Within the last eighteen months we have seen both the Katrina disaster and the Obama candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination for president reshape the political landscape within the United States. Equally important, for our analytical purposes, both phenomena are strong indicators of the evolving nature of the American racial order. The Obama candidacy points to important changes in the racial terrain within the United States. His candidacy highlights the more tolerant nature of public racial discourse in the United States—it was not very long ago when a Black candidate for president was considered unelectable. Obama's candidacy also highlights how immigration from non-European countries has fundamentally reshaped the racial landscape. Obama is, of course, not the “traditional” Black candidate, as his African heritage is due to recent immigration, not the slave trade. Relatedly, his candidacy also highlights the evolving nature of, and contestation over, racial categories. Over the past decade we have seen similar processes transforming conceptualizations/categories such as Hispanic, Latino/a, and Asian American. With even more recent waves of immigration from Africa and the African diaspora, we are now seeing the category Black under heavy contestation—which was brought to the (White) public eye as a result of the furor over whether Obama is “Black” enough to garner African American support and whether (as Senator Joseph Biden implied) part of Obama's crossover appeal is the perceived absence of a “tainted” African American cultural heritage. The Obama candidacy is emblematic of one type of change that marks the American racial landscape.

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).

Hurricane Katrina exposed the politics of race, poverty, and inequality to broad public view for the first time in a generation. But the storm and its aftermath also constituted a metaphor for the deep tension between color-blind and race-conscious models of politics that has long been one of the central and defining themes of U.S. politics. In this essay, I explore Hurricane Katrina as a window onto this fundamental dualism in U.S. political culture, its ambivalent embrace of both color blindness and race consciousness. In the storm's immediate aftermath, President George W. Bush became the unlikely mouthpiece of this dualism, and I examine his contradictory statements about race in the storm's wake and place them in historical context. I connect these presidential statements to the broader political context that shapes race policymaking in order to ask whether Katrina and the political response it provoked might generate a policy response that takes seriously the problem of racial inequality exposed by the storm. A brief account of a parallel historical example of race-conscious policy emerging from political conditions apparently dominated by color blindness, the emergence of affirmative action in employment in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizes the mixture of ideological and strategic, political factors that shape U.S. race politics and policy, and suggests a set of ideological and institutional conditions that may be necessary to generate such a dramatic change in policy direction. I conclude by drawing some lessons from this history for post-Katrina race politics.

White Americans have long resisted the idea of reparations to the descendants of slaves. We examine the psychological basis of such resistance, primarily testing the possibility that resistance may be a function of Whites' perception of the ongoing cost of being Black. White participants (n = 958) across twelve independent samples (varying in age, student status, and geographic location) were asked variations of the question: How much should you be paid to continue to live the remainder of your life as a Black person? Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost/White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations. Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black. The implications of our findings for color-blind and multiculturalist conceptual approaches are discussed.This work was facilitated by a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. In addition, we are greatly indebted to Hal Arkes for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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.

Although Hurricane Katrina generated a compassionate public response toward those affected, it did not lead to a serious discourse about the nature of poverty in America, nor did it lead policymakers to re-examine antipoverty policies. In this paper, we present data on long-run trends in the economic status of African Americans and Whites. We demonstrate that even though earnings are lower and poverty rates are higher for African Americans than for Whites, the economic experiences of poor Americans have been similar over the last three decades. The period since the early 1970s has been an era of slow growth in median earnings for all workers and falling real earnings for less-educated men. Although the economy has generated increasing economic hardship for less-educated workers, antipoverty policies have not taken up the slack. If the United States had in place a more comprehensive safety net, the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the poor would have been smaller than they were. We discuss a series of policies that address the broad poverty problem that persists. However, since these safety net reforms are not likely to be implemented, we also propose a “disaster-assistance safety net” that could better serve the poor in the aftermath of any future natural or other disaster.

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.

A succession of policies aimed at inclusion and accommodation of racial and ethnic groups in the United States is tied together by scholars who assert that the last forty years witnessed a broad “Minority Rights Revolution.” Nevertheless, subnational policies addressing racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities vary greatly and hardly resemble a uniform orientation; this variation provides compelling reasons as well as an analytical opportunity to explore the relationship between policies considered part of the minority rights transformation. Using state civil rights policies from the 1960s as a proxy, we find that an egalitarian tradition within states consistently explains the variation in contemporary multicultural policies and policies regarding immigrant access to social welfare benefits.This research was funded in part by a grant from the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado. The authors would like to thank Andrew Thangasamy for his research assistance.

