The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement have brought ethnic and racial inequalities to the forefront of public conversation on both sides of the Atlantic. However, research shows that people routinely overestimate the progress made towards equality and underestimate disparities between racial and ethnic majority and minority groups. Common among the American public is a naive belief in equal opportunity that stands in sharp contrast to the reality of structural racial inequity. Across the Atlantic, Dutch people’s self-perception of a tolerant, progressive, and egalitarian society means that racism and discrimination are topics often avoided, rendering invisible the stigmatization of ethnic and racial minorities. The result is racism of omission: ethnic and racial disparities are minimized and attributed to factors other than discrimination, which leads to legitimize inequities and justify non-intervention. Against this background, we field an internationally comparative randomized survey experiment to study whether (willful) ignorance about racial and ethnic inequality can be addressed through the provision of information. We find that facts about ethnic and racial inequality, on the whole, (1) have the greatest impact on people’s perceptions of inequality as compared to their explanations of inequality and policy attitudes, (2) register most strongly with majority-group White participants as compared to participants from minority groups, (3) cut across partisan lines, and (4) effect belief change most consistently in the Netherlands, as compared to the United States. We make sense of these findings through the lens of how ‘shocking’ the information provided was to different groups of participants.

This study investigated the mental health significance of Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election among Blacks. Upon his re-election, we hypothesized Blacks would either feel symbolic empowerment or relative deprivation. They would feel symbolic empowerment because a man who identifies as Black won re-election to the nation’s highest office. His second victory should generate optimism, given his status as a historic first. Alternatively, they would feel relative deprivation because The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 curtailed what Obama could achieve. More important, he withered when afforded opportunities to challenge White supremacy and championed individual responsibility. Using a quasi-experimental design with nationally representative survey data from the 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we predicted Blacks’ preelection and postelection poor mental health days. We found no time period main effects. However, Black men with less than a college degree experienced 1.11 more poor mental health days postelection whereas Black men with a college degree or more experienced 2.93 fewer poor mental health days postelection. These findings support relative deprivation theory.

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court ended enforcement of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. As a result, over 3500 municipalities were released from the preclearance requirement to seek federal approval prior to enacting changes to elections. Despite the Court’s majority opinion that Section 5 was no longer needed, practices like enforcing strict voter ID requirements and last-minute polling place changes increased dramatically after Shelby County. However, one underexamined election change is changing municipal boundaries through annexations. Municipal annexations can weaken minority political representation in municipal elections if minority population shares decrease after annexation. Using difference-in-differences models, I analyze annexations for over 15,000 municipalities from 2007–2020 across all forty U.S. states with annexable land. I find no evidence that municipalities previously covered by Section 5 increased annexation activity or that they conducted more annexations that dilute Black and minority resident shares after Shelby County. Patterns of annexations pre-Shelby County suggest that the null finding can be explained by the limited effectiveness of Section 5 in preventing minority dilution through annexations when it was in place. This study underscores how municipal boundaries can be manipulated to perpetuate inequality and the limitations of federal legislation in preventing this practice.

In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

While Republicans enjoyed unified control of the national government during the 1920s, scandals involving executive patronage and GOP state bosses in the South dogged the national party throughout the decade. The Republican Party in the South had been a set of “rotten boroughs” for decades, used by national politicians—especially presidents—for the sole purpose of controlling delegates at the Republican National Convention. This patronage-for-delegates arrangement was generally understood among political elites, but the murder-suicide involving a U.S. postmaster in Georgia in April 1928 brought the Southern GOP’s patronage practices to national light. This forced Republican leaders in an election year to call for a Senate investigation. Chaired by Sen. Smith W. Brookhart (R-IA), the committee investigation lasted for eighteen months, covered portions of two Republican presidential administrations, and showed how state GOP leaders in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas engaged in office selling. The fallout would be a thorn in the side of President Herbert Hoover, who tried to clean up the corrupt GOP organizations in the South—and build an electorally-viable Republican Party in the ex-Confederate states—but largely failed.

