In this paper we emphasize W. E. B. Du Bois’s relevance as a sociological theorist, an aspect of his work that has not received the attention it deserves. We focus specifically on the significance of Du Bois’s theory of Double Consciousness. This theory argues that in a racialized society there is no true communication or recognition between the racializing and the racialized. Furthermore, Du Bois’s theory of Double Consciousness puts racialization at the center of the analysis of self-formation, linking the macro structure of the racialized world with the lived experiences of racialized subjects. We develop our argument in two stages: The first section locates the theory of Double Consciousness within the field of classical sociological theories of the self. We show how the theory addresses gaps in the theorizing of self-formation of James, Mead, and Cooley. The second section presents an analysis of how Du Bois deploys this theory in his phenomenological analysis of the African American experience. The conclusions point out how the theory of Double Consciousness is relevant to contemporary debates in sociological theory.

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.

In just the last forty years, imprisonment has been transformed from an event experienced by only the most marginalized to a common stage in the life course of American men—especially Black men with low levels of educational attainment. Although much research considers the causes of the prison boom and how the massive uptick in imprisonment has shaped crime rates and the life course of the men who experience imprisonment, in recent years, researchers have gained a keen interest in the spillover effects of mass imprisonment on families, children, and neighborhoods. Unfortunately, although this new wave of research documents the generally harmful effects of having a family member or loved one incarcerated, it remains unclear how much the prison boom shapes social inequality through these spillover effects because we lack precise estimates of the racial inequality in connectedness—through friends, family, and neighbors—to prisoners. Using the 2006 General Social Survey, we fill this pressing research gap by providing national estimates of connectedness to prisoners—defined in this article as knowing someone who is currently imprisoned, having a family member who is currently imprisoned, having someone you trust who is currently imprisoned, or having someone you know from your neighborhood who is currently imprisoned—for Black and White men and women. Most provocatively, we show that 44% of Black women (and 32% of Black men) but only 12% of White women (and 6% of White men) have a family member imprisoned. This means that about one in four women in the United States currently has a family member in prison. Given these high rates of connectedness to prisoners and the vast racial inequality in them, it is likely that mass imprisonment has fundamentally reshaped inequality not only for the adult men for whom imprisonment has become common, but also for their friends and families.

For generations, Mexican and American Indian populations reciprocally and ritualistically took captives from one another’s societies in what are today the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These captive-taking wars breached the expansion of the American state into the west (1850s) and tested the ability of the American state to enforce law and policy in a frontier environment. This intriguing history, however, has yet to be addressed in legal and social science research on race. Our goal in this article is two-fold: (1) to determine whether the captive status of individuals taken in these endemic borderland wars is visible within surviving U.S. administrative materials (e.g., census); and (2) to determine whether close analysis of census materials can be used to ascertain whether federal liberators were able to abolish the captive-taking trade relative to their official mandate. The authors analyze a core sample of 1860s-era census materials from the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico—which has a documented history of Indian captivity and enslavement—as well as church records to determine whether these materials indicate the continuance of captivity even after federal liberators had the opportunity to abolish the trade.

The dramatic difference in typical Black and White lifeworlds—or sets of “cultural givens” assumed by Black and White Americans and used to interpret experience—impedes the development of a cross-racial solidarity oriented toward racial justice. If such a cross-racial solidarity is to be realized, actors must reorient the average White lifeworld in ways that make Whites more receptive to Black claims. I identify, theorize, and assess a particular strategy for transforming the dominant White lifeworld, and thus facilitating cross-racial solidarity, that directly confronts contemporary Whiteness: “marking Whiteness.” The idea of “marking Whiteness” is abstracted from three different texts—the blog-turned-book Stuff White People Like, a satiric essay entitled “I Am a Martyr (And So Can You!): A Guide to White Male Victimhood” published in Esquire magazine, and the sketch comedy phenomenon Chappelle’s Show. Interventions that “mark Whiteness” make Whiteness hyper-visible—as is characteristic of “marked” groups—and portray average White behavior and ideas as integral to the systemic reproduction of racial injustice. “Marking Whiteness” renders the racial polity visible, and makes contemporary Whites’ complicity in racial injustice undeniable. While there are good reasons to be skeptical of the progressive credentials of any mass cultural product and popular texts are often subject to misinterpretation, popular culture should be recognized as an important site in lifeworld and solidarity construction and reconstruction.

