Despite claims by normative theorists that gender diversity in Congress leads to better representation of women’s interests, the results of empirical studies have been largely mixed. While some scholars have found positive effects of gender diversity, others have found very little impact. We argue that it is not the presence of White and minority women alone that makes political institutions more responsive to women’s issues, but rather it is the organizational presence of minority men along with minority women who make similar claims for inclusion, power, and organizational formation to achieve those goals that matters. We examine to what extent gender and racial diversity have led to more attention to issues that directly and indirectly impact women. Using congressional hearings data from 1951–2004, we find that the increased presence of minority men and women legislators in the House, but less so in the Senate, is responsible for keeping women’s interests on the congressional agenda. We demonstrate how an intersectional and additive approach can add both theoretical and empirical value to the study of political representation by demonstrating the impact of women and minorities in Congress.

As the White populace in the United States moves toward numerical minority status by 2042, how might Whites respond to impending threat of losing their dominant group position? In particular, how will Whites react at selective, elite universities, where Asians are increasingly prominent and other non-Whites are maintaining or capturing a larger share of enrollments? Drawing on group position theory, I test White commitment to meritocracy as a public policy, using a survey-based experiment (599 California adult residents) to examine the importance grade point average should have in public university admissions. Whites decrease the importance that grade point average should have when Asian group threat is primed. However, White Californians increase the importance that grade point average should have when thinking about group threat from either Blacks or Blacks and Asians simultaneously. Ethnoracial outgroup threat shifts White support for meritocracy in different directions.

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.

This essay reconsiders the prospects for postracialist discourse. Critics tend not to take seriously enough the strongest case that can be made for viewing contemporary U.S. racial politics through the postracial lens. As a result, some important criticisms—the ones that survive postracialism’s reformulation in these stronger terms—have yet to be fully developed. It is important to develop a critique of the strongest form of postracialism, because this form of the view shares, or exemplifies, certain problems in garden-variety liberal antiracisms. Clarifying these problems in the more extreme conceptual environment of postracialism may help clarify their implications for the much more widespread commitments of mainstream post-civil rights thinking.

One of the principal theoretical and policy questions in the sociology of international migration is the extent to which post-1965 immigrants are either assimilating in the United States or remain stuck in an ethnic “underclass.” This paper aims to recast conventional approaches to assimilation through a temporal and spatial reorientation, with special attention to the Mexican-origin case. Attending to the effects of the replenishment of the Mexican-origin population through a constant stream of new immigrants shows significant assimilation taking place temporally between a given immigrant cohort and subsequent generations. Thinking outside the national box, through comparing the growing differences between Mexican migrants and their descendants, on the one hand, and Mexicans who stay in Mexico, on the other, reveals, spatially, a dramatic upward mobility and a process of “homeland dissimilation” that conventional accounts miss. We demonstrate the analytic utility of these two perspectives through an empirical comparison with more orthodox approaches to educational stratification.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s perspective on education was that the social and physical environments outside of schools matter to the learning that takes place inside schools. Existing research shows that due to environmental disparities in school and neighborhood contexts, Black and low-income children spend less time in activities that promote physical, cognitive, and social capabilities. These outside environmental factors influence the academic achievement gap. School gardens are noted as resources that capture the fluid environments between schools and neighborhoods. Little research, however, has quantitatively examined whether school gardens actually help to attenuate race and class inequality in academic achievement. We aim to determine how school gardens serve as gateways to help close the achievement gap. We analyze quantitative data on fifth graders’ math, reading, and science standardized test scores in Washington, DC with two main aims: (1) To compare differences between traditional schools and garden-based learning schools to determine whether students who have a school garden perform academically better than their counterparts; and (2) to examine whether the presence of a school garden plays a role in reducing race and social class disparities in academic achievement. We find that the presence of a school garden is associated with higher test scores and persists even when controlling for the race and class composition of students for reading and science. We conclude by discussing how school gardens can be used as a policy tool to create more environmental equity in urban areas.

