and in each of their killers’ defense strategies at trial. It does so by offering a history of lynching; explaining how White men demonstrated their ownership of White women and their dominance over Blacks by using violence against Black men who threatened the social order; and revealing how the defense attorneys in both the Till and Martin cases manipulated and employed the narrative of the White male protector of White women to facilitate acquittals for their clients. In so doing, it analyzes the transcript from the Till trial, a transcript previously believed to be lost forever until the FBI discovered the transcript upon its re-opening and investigation of the Till murder and released the transcript in 2006. Finally, utilizing excerpts from the trial transcript in the Martin case, this essay reveals how the trope of protecting White womanhood shaped the outcome in the Martin case, even though the stock narrative of needing White female protection from purportedly dangerous Black men was not at all related to the claims about Martin or charges against Zimmerman. In so doing, this essay reveals (1) how White womanhood has been abstracted to encompass not only a specific woman in an incident and to include not only a “man’s” home, but also to include broader spaces like gated communities, and (2) how that reality, coupled with the way that civil rights laws have made it harder for White men to bully Black men and the way that feminism has made it harder to subordinate women, has produced a new masculine anxiety for White men.

Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.

Lawrie Balfour and Robert Gooding-Williams have written superb books. Reading Du Bois's texts creatively and carefully, both treat Du Bois as a living political thinker, someone we can learn from and profitably argue with and whose thought is relevant to contemporary political theory. There is more in these books that I could praise and much in them that I agree with, but I will focus my remarks on areas of disagreement.

Abstract

The choice between working as an employee and owning a business is shaped by constraints and opportunities. Among African Americans, understanding why the entrepreneurial path is chosen requires evaluating not only the relative importance of constraints pushing workers toward self-employment versus opportunities pulling entrants into firm ownership, but, more fundamentally, the changing opportunity structures shaping occupational choices. This study focuses on the 1960s and 1970s period when specific constraints historically limiting entrepreneurial alternatives began to change dramatically. Findings indicate that expanding opportunities sharply altered the industry composition of the Black business community.

Because economists view the decision to enter into business ownership as an exercise in freedom of choice made on the basis of one’s preferences, they tend not to appreciate that these decisions are made in specific socio-economic contexts and that changes in context matter. Facing altered opportunity structures, prospective Black entrepreneurs have often chosen to abandon fields offering low remuneration—particularly personal services—entering instead into higher yielding fields where creation of viable firms requires investment of capital by owners possessing appropriate expertise. This transformation has remolded the stagnant business community of the mid-1960s into a profoundly different, more dynamic one.

In this article, I discuss Black transnational solidarity and liberation in the Americas by analyzing the historical relationship between W. E. B. Du Bois and Brazil from 1900 to 1940. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Du Bois was studying, writing, and publishing about Brazil. He was interested in creating international solidarity and cooperation among Black people. However, Du Bois (as well as other African Americans) promoted the idea that Brazil was a place without racism, a racial paradise. This idea served as a basis for a theory that oppressed Afro-Brazilians—the myth of racial democracy. In this article, I explore Du Bois’s relationship with Brazil, highlighting possible reasons why Du Bois engaged with the myth of racial democracy. In addition, I argue that this historical event teaches us that an Afro-diasporic liberation project must seriously consider global and material inequalities among Black people.

Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (1975) criticized government policies requiring goals and timetables from federal contractors in order to implement affirmative action, arguing that this opposed the clear language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aiming at a color-blind society, was unnecessary, and threatened a full-scale Balkanization in employment procedures. It also criticized school busing and nascent programs to require publicly supported housing to reach some statistical goal in proportions of Black and White. In time, the author changed his position, as indicated in the introduction to the 1987 edition of Affirmative Discrimination. In particular, he saw the virtue and necessity of race preference in admission to institutions of higher education, recognizing the degree to which slavery and discrimination had placed blacks in a unique position of disadvantage, and the imperative for a democratic society to incorporate in its leading institutions all major elements of the population.

The foreign-born population in the United States has reached new heights, and experts predict that the country will be “majority minority” by 2042, possibly earlier. Despite its growing ethnic, racial, national, and other forms of diversity, the fundamental location of Blackness at the bottom of the pyramid of structural racism endures. In attempts to overcome the real and perceived tensions that characterize relationships between immigrants and African Americans, efforts to create space for interpersonal connection and shared structural analysis have proliferated in organizations across the country. Drawing from seventy-five interviews with individuals leading these initiatives and the review of over fifty different pedagogical resources they have developed and used, this article presents a classification and assessment of these programs. We consider these programs using an anti-racist, African Americanist framework reflected in Steinberg’s “standpoint of [the] black figure, crouched on the ground as others pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity” (2005, p. 43), and analyze their successes and shortcomings. Successes include the creation of spaces for interaction across difference and the building of a shared analysis. We find evidence of transformative effects at the intra- and interpersonal levels. The greatest limitations include immigrant-centricity in relationship-building efforts and a reluctance to engage immigrants in conversation about their relationships to Whiteness, Blackness, and racial hierarchies in the United States and in their countries of origin.

In recent years, we have witnessed various efforts by the federal government to advance our justice system and improve public safety. Collaborations across justice and service agencies and research on what works in criminal justice policy have been central in criminal justice reform activities. Within the juvenile justice arena, reducing rates of victimization and delinquency, as well as implementing strategies to reduce racial and ethnic disparities remain priorities. In this essay, I discuss how research on neuroscience and brain development, and racial and ethnic disparities in justice system outcomes has informed juvenile justice policy and procedural protections for youth. I also review how school policies and practices can perpetuate racial and ethnic disparities in justice outcomes. Throughout the essay, I discuss the federal government’s role in supporting research to advance policies and practices designed to reduce these harms. I highlight the implications of these activities and ways in which data and research can continue to play a key role in realizing equal opportunity and justice for all youth, especially as they are the most vulnerable members of society.

This research examines laws in the colony of Virginia created by a powerful landowning planter class that attempted to draw a color line separating three descent groups: an indigenous native population (Indian), an immigrant population from Europe (English), and an imported population from Africa (Negro). Textual analysis of the Laws of Colonial Virginia shows that the English lawmakers had to learn they were the White component of a color line; they did not, for many years, refer to themselves as White. Contrary to some widely held views that race relations began as soon as these groups came into contact at some point in the seventeenth century, the analysis of written law suggests it took over 100 years, until near the middle third of the eighteenth century in Colonial Virginia, before a definitive concept of race was socially-constructed and a color line was drawn in Black and White.

Contemporary discourse about Black Americans questions the loyalties of younger Blacks to the advancement of the Black racial group. This discourse often compares the commitment of Black Americans who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement era to those who came of age during the post-Civil Rights Movement era. Fueling this discourse is a working assumption that somehow younger Black Americans have a different understanding about race and its role in Blacks' political interests. This begs the question whether there are generational differences in the ways that Black Americans learn about race, or racial socialization, perhaps with implications for distinct value orientations about Black politics. Using public opinion data from an original survey, the 2007 National Politics and Socialization Survey (NPSS), this paper compares the racial socialization experiences of four generations of Black Americans—(1) World War II generation (age 67 and older, born in and before 1940); (2) civil rights generation (ages 54–66, born 1953–1941); (3) mid-civil rights generation (ages 43–53, born 1964–1954); and (4) post-civil rights generation Black Americans (age 42 and under, born 1965 and after). Results of ordered probit regression analyses indicate minimal generational differences. Differences emerge in emphases on racial socialization messages about Black public behavior, Black intraracial relations, Black interracial relations, and composite factor loadings of Black consciousness and Black protectiveness messages.