Research finds that individuals of dark complexions are more likely to face prejudice or be discriminated against in a variety of contexts. Referred to as colorism, skin-tone-based discrimination has major implications for various life outcomes. Research on social interactions suggests that lighter skin tones are associated with a higher level of physical attractiveness, which is of particular interest for this study. This study uses quantitative survey data collected from undergraduate and graduate students from across the United States to explore the relationship between colorism, gender, and perceived physical attraction via a modified version of Harvey, Tennial, and Bank’s In-Group Colorism Scale (ICS). Analyses measured the relationship between a participant’s own skin tone, which was self-assessed via comparison to images modeled after make-up swatches, and results on a subscale of the ICS which measures attraction to lighter skin tones. Our results suggest that gender has a significant impact on perceived physical attractiveness, with male-identifying participants placing more weight on the significance of skin tone when determining physical attraction. Implications for future research and translational implications are also discussed.

The stigma faced by unemployed Americans places a toll on their wellbeing and decreases their life chances. While all unemployed Americans are subject to stigmatization, the stigma levied on Black Americans may be particularly potent due to racializing stereotypes that associate Blackness with the undeserving poor, including the inability to obtain employment. Given the social and economic challenges Black people face, research elucidating the racial complexities of unemployment stigma is needed. Through in-depth open format face-to-face interviews of unemployed individuals residing in urban and suburban areas, this study produces an alternative perspective on how impression management techniques are connected to both internalization and mitigation of unemployment stigma. This study contributes to employment, race, and stigma literature by providing a theoretical frame that synthesizes Du Boisian and dramaturgical concepts to conceptualize an “unemployed worker-self.” Through this framing, I find variations across race and community type in impression management techniques executed by unemployed people. I conclude with suggestions for future research and potential applications for the theoretical frame developed in this study.

How was former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric crafted to appeal to a public that cross-cut class, racial, and ethnic boundaries? Significant scholarship has addressed the prevalence of racism and xenophobia in Trump’s language; nevertheless Trump was able to build a broad political coalition despite this derogatory speech. This article examines the ways in which Trump leverages producerist discourse by using race as a modality to construct a moral argument about the worthiness of the figure of the ‘maker’—the entrepreneurial protagonist of his rhetoric. Using a discourse analytic framework, it highlights how Trump uses stance to indirectly racialize and gender the subjects of his talk. The aim of this article is twofold. First, furthering scholarship on racialization and colorblind racism, it offers a discourse-based method for analyzing how an explicitly racist and exclusionary discourse can be interpreted by audiences as an inclusive one. Second, building on scholarship on Trump’s rhetoric, it shows how racialized, gendered, and anti-Semitic language is part of a discursive formation that makes the neoliberal ideal of producerism appealing to an expanding political coalition—paradoxically because it is a moralizing discourse that names outsiders. By analyzing stance-taking within discourses of ressentiment, it is possible to understand how racialized and gendered ideologies and anti-Semitism work together to simultaneously include and exclude non-White audiences.

For the past several years, affirmative action policies and their implementation have constituted a field of debate and academic research, in dialog with social movements and public policies carried out by various Latin American and Caribbean states, to mitigate persistent historical inequalities related to discrimination and racism. This article presents the results of the implementation of affirmative action policies for Afro-descendants in Uruguay in the workplace between 2014 and 2019, the first five years of implementation of Law No.19122 (which establishes a period of fifteen years in total for its validity). These results were obtained through interviews with key informants and through documentary analysis of the annual reports of the National Civil Service Office for the period under consideration.

Much sociological attention has focused on Black identity within the United States. Less attention, however, has been given to understanding how immigrant and native-born streams of U.S. Black Muslims articulate American identity. In this study I ask: how do second-generation Black American Muslims and indigenous Black American Muslims compare in the ways they narrate connections among race, American identity, and Islam? Using data from thirty-one in-depth interviews with Black Muslims living in Houston, TX, I find that racial double-consciousness complicates American identity for respondents. While indigenous Black American respondents critique racist U.S. histories and structural inequities, I argue that in certain spaces Muslim identity reinforces American identity. For second-generation respondents, however, American identity is reinforced through embracing immigrant status. This study extends Du Boisian double-consciousness by making a case for “layered double-consciousness.” I argue that layered double-consciousness better explains how Black Muslims perceive their racial, religious, and national identities across macro levels within the context of the United States and meso levels within the Muslim American community.

In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.