How do White members of Black-White interracial families negotiate the meanings of race, and particularly Whiteness? Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness, this article argues that interracial intimacy is a microlevel political site where White people can acquire a critical analytical lens that we conceptualize as racial literacy. This article fills a gap in the empirical and theoretical literature on race and Whiteness by including gay, lesbian, and heterosexual families on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects involving one hundred and twenty-one interracial families in the United Kingdom and the eastern United States, we provide an analysis of how White people learn to translate racial codes, decipher racial structures, and manage the racial climate in their communities. We draw on “racial consciousness” interviews conducted with one hundred and one heterosexual families and twenty gay and lesbian families to present seven portraits that illuminate three dimensions of racial literacy: double consciousness, negotiation of local racial meanings, and seeing routine forms of everyday racism.We would like to thank Kathleen Blee, Maxine Leeds Craig, Charles Gallagher, Caroline Knowles, Yaba Amgborale Blay, Joan Grassbaugh Forry, Kaila Adia Story, and two anonymous reviewers at the Du Bois Review for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Winddance Twine also benefited from the comments of the audiences in the Sociology Seminar series at the City University of London, Cambridge University, and the University of Manchester. The title of this essay is taken from John Hartigan, Jr.'s (1997, 1999) provocative notion of a racial gap: a chasm across which everyday experiences of Whites “on the ground” map imperfectly onto a cohesive and unifying concept of Whiteness (Frankenberg 1997).

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.

Neoconservative lobbyist Grover Norquist has declared that he wishes so to diminish government in the U.S. that he can drown it in a bathtub. This paper will address the ways in which Katrina has laid bare how the neoconservative attack on the state since the early 1980s, and especially in the past five years, has (1) targeted for devastation those public agencies supportive of the racially defined poor, thus rendering them far more vulnerable to disasters, both natural and social; and (2) shifted state resources away from poorer, especially African American and Latino, citizens to the interests of wealthier (and overwhelmingly White) Americans, in effect privatizing the definition and implementation of public programs in the name of “charitable contributions”. This trend has also had the effect of shifting racial discriminations from the public to the private realm, thus making racism less visible and more difficult to address, while at the same time easier to deny in practice.

Using the critical tools of social science, W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the White supremacism of his era. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he presented his views on social inquiry in various programmatic pieces (e.g., “The Study of the Negro Problems” and “The Atlanta Conferences”), all the while conducting empirical research on the conditions and experiences of African Americans. This essay examines the ways in which Du Bois's programmatic statements were elaborated in his early works of social science, notably: his goal of scientific truth, the specificity of his research scope, and the research topics for investigation. Three of Du Bois's projects—The Philadelphia Negro; The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia; and the Atlanta University Publications—are detailed. In addition, this essay derives several insights from Du Bois that address issues common to debates in the philosophy of social science, such as the controversies over researcher neutrality and the rigor of politically engaged scholarship.

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster that destroyed New Orleans, a major U.S. city, and it is reasonable to expect all Americans to react with sympathy and support for the disaster's victims and efforts to restore the city. From another vantage point, however, Hurricane Katrina can be seen more narrowly, as a disaster that disproportionately afflicted the poor Black inhabitants of New Orleans. Past research demonstrates a large racial divide in the support of issues with clear racial overtones, and we examine the possibility of a racial divide in reactions to Katrina using data from a national telephone survey of White and Black Americans. We find large racial differences in sympathy for the hurricane's victims, the adequacy of the federal government's response, and support for proposed solutions to mend hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, verifying the racial nature of the disaster. Blacks viewed the hurricane victims more positively than did Whites, drew a sharper distinction between and felt more sympathy for those stranded than for those who evacuated New Orleans, and were substantially more supportive of government efforts to improve the situation of hurricane victims and rebuild New Orleans. This racial gap is as large as any observed in recent polls; persists even after controlling for education, income, and other possible racial differences; and documents more fully differences that were hinted at in public opinion polls reported at the time of the disaster. We spell out the implications of this divide for racial divisions within U.S. politics more generally.

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.

There are some telltale signs that we might really be living in the kind of moment that academic provocateurs have labeled “postracial” (i.e., indifferent to historically self-evident expectations about race relations and race-based identifications): Duke lacrosse players, all of them White, who taunt a Black collegian-cum-stripper with carefully crafted quips better suited for a comedy club than a Klan rally (“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”); a Black Ivy League professor testifying under oath that a baseball bat-wielding White vigilante who begins pummeling a Black man in Brooklyn by calling his victim a “nigger” does not necessarily harbor any race-specific animus; a former Education Secretary seemingly shocked and appalled that African Americans would be shocked and appalled by his comments regarding the hypothetical abortion of African American babies as a technique for lowering crime rates; and any of the dissenting judicial opinions penned by the lone Black justice on the nation's highest court. Race is doing some very strange things these days.

