Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century and Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities are two important additions to the study of race in the United States. First, both provide insight into the continuous significance of race in a time when racial tensions are on the rise despite the ubiquitous suggestion that we are in a post-racial society. Secondly, both works serve as important indicators of the multiplicative nature of race, each covering many of the bases so critical to race study. As many academicians and students of race and ethnicity recognize, race is a phenomenon that must be approached from multiple angles (e.g., anthropologically, sociologically, historically, and so on) if we are to fully understand how race operates. Thirdly, these two works offer an array of possible solutions or models for addressing some of the problems that beset racial and ethnic conflicts. Finally, while each of the books tackles the issue of race, they complement each other as Doing Race provides a more general, comprehensive understanding of racial and ethnic issues across the United States while Black Los Angeles represents a specific case study of race relations in one urban setting. All in all, these works make important contributions to the literature about the significance of race in America.

The abysmal state of the American criminal justice system and its pernicious features has been well documented in much of the relevant literature. Feeley and Simon (1992) propose the notion of a “new penology” that prioritizes efficient, cost-effective (and often actuarial) techniques to manage criminal populations, while Katherine Beckett (1997) argues that the punitive shift in crime control policy was an ideologically motivated response to the Civil Rights Movement, with political rhetoric fomenting fears of crime and public policy reflecting the vogue of law-and-order punishment. David Garland's (2001) comparative study of the United States and Britain suggests that “late modernity,” which encompasses much of the social, economic, cultural, and technological advancements and changes of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. wage stagnation, regressive tax policies, suburbanization, the rise in the service economy, new penal technologies), along with neoconservative politics in the 1980s played key roles in the reconfiguration of the criminal justice system.

Literature on international migration, assimilation, and transnationalism continues to be concerned with questions about ties that migrants and their descendents have with their homelands, coethnics, and the native-born population. Tomás R. Jiménez's Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity and Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children provide important perspectives on different aspects of the larger phenomenon of international migration from Mexico to the United States that is a consequence of labor demand in the United States, economic need and job scarcity in Mexico, and a global economy. Both books deal with social life that takes place across ethnic boundaries, within ethnic groups, and across national borders. Taking qualitative approaches and dealing with the perennial tension between inclusion and exclusion, these books analyze the experiences and perspectives of Mexican migrants, Mexican children, and Mexican Americans.

Beginning with the 1972 presidential election and for each election thereafter Harvard University's Institute of Politics in the John F. Kennedy School of Government has held a post-election symposium where all of the campaign managers, pollsters, political consultants and media advisors for all of the primary and general election candidates come together with leading journalists, electronic and print, and political commentators and pundits to discuss and dialogue about what occurred during the election among the candidates, nominees, and the winner and losers. The symposia have allowed campaign managers to describe what happened and forecast for the forthcoming presidential election. After the multi-day symposium a book length transcript is published. In 1992 the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania launched its own symposia where the campaign managers of the Democratic and Republican nominees in the general election are invited to discuss what happened and forecast for the next presidential election. The ten books in the Harvard series and the three books in the Pennsylvania series are used as data sources in this article to determine if any of the campaign managers forecasted and/or predicted an African American presidential candidate, even when such candidates had appeared in previous years. While our findings uncover some of the interests and concerns of presidential campaign managers and advisors since 1972, the overriding focus of the symposia has been on the nature, scope, and significance of the African American electorate.

Since the turn of the millennium, French society has become the theatre of a noticeable Black agency. Few previous events have ignited the media's interest in a Black French agenda more than the Collectif Égalité-led “March for the dignity of Black peoples” and the formation of the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires (CRAN). Through these newly-founded organizations, French activists of African descent have been challenging the hegemonic ideology of color-blindness, and heralding the claims, problems, and expectations of postcolonial African-descended people.

Informed by this ideology of so-called color-blindness, the academic literature in France has been slow to account for this new form of political expression. Moreover, as this article will argue, postcolonial African-descended people have not been recognized as political agents in the French literature. Few studies have attempted to correct this myopic view by analyzing the current political dynamic of postcolonial African-descended people. Due to the state-centered or institutionalist approach, these studies are more concerned with highlighting external and structural factors, such as racial discrimination, at the expense of endogenous determinants. They focus on what postcolonial African-descended people are denied in the French society instead of investigating the qualities these citizens actually possess that enable them to organize collectively. This article is intended to contribute to this new literature. It will pinpoint the different transformations that postcolonial African-descended people have undergone from the 1960s through the 1990s, examine the resources and skills under these actors' control, and gauge the contribution of these resources and skills to the emergence of a Black collective voice.

