In this article, we reflect on the pernicious nature of rhetoric aimed at soliciting Black community support for predatory urban development schemes. Highlighting recent examples of Urban One Casino + Resort’s development campaign in Richmond, Virginia, and the messaging leveraged by political leaders on behalf of SoFi stadium and the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, we find that discursive moves made by public and private stakeholders reflect what we call the “predatory rhetorics of urban development.” We argue that these rhetorics intend to enlist divested Black communities as supporters of development projects that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of economic and political elites. They do so by playing on Black desires for social and economic inclusion into American middle-class community life. Four common threads of predatory rhetoric appear across both contexts. They are 1) seizing the real needs and concerns of stigmatized places, 2) relying on representational politics to mitigate issues of trust, 3) the neoliberal framing of American internal colonization as a problem that requires extractive private development solutions and, finally, 4) dissimulating intra-community class interests to consolidate “Black needs.” We reflect on the outcomes supported by these rhetorics across both development projects and raise several points of further consideration as we hope for more organized responses to such rhetorics in the future.

This project draws on psychological and sociological social psychology to investigate immigration policy opinions among native-born non-Hispanic Whites. Using data from a suburban Chicago-area county that has seen substantial growth in the Latino immigrant population, we examine Anglos’ opinions on three dimensions of immigration policy: preferred immigration rate, resistance to immigration, and assistance for immigrants. Our central hypothesis is that liberalizing effects of Anglo/Latino interpersonal contact are conditioned on Anglos’ recognition of hardships and barriers faced by Latinos. Five of the six interaction effects we estimated were highly significant: Personal contact with Latinos does promote more positive, progressive immigration policy opinions, but only among some Anglos—those who were acquainted with immigrants who had run afoul of immigration law or believed there is substantial local discrimination against Latinos. The results are reminiscent of James Kluegel’s (1985) analysis of White Americans’ views about affirmative action: “If there isn’t a problem, you don’t need a solution.” Affirmation of local anti-Latino discrimination was the stronger moderator of contact effects and also showed main effects on immigration policy opinion stronger than the effects of interpersonal contact. Denial of anti-Latino discrimination may be a means used by Anglos to defend their group position.

A range of health effects are associated with debt burdens from ubiquitous access to expensive credit. These health effects are concerning, especially for women who owe multiple types of higher-cost debt simultaneously and experience significantly higher stress associated with their debt burdens when compared to men. While debt burdens have been shown to contribute to poor mental and physical health, the potential gendered and racialized effects are poorly understood. We conducted interviews between January and April 2021 with twenty-nine racially marginalized women who reported owing debt, and used theoretical concepts of predatory inclusion and intersectionality to understand their experiences. Women held many types of debt, most commonly from student loans, medical bills, and credit cards. Women described debt as a violent, abusive, and inescapable relationship that exacted consequential tolls on their health. Despite these, women found ways to resist the violence of debt, to care for themselves and others, and to experience joy in their daily lives.

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama was remarkable for the millions of volunteers and donors it inspired. In this article, we argue that the Obama campaign was inspirational because it communicated an ecosystem perspective—a perspective in which people care about something larger than the self. We describe the characteristics of ecosystem perspectives revealed in a program of social psychological research and how these characteristics translate to ecosystem leadership. We then consider Obama's speeches and actions at critical moments in the campaign that suggest to us an ecosystem perspective.

