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Scholarship within Black geographies and Black studies has highlighted how historical injustices continue to shape the ways in which space is racialized and race is spatialized. This paper examines a fight during the late 19th century between white business owners and Black citizens regarding whether or not the boardwalk of Asbury Park, New Jersey ought to be racially segregated in order to trace the emergence of a racial formation that signified Black people as unwelcome in tourist spaces. By focusing on a battle to implement a color line within a popular northern coastal resort community during the 1880s and 1890s, the paper shows how racial discrimination was justified and normalized through the prioritization of economic growth. Thus, a form of coastal ‘racial capitalism’ also emerged from this conflict. The spatial, cultural, and economic legacies of the battle over the boardwalk continue to shape present spatial inequalities and imaginaries in the city as well as in other parts of the United States. The paper concludes by arguing that efforts to address racial inequalities and to reimagine what it means to be human in must engage with the racist history of the resort. Through this, the paper demonstrates how histories of racial inequality continue to reverberate in the present and intersect with new forms of vulnerability.

The United States’ deeply racialized history currently operates below the surface of contemporary apolitical narratives on vulnerability mitigation and adaptation to sea-level rise. As communities, regulatory agencies, and policy-makers plan for rising seas, it is important to recognize the landscapes of race and deep histories of racism that have shaped the socio-ecological formations of coastal regions. If this history goes unrecognized, what we label colorblind adaptation planning is likely to perpetuate what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of environmental racism, characterized by policies that benefit some populations while abandoning others. By colorblind adaptation planning, we refer to vulnerability mitigation and adaptation planning projects that altogether overlook racial inequality—or worse dismiss its systemic causes and explain away racial inequality by attributing racial disparities to non-racial causes. We contend that responses to sea-level rise must be attuned to racial difference and structures of racial inequality. In this article, we combine the theory of racial formation with the geographical study of environmental justice and point to the ways racial formations are also environmental. We examine vulnerability to sea-level rise through the process of racial coastal formation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, specifically analyzing its deep history, the uneven racial development of land ownership and employment, and barriers to African American participation and inclusion in adaptation planning. Racial coastal formation’s potential makes way for radical transformation in climate change science not only in coastal areas, but other spaces as situated territorial racial formations.

Transitional age youth were born into a world that is becomingly increasingly diverse. Youth who are ethnic or racial minorities encounter cultural stressors, including acculturative stress and discrimination that undermine their health and mental health. Decades of research demonstrate that cultural assets can serve as risk-reducing and resilience-enhancing mechanisms among minority and immigrant youth. Cultural assets include the development of a healthy ethnic-racial identity and maintenance of cultural values. Practitioners should assess for culturally relevant stressors and incorporate cultural assets such as ethnic-racial identity and cultural values to support the mental health of these youth.

Scholars argue that the traditional binary racial order model of the U.S. is outdated and acknowledge that racial systems can shift in response to demographic, political, and economic changes. In the coming years, White Millennials will exert ever-greater political and economic power in shaping the racial order. However, we have limited empirical evidence on the racial attitudes and race-based actions of this group. Our overarching goals in this paper are to uncover the racial order currently taking shape among White Millennials and to understand links between racial valorization, cultural inclusion/exclusion, and discriminatory actions among this group. To do so, we simulate a previous housing correspondence audit and conduct an online survey experiment with 4,462 White Millennials gauging respondents’ actions toward and views of White, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese-origin individuals. We find that White Millennial respondents express less acceptance of Blacks than members of other groups. Second, Blacks and Latinx are penalized on dimensions of valorization (i.e. responsibility, courteousness