The discourse of “race-blindness” in contemporary France cannot help but engender what it seeks to evade, “race” consciousness. Nowhere, is this dynamic better illustrated than by the current public debate on “Black” consciousness, “Black” identity discourses, and “French Black” activism that have emerge in response to an avoided “race” question in hexagonal France where “Blacks” have now reached a critical mass. In examining these issues, I argue that “French Black” activists are, however, limiting their own effectiveness when its adherents also retreat from a critical concept of “race” in their anti-black struggles. While the potent ideals of French republicanism are intrinsic to “race” avoidance, this stance unwittingly contributes to the prevalent practice of camouflaging the very discrimination and racism that such activists seek to document through controversial ethno-racial statistics, presently proscribed in France. Negated with “race” is the under-stated significance of the semantic particularity of the notion of “black” and its relevance in anti-black discrimination, also explored in this essay. By this, I am referring to those stigmatizing meanings of “black” prior to its incorporation into social categories used to designate and rank people so-perceived and so-denoted in Europe where those meanings crystallized and migrated beyond its shores. The critical use of “race” by these activists, then, would force the recognition, presently occulted, that this construct has played a fundamental role in structuring belonging and opportunity in France, and thereby buttress demands for statistics to demonstrate and analyze that lived reality towards its undoing. Ultimately, the existence of anti-blackness and anti-black struggles serve to illustrate that France has not escaped its “race” question or fulfilled it promises of “race-blind” equality.

One objective of this study is to investigate whether Black drivers are more likely than White motorists to receive traffic tickets and to be arrested following routine traffic stops in the Detroit suburb of Eastpointe, Michigan. Compared to White drivers, Blacks were more likely to be arrested and ticketed when police officer discretion was most pronounced. My broader objective is to explore police enforcement of racialized space in suburban Detroit. Outcomes of routine traffic stops were analyzed to determine whether enforcement of racialized space could be detected by comparing how drivers were treated on Eastpointe streets that were more, opposed to less, White. Black motorists driving on internal streets were more likely to attract police attention than those driving along Eastpointe's border street with Detroit, Eight Mile Road, which is interpreted as evidence that Black drivers are more likely to be ticketed, searched, and arrested when they were “out of place”.

The spatial configuration of minorities relative to Whites in a metropolitan area, or residential segregation, has been identified as a significant barrier to access to employment opportunities for racial/ethnic minorities, including Latinos, in metropolitan labor markets. Dominating the research are tests of place stratification models that focus on segregated ethnic enclaves or the mismatch between minority communities and employment opportunities. Both approaches focus on predominantly Latino neighborhoods and communities, but overlook their structural location and isolation in the broader metropolitan labor market. This study examines whether and to what extent structural characteristics of metropolitan labor markets in which Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans live and work shape their employment opportunities and whether or not these relationships vary across the three Latino native-origin groups. We utilize a unique dataset of the demographic, employment, educational, occupational, and industrial characteristics of the 95 largest US cities. The analyses feature both OLS regression to ascertain if varying levels of segregation across metropolitan areas in 2000 is associated with different levels of employment for Latinos, and a fixed-effects analysis to determine if changes in these structural factors between 1980 and 2000 within the same labor market affect the employment rates of Latinos in that metropolitan area. We find that segregation has a deleterious effect on Latino men's employment; in cities where segregation is worse, their employment rates are lower, and as the cities that they live in became more segregated over the 20 year period of study, their employment rates decreased.

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.

In this paper, we extend previous research on racial performance gaps at twenty-eight selective U.S. colleges and universities by examining differences in grade achievement and graduate rates across race-gender categories. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), we show that Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males attain significantly lower grades than other race-gender groups, and that Black males are thirty-five percent less likely to graduate on-time than other race-gender groups. Analyses consider an array of personal and institutional indicators of academic performance. Grades and graduation rates are improved by academic preparation (particularly high school grade point average), scholarly effort, and, for graduation rates, membership in career-oriented or majority-White campus groups. Grade performance and graduation rates are undermined by a hostile racial climate on campus, family stress, and stereotype threat, all of which disproportionately affect minority students. We conclude with recommendations to college administrators for ways of selecting and supporting minority students to reduce differentials in academic achievement across race-gender groups.