During the 1930s and 1940s, W. E. B. Du Bois was not only interested in European colonialism in Africa, but he also approached the racial situation in the Americas, particularly Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba. In this article, I examine how Du Bois engaged strategically in a critique of racism in Cuba and the United States. I analyze how Du Bois discussed the Cuban color line as linked to colonial dispossession and explore the formation of the anti-colonial critique within global sociology. Du Bois’s letters, manuscripts, and field notes during his first visit to Cuba in 1941 reveal how, to a large extent, Du Bois shared the prevailing vision of Cuba as a society free from racism. Although Du Bois only partially captured how racism worked in Cuba, he constantly affirmed how the analysis of the Cuban color line implies dealing with the analysis of American imperialism. Thus, Du Bois’s approach to Cuba was fundamental in two senses. First, it led him to consider the contradictions between cultural integration and social and economic equality in a setting other than the United States. Second, Du Bois developed the fundamental place assigned to the critique of U.S. imperialism within global sociology. At the same time, Du Bois’s connection with Cuba elaborates the understanding of Du Bois’s global sociology.

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.

Different aspects of the African American experience during World War One have been covered since the release in 1974 of Florette Henri’s and Arthur E. Barbeau’s The Unknown Soldiers: African American Troops in World War I. All these studies concur in their assumptions that World War One opened up a new quest for full citizenships and galvanized soldiers and officers alike. A new era started right in the middle of the conflict fueling African American units with hope of change. World War One turned into the matrix for a new form of militancy. However, perhaps World War One did not only trigger a new form of militancy among African Americans. Something else might have snapped in African American (and perhaps African) leaders of the time. What if World War One had nurtured the awakening of a “colored manifest destiny”?

A New Du Boisian Sociology has recently clarified, elevated, and synthesized Du Bois’s sociological contributions. We argue that more systematic and detailed study of Du Bois’s research methodologies, with an eye towards their contemporary applicability, can further strengthen this body of scholarship. Here we begin this effort with sustained attention to Du Bois’s use of quantitative data and methods during a productive and illustrative period around the turn of the twentieth century (1898–1902). This adds a level of depth and specificity to a subset of existing Du Bois scholarship that has more generally noted quantitative inquiry as one aspect of Du Bois’s social-scientific approach of mixed-methods triangulation. We detail how and why Du Bois developed an inductive, theoretically generative approach to his research on race. This orientation appears, at first glance, to be a misfit for contemporary quantitative sociology, which is currently skewed towards deductive theory testing and causal inference. We demonstrate that Du Bois’s quantitative methodology invites sociologists to return to exploratory, descriptive, and theoretically generative quantitative research based on creative syntheses of primary and secondary data that span generations and levels of institutional and geographic aggregation. Such data can, among other possibilities, assess within- and between-race comparisons and intersections of race with factors including class, gender, age, place, and time. Our study also enters Du Bois, as historical precedent, into current debates regarding quantification’s productive role, if any, in social science research on race/racism and other axes of systemic inequality.

Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” has yet to receive a critical analysis congruent to the ethos of Black Studies, which impels us to contextualize struggles over knowledge formation as part of struggles for, against, and over Black community. In this article, I situate the early Patterson not only within an imperial academy but also within its contested Black spaces of post-emancipation independence. I demonstrate how Patterson’s intellectual path was shaped by his interactions with the Rastafari movement around the cusp of Jamaica’s independence. But I also argue that in his evaluation of the movement Patterson denuded Rastafari of reason. Examining the same concerns of Patterson but through Rastafari reasoning demonstrates that his concept of “social death” might be problematic in some important ways to the purposes of Black Studies.

In this article, I argue that Du Bois’s Japan—despite displaying his myopic failure to critique non-Western imperialism—served as a potential model for his reimagining transnational democratic leadership beyond Western-centric models and their legacies of White supremacy and democratic despotism. Du Bois’s reflections from the 1890s to the 1960s generally demonstrate a sustained, seven decade-long fluid commitment to realizing a vision of transnational leadership that was accountable to the democratic masses, whether in Asia, Africa, the United States, or elsewhere. Such reflections hold importance now (even as they did in Du Bois’s time) as we continue to grapple with the legacies of Western “democratic” dominance, especially in international institutions designed to facilitate global governance.