In his allegorical tale “Racism's Secret Bonding,” legal scholar Derrick Bell imagined the occurrence of fourth of July “racial data storms.” During these storms, the consciousness of each and every White American was flooded with full information about the slave trade, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and contemporary discrimination, as well as a powerful emotional appreciation for the human suffering entailed by these conditions. Bell's “racial data storms” created great turmoil, anxiety, and demands for action. These demands focused on preventing future waves of “racial data storms” but also sought significant progressive policy intervention against discrimination and inequality. Bell mused that by the time the “racial data storms” had stopped, they “left behind them the greatest social reform movement America had ever known” (1992, p. 150).

The Democratic and Republican parties both pursue a Downsian median voter strategy that has direct implications for the role of African Americans and Latinos in national politics. The driving force in much national politics is still the politically polarizing Black-White divide in the South, which provides the necessary foundation for a nationally competitive Republican Party. This Black-White racial divide also pushes the Democratic Party to deracialize its campaigns as guided by the strategy of the Democratic Leadership Council. Counterintuitively, however, the more recent strategy of the Republican Party also contains symbolic appeals to racial inclusion with a specific focus on Latinos and a consistent marginalization of African Americans. These are efforts to soften their social conservatism to appeal to moderate “swing” White voters. We conclude that the current politics of race and ethnicity in national party politics, by Republicans and Democrats, can serve to marginalize the interests of both African Americans and Latinos in substantive policymaking.

Although political science provides many useful tools for analyzing the effects of natural and social catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the scenes of devastation and inequality in New Orleans suggest an urgent need to adjust our lenses and reorient our research in ways that will help us to uncover and unpack the roots of this national travesty. Treated merely as exceptions to the “normal” functioning of society, dramatic events such as Katrina ought instead to serve as crucial reminders to scholars and the public that the quest for racial equality is only a work in progress. New Orleans, we argue, was not exceptional; it was the product of broader and very typical elements of American democracy—its ideology, attitudes, and institutions. At the dawn of the century after “the century of the color-line,” the hurricane and its aftermath highlight salient features of inequality in the United States that demand broader inquiry and that should be incorporated into the analytic frameworks through which American politics is commonly studied and understood. To this end, we suggest several ways in which the study of racial and other forms of inequality might inform the study of U.S. politics writ large, as well as offer a few ideas about ways in which the study of race might be re-politicized. To bring race back into the study of politics, we argue for greater attention to the ways that race intersects with other forms of inequality, greater attention to political institutions as they embody and reproduce these inequalities, and a return to the study of power, particularly its role in the maintenance of ascriptive hierarchies.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the Caribbean attained greater socioeconomic status than African Americans. Although Black immigrants remain an understudied population, recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans continue to outperform African Americans in the labor market. Given that these groups share a set of racialized physical features, some contend that this gap highlights the role of cultural attributes in the manufacture of Black ethnic and Black-White racial disparities. In this study, I investigate the degree to which cultural attributes associated with a specific form of the model minority hypothesis are responsible for disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I use data from the National Survey of American Life in order to test for the relative roles of work ethic, economic autonomy, oppositionality, family structure and function, and racial attitudes in the manufacture of disparate labor market outcomes between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I find mixed support for the idea that Afro Caribbeans constitute a model minority vis-à-vis African Americans and that differences in model minority attributes are only partially responsible for these labor market disparities. My findings suggest that racial inequality will not be undone if the racially stigmatized and marginalized simply work harder and complain less about race and racism in the United States.