In the history of Québec, the 1960s are known as the time of the Quiet Revolution. That decade is commonly referred to as a major watershed since it marked the onset of a spectacular economic, social, and cultural recovery of the Francophone (“French Canadian”) population. Previously, and for two centuries, Francophone Québec had been dominated by the British Empire and English Canada. Throughout the period, as a cultural minority, it had borne the brunt of ethnoracial stereotypes and had suffered from discrimination in the workplace. I seek to investigate one dimension of the destigmatizing process that unfolded in the 1960s by focusing on the discursive strategies devised by a group of young leftist intellectuals who argued that Francophone Québec needed a new national language as a condition of its full emancipation. My research focuses on major contradictions that this radical group had to confront: 1) they could have rejected the vernacular, stigmatized language (known as joual) emblematic of the English domination, to adopt the Parisian French and thus become fully part of a great civilization, but by doing so they would have lapsed into another form of colonization since this superior language was considered as foreign and imposed at the expense of “authenticity”; and 2) they could have promoted joual as the authentic language of the nation and worked to free it from stigma, but this would have come at the price of a “parochialization” of Québec culture. I show that these intellectuals failed to invent the collective myths that would have transcended this double bind and other contradictions. Finally, the paper compares Québec to other societies in the New World in order to better highlight the distinctiveness of this case.

Hurricane Katrina was a horrible tragedy. Rather than reprising the obvious pitfalls of governmental response or the dire consequences of social inequalities, however, I pose a series of questions. In particular, I seek to highlight the blind spots and silences that the media frenzy generated. These range from the fate of the Native Americans and the complexity of New Orleans' racial history to the explanatory adequacy of the dominant narrative and the unreflective premise of the reconstruction effort. The precarious state of nature and civilization demands a way to think and act beyond short-term palliatives.

In this article I investigate how a group of Black men in college worked together to learn and practice the professional pose—professional styles and behaviors meant to navigate professional settings. I argue that these behaviors were adopted to preempt any potential discriminatory acts and would ideally disassociate them from the negative labels associated with Black men. Specifically, I examine how leaders of the group Uplift and Progress (UP) prepared other members and recruits by teaching them how to present themselves as professional Black men who were familiar with White middle-class practices. To further encourage their success, group members sought out opportunities to practice these styles in public. By cultivating this professional pose, they were able to claim their place at a White institution and distance themselves from the unfavorable stereotypes of Black men. This strategy also bolstered their reputation on campus and would ideally prepare them for the predominantly White workplace.

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.

Using methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as “country boys.” In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric—in this case, that something or someone “is not racist”—even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith’s success, particularly since he is best known for his “redneck” alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration initiated a dramatic policy shift towards a new housing voucher program, which simultaneously resulted in a near-halt in public and project-based assisted housing funding. When analyzing this historic policy shift, many affordable housing scholars have overemphasized race-absent narratives about fiscal austerity to explain the Reagan administration’s policy rejection of public housing and embrace of housing vouchers. To present a more comprehensive and intersectional history of the Reagan administration’s transition to housing vouchers, I employ an alternative methodological lens that I call Black feminist critical policy studies. This paper traces how the Office of Management and Budget and Housing and Urban Development officials relied on obscured racial and gender bias in their debate informing Reagan's alternative housing voucher program. By revealing the social bias endemic in the Reagan administration’s housing debate, this article illustrates that housing vouchers were not simply a neutral, cost-efficient policy tool but helped ensure low-income black mothers’ continued subjection to anti-welfare backlash, housing discrimination, and paternal supervision.

Using data from the 2008–2016 American Community Survey, we compare the racial identification responses of the Mexican-origin population residing in California to their counterparts in Texas, the two states with the largest and most established Mexican-origin populations. We draw on existing theory and research in order to derive a theoretical account of state-level historical mechanisms that are likely to lead to varying patterns of racial identification within the two states and a set of propositions predicting the nature of this variation. Results indicate that the Mexican-origin population in Texas is substantially more likely to claim White racial identification than their counterparts in California, even after accounting for factors related to racial identity formation. Further analysis indicates that this result is robust and buffets the notion that the historical development of the racial context in Texas has engendered a present-day context in which “Whiteness” carries a distinctive social value, relative to California’s ethnoracial context, and that this social value is reflected in the ways in which individuals of Mexican origin respond to race questions on U.S. Census surveys.

Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda County, California. Sociopolitical leaders have struggled to adjust to these changes. In an effort to facilitate limited English speakers’ access to critical municipal services, Oakland—the largest municipal in Alameda County—passed an Equal Access to Services Ordinance on May 8, 2001, which is a groundbreaking language access legislation for the City of Oakland’s public administration. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2011 American Community Survey, this study examines the impact of bilingual employment policies on the ethnoracial segmentation of Alameda County workers. Logistic regression reveals that bilingual employment policies have reorganized both targeted (i.e., public contact) and non-targeted occupations within the local government public administration sector. Specifically, Spanish/Chinese bilingual speakers made gains in the public administration sector (the intended effects), while Black monolingual English speakers experienced losses (the unintended effects). The representation of Black monolingual English speakers in public contact jobs within the local government public administration sector declined by as much as 18 percentage points after the implementation of the nation’s first municipal-level bilingual employment policy. The impact of bilingual employment policies on the East Bay’s Black/Brown relations and African American’s hold on low-skilled jobs in service industries is examined.

This research examines the impact of ethnic concentration and community socioeconomic status (SES) on elderly health in ethnically diverse communities in Xinjiang in northwest China. Effects of the concentration of two major ethnic populations are compared: the Han, which is the dominant ethnic group in China, and the Uyghur, the largest Muslim group in Xinjiang. Net of socioeconomic status, we find that population densities of the ethnic groups have a significant impact on our aggregate-level indicators of elderly health. Han density predicts good health, while Uyghur density predicts poor health. However, we do not find that SES indicators are independent predictors of community elder health. These findings suggest that rapidly developing economies, like those in China, do not necessarily provide the attention to health care that would result in improved quality of life and health status for the population.

We join Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of the racialized U.S. social system with a situational methodology developed by Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Irving Goffman to analyze how law works as a mechanism that connects formal legal equality with legal cynicism. The data for this analysis come from the trial of a Chicago police detective, Jon Burge, who as leader of an infamous torture squad escaped criminal charges for more than thirty years. Burge was finally charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, charges that obscured and perpetuated the larger structural reality of a code of silence that enabled racist torture of more than a hundred Black men. This case study demonstrates how the non-transparency of courtroom sidebars plays an important role in perpetuating systemic features of American criminal injustice: a code of silence, racist discrimination, and legal cynicism.

Canada is touted as a diverse, tolerant, and multicultural country where the prevailing understanding is that racial injustices emanating from structural oppression are not widespread. Analysing lived experiences of racialized participants who worked in publicly funded places of employment in British Columbia (BC), this qualitative study offers a phenomenological exploration of a particular manifestation of racial discrimination: that of quarantine-like containment of mobility at work. Examining undue restrictions and mobility limitations imposed on participants, this article will use three metaphors—stranger for racialized individuals, body for workplaces, and cordon minoritaire as the process of containing the mobility of strangers within the body—to present and discuss findings on: 1) excessive targeted scrutiny; 2) wrongful seating arrangements; 3) cold and transactional interactions; and, 4) bad faith references. In this regard, cordon minoritaire is presented as a novel analytical framework to illustrate the ways in which racialized workers were cordoned off, with their professional freedoms and career mobilities restricted, in order to quarantine White ecosystems of employment. Consequently, cordon minoritaire machinations created perniciously unequal conditions that fundamentally and unjustly constrained participants into working under discriminatory conditions—depravities that are at odds with whimsical notions of Canada as tolerant, multicultural, and morally superior to its neighbour south of the border.

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.

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.

In 1903, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois famously predicted that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. Indeed, during the past century, matters of race were frequently the cause of intense conflict and the stimulus for public policy decisions not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The founding of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race at the beginning of the twenty-first century acknowledges the continuing impact of Du Bois's prophecy, his pioneering role as one of the founders of the discipline of sociology in the American academy, and the considerable work that remains to be done as we confront the “problem” that Du Bois identified over a century ago.