This paper explores some implications of Hurricane Katrina, especially as it affected, and will continue to affect, African Americans. Our observations stem largely from our ongoing examination of the demography of African Americans, including motivations to leave the South historically, and recent changes generating a significant “return migration” of African Americans to the South. The specific case of Katrina-related migration requires examining issues of race and class—including the destinations to which Katrina's victims were displaced and key features of the place to which they might return. We leave for others the evaluation of ongoing political debates concerning responsibility for who did what, and why. Our focus is on New Orleans as a place, and what prospects exist for reconstituting that place in light of past, present, and prospective demographic trends. We first review recent work on place and identity, and describe the general features of past migration patterns of African Americans—both from the South and back to the South. We then identify important features of New Orleans as a distinctive place on the U.S. landscape, in part by comparing New Orleans with other southern cities using the 1% Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) sample of 2000 U.S. Census data. Finally, we assess the prospects of the reconstitution of New Orleans as a place resembling what it was prior to Katrina, by examining the intersecting factors of race, class, and ethnicity in shaping how, and by whom, the city may be resettled. We project that the city will be smaller, more White and Hispanic, more affluent, and more tourism/ entertainment-oriented than its pre-Katrina reality. Given the difficulty of making such projections, we conclude with an analysis of various demographic portraits of what the racial composition of New Orleans may become, depending on (1) its future size, and (2) relative rates of return migration by White and Black New Orleanians.

Americans like to believe that “we are all in the same boat” when disaster strikes. Using a Du Boisian framework, this article provides a multivariate analysis of survey data from victims of Hurricane Katrina to determine whether there were racial differences in their perceptions about rescue and relief efforts. The data collected from survivors show that Blacks and Whites drew very different lessons from the tragedy. There was widespread agreement among Black survivors that the government's response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm's victims had been White. Whites, in contrast, were more likely to feel that the race of the victims did not make a difference in the government's response. Less than half of White victims, but more than three-quarters of Black victims, held that Hurricane Katrina pointed out persisting problems of racial inequality. There were, however, few racial differences in perceptions about the role of income in the aftermath of Katrina. Most Blacks and Whites agreed with the idea that low-income and middle-income victims of the hurricane received similar treatment. But when asked a similar question about the role of race, racial differences reemerged. Also, rather than this being a difference of opinion only between poor Blacks and middle-class Whites, these results suggest that there were also differences between the lowest-income Blacks and middle-income Blacks and perhaps an even larger difference between middle-income Blacks and middle-income Whites in terms of how they viewed the government's response. Income and other sociodemographic differences did not explain racial differences in perceptions about the role of race in the aftermath of the hurricane. The article concludes that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed the wide gulf between the nation's haves and have-nots as well as the nation's persistent racial divide.

One of the most interesting developments in recent years in the field of African American studies has been the expansion of its horizons beyond the North American theater of Black life and expression that has for so long been featured as its principal focus, and often, in many academic departments, as the only one. Yet, as the early scholarship which serves as the foundation for the field demonstrated, the Black experience in the New World has always presented a continental dimension that provides the concrete grounding for the historical perspective from which that experience must be viewed and understood. This was the methodological premise underlying the work of scholars such as Melville Herskovits (1941) and Roger Bastide (1967), who ranged throughout the Black world in quest of the lived connections that gave an original African imprint to the Black experience, while providing theoretical validity to the very concept of a Black world. In the works of such scholars, the consciousness of a continuum that connects Africa to the Black experience in the New World underlies the effort to comprehend the Black diaspora itself in its manifold wholeness.

Publications about multiracial identity and the multiracial population increased significantly prior to the 2000 U.S. Census. Most of these publications emerged after 1997—a significant year in the recent history of studies on the multiracial population, as this was the year the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established new guidelines for collecting data on race, allowing people to choose more than one race (Office of Management and Budget 1997). It quickly became evident that this change in how the federal government tallies race was a significant event that merited the attention of academics. This surge in research on multiracial identity and the multiracial movement reflected, on the one hand, a push by multiracial advocates for more attention to the complexities of “being multiracial” and, on the other hand, a group of scholars interested in understanding the unfolding of these events.

While most Americans agree that government officials failed to act promptly to provide food, water, shelter, and other relief to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they disagree about the racial relevance of this negligence. Nevertheless, the unavoidable images of the storm's disproportionately high number of African American victims among those unable to flee a foretold disaster brought into view the specter of racial inequality. While most theorists and commentators have used race and poverty as the primary lenses through which to view Katrina's human toll, this paper utilizes linguistic rubrics and relative immigration status to address inequities globally suffered by people of African descent. In the case of American Blacks, our emphasis is on Blacks with ancestral ties to enslaved Africans, since those who suffered most in the wake of Katrina were not merely Black, but also direct descendants of American slaves of African origin. Framing the discussion in terms of linguistic ancestry, its relationship to slavery, and instances of (c)overt social and educational apartheid born of statutory racial segregation, I develop a Historical Hardship Index as an alternative way to advance equality in the period after the end of African slave trade. The proposed Historical Hardship Index can be applied—with slight regional modifications—to anyone, anywhere, without reference to race.