Deeply embedded in everyday discourse, social interactions, and institutional practices, racism negatively affects the health and well-being of Black people in the United States. Theory and empirical research on the impact of racism on health have focused on stressful events and individual perceptions of racism, although racism is not expressed only as racist acts. Racism subordinates people and diminishes their importance; stereotyping is one of the most insidious forms of such subordination. The stereotypes that underlie social discourse about race influence how others perceive Black people and, to some extent, how Black people perceive themselves. Thus stereotypes help maintain and promote racism. Despite the importance of stereotypes in understanding racism and its effects on Black people, little attention has been paid to the impact of stereotypes on health. This paper explores the adverse effects of stereotypes on African American health, focusing on the psychological and structural pathways through which stereotyping operates. Psychological pathways are salient for these reasons: stereotyping constitutes a form of racism that may be experienced vicariously; stereotypes induce vigilance and rumination as people caricatured by them anticipate their use and spend time trying to disconfirm them; stereotypes may be internalized. Structural pathways occur because stereotypes that portray Black people as deviant, undeserving, and ultimately less human negatively affect opportunity structures and physical environments.

This research examines the extent to which negative attitudes toward African Americans influence public reactions to restoring political rights to felons. We argue that race-neutral policies, such as felon disenfranchisement laws, are non-separable from racial considerations, as images of criminals and felons are typically associated with Blacks. Such attitudes produce collateral consequences for felons, hampering the restoration of their full political rights and, ultimately, their citizenship. Predispositions, such as racial attitudes and political ideology, provide both racial and nonracial justifications for supporting these laws, yet, there are no empirical accounts of their relational effects on opinion toward felons’ rights. Using nationally representative survey data, we find that racialized resentment and ideology exert the most influence on the reactions to policies seeking political rights for felons as well as beliefs about the value of doing so. Consistent with much of the literature on attitudes toward ameliorative racial policies, higher levels of racial resentment strongly predict lower support for felons’ political rights among both conservatives and liberals, yet, racial resentment is most influential among liberals. Conservatives exhibit the highest levels of racial resentment, but its impact is depressed more by agreement on both racial attitudes and opposition to political rights of felons.

This paper outlines the urban theory of W. E. B. Du Bois as presented in the classic sociological text The Philadelphia Negro. I argue that Du Bois’s urban theory, which focused on how the socially-constructed racial hierarchy of the United States was shaping the material conditions of industrial cities, prefigured important later work and offered a sociologically richer understanding of urban processes than the canonized classical urban theorists—Weber, Simmel, and Park. I focus on two key areas of Du Bois’s urban theory: (1) racial stratification as a fundamental feature of the modern city and (2) urbanization and urban migration. While The Philadelphia Negro has gained recent praise for Du Bois’s methodological achievements, I use extensive passages from the work to demonstrate the theoretical importance of The Philadelphia Negro and to argue that this groundbreaking work should be considered canonical urban theory.

Using Black women's responses to same-race sexual assault, I demonstrate how scholars can use interpersonal violence to understand social processes and develop conceptual models. Specifically, I extend the concept of racial appraisal by shifting the focus from how indirect victims (e.g., family and friends) use race to appraise a traumatic event to how survivors themselves deploy race in the aftermath of rape. Relying on 111 interviews with Black women survivors in four cities, I analyze how race, gender, and class intersect and contour interpretations of sexual assault. I argue that African Americans in this study use racially inscribed cultural signifiers to root their understandings of rape within a racist social structure (i.e., a racial appraisal)—which they also perceive as sexist and, for some, classist—that encourages their silence about same-race sexual assault. African and Caribbean immigrants, however, often avoid the language of social structure in their rape accounts and use cultural references to distance themselves from African Americans. Last, I discuss the implications of my findings for Black feminist/intersectional theory.

This article offers a critique of the very claim that we live in postracial times, and examines the residue of old systems of racism intermeshed with new forms of racism that perpetuate systematic institutional racism. I argue that to combat institutional racism we need post-racism rather than postracialism. Additionally, I reject the Black-white Binary as the singular or even primary paradigm for understanding racism in order to challenge narrow conceptualizations of racism. Finally, I argue for a more nuanced and complex analysis of Blackness.

Prominent U.S. police officials have advocated greater acknowledgement of the role of law enforcement in historical racial injustice, including violence, in hopes of transforming police community relations. While an encouraging development, these calls for transformative justice understate the scope of this historical and contemporary problem, neglecting the often extralegal nature of police involved violence and injustice, its array of spectacular and more subtle forms, and the layered roles of state and non-state actors in perpetrating and sanctioning White supremacist violence. Drawing on historical records of racist violence implicating police, this paper analyzes overlapping aspects of White supremacy in policing, including racist ideologies and political acts of law enforcement officers and officials, and more routine underpolicing of White supremacism by legal authorities. This backdrop of normative racist violence - physical, cultural, and structural – must inform a contemporary transformative justice agenda, including demands for explicit and robust protection from White supremacism in policing.

In the realm of electoral politics, a growing number of women, African Americans, and Latinos now serve at the highest levels of government. For many Americans, the bipartisan presence of representatives who are people of color and/or women is proof that we live in a “post-feminist” and “postracial” era in which institutions are now fundamentally fair and accessible. Rather than assuming that racial presence is synonymous with racial justice, this essay turns to aesthetic theory to advocate for a new understanding of presence—not as proof that racial or gender justice has been achieved but as a kind of beauty that is experienced as a form of visible certitude. Drawing on the work of Hannah Pitkin, alongside writings on descriptive representation for Latinos and African Americans, this essay stresses the importance of judgment, arguing that on questions of social justice, a racially diverse elite is simultaneously ethically valuable and politically indeterminate.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern states decreed that one drop of African American blood made a multiracial individual Black, and even today, multiracial Blacks are typically perceived as being Black only, underscoring the enduring legacy and entrenchment of the one-drop rule of hypodescent. But how are Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry perceived? Based on analyses of census data and in-depth interviews with interracial couples with children and multiracial adults, I find that the children of Asian-White and Latino-White couples are much less constrained by strict racial categories. Racial identification often shifts according to situation, and individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines, as White, or as American. Like their Irish and Italian immigrant forerunners, the Asian and Latino ethnicities of these multiracial Americans are adopting the symbolic character of European, White ethnicity. We appear to be entering a new era of race relations in which the boundaries of Whiteness are beginning to expand to include new non-White groups such as Asians and Latinos, with multiracial Asians and Latinos at the head of the queue. However, even amidst the new racial and ethnic diversity, these processes continue to shut out African Americans, illustrating a pattern of “Black exceptionalism” and the emergence of a Black–non-Black divide in the twenty-first century.

Despite considerable examination, scholars have yet to definitively establish the relationship between a legislator's racial background and his or her legislative activities. We assess the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation by discerning whether Black members of the U.S. House are more likely to promote group interests in their varied capacities as elected officials than are similarly positioned non-Black legislators. Our empirical tests utilize the most appropriate econometric models and techniques to analyze data from four Congresses spanning two distinctive districting regimes and incorporating several elements of representational behaviors. The findings are clear: Black members represent group interests more vociferously than non-Black members, including liberal non-Black Democrats from similar districts. Moreover, because Black members do not receive electoral benefits for engaging in such behavior, these legislators have policy-based motivation for representing Black interests. These results have profound practical implications for minority political representation and the future of identity politics.

Race and patriotism were recurring themes during the 2008 presidential campaign that were used to highlight differences between Barack Obama and his opponents. Yet we know little about how racism and patriotism ultimately affected support for Obama among Whites. Appeals to working-class Whites, a lot of which were thinly veiled allusions to Obama's race and perceived lack of patriotism, also figured prominently in the campaign. Accordingly, this paper explores how racism and patriotism shaped support for Obama, as well as the extent to which the effect of each is moderated by class. We find that rising symbolic racism dampened his support among Whites, as did patriotism. Moreover, we find the effects of patriotism on support for Obama were contingent upon class.