DNA ancestry testing may seem frivolous, but it points to two crucial questions: First, what is the relationship, if any, between biology and race? Second, how much and why do people prefer clear, singular racial identities over blurred, mixed racial self-understandings, or the reverse? We posit that individuals of different racial or ethnic backgrounds will have different levels of support for this new technology. In particular, despite the history of harm caused by the biologization of race, we theorize that African Americans will be receptive to the use of DNA ancestry testing because conventional genealogical searches for ancestral roots are mostly unavailable to them. This “broken chain” theory leads to two hypotheses, of disproportionately high Black interest in DNA ancestry testing—thus an implicit acceptance of a link between biology and race—and high acceptance among Blacks of multiple heritages despite a preference for evidence of roots in Africa.

To test these hypotheses, we analyze two databases of U.S. newspaper articles, one with almost 6,000 items and a second with 700. We also analyze two new public opinion surveys of nationally representative samples of adult Americans. Most of the evidence comes from the second survey, which uses vignettes to obtain views about varied results of DNA ancestry testing. We find that the media increasingly report on the links between genetic inheritance and race, and emphasize singular racial ancestry more than multiple heritages. The surveys show, consistent with our theory, that Blacks (and Hispanics, to some degree) are especially receptive to DNA ancestry testing, and are pleased with not only a finding of group singularity but also a finding of multiple points of origin. Qualitative readings of media reports illuminate some of the reasons behind these survey findings. We conclude with a brief discussion of the broader importance of DNA ancestry testing.

A growing body of social science research has sought to conceptualize race as a multi-dimensional concept in which context, societal relations, and institutional dynamics are key components. Utilizing a specially-designed survey, we develop and use multiple measures of race (skin color, ascribed race, and discrimination experiences) to capture race as a “lived experience” and assess these measures’ impact on Latinos’ self-rated health status. We model these measures of race as lived experience to test the explanatory power of race, both independently and as an integrated scale, with categorical regression, scaling, and dimensional analyses. Our analyses show that our multiple measures of race have significant and negative effects on Latinos’ self-reported health. Skin color is a dominant factor that impacts self-reported health both directly and indirectly. We then advocate for the utilization of multiple measures of race, adding to those used in our analysis, and their application to research regarding inequities in other health and social outcomes. Our analysis provides important contributions to research across a wide range of health, illness, social, and political disparities for communities of color.

The politics of affirmative action are currently structured as a litigious conflict among elites taking polarized stances. Opponents call for colorblindness, and defenders champion diversity. How can marginalized activists subvert the dominant terms of legal debate? To what extent can they establish their legitimacy? This paper advances legal mobilization theory by analytically foregrounding the field of contention and the relational production of meaning among social movement organizations. The case for study is two landmark United States Supreme Court cases that contested the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper analyzes BAMN, an activist organization, and its reception by other affirmative action supporters. BAMN had a marginalized allied-outsider status in the legal cases, as it made a radical civil rights claim for a moderate, elite-supported policy: that affirmative action corrects systemic racial discrimination. BAMN activists pursued their agenda by passionately defending and, at once, critiquing the university’s policies. However, the organization’s militancy remained a liability among university leaders, who prioritized the consistency of their diversity claims. The analysis forwards a scholarly understanding of the legacy of race-conscious policies.

Robert Strausz-Hupé (1903-2002) and Stefan Possony (1913-1995) were two scholars and policy makers who reached the peak of their careers as the tutelary spirits of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), founded in 1955 at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the FPRI and its journal, Orbis, the influence of these two anti-”totalitarian” crusaders reached the high echelons of the United States military and U.S. policy makers. This article analyzes the way in which the intellectuals of the FPRI—“defense intellectuals”—tweaked concepts such as “human rights,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “open society” in order to promote the interests of the United States’s military-industrial establishment, court racist lobbies, and accommodate problematic Cold War allies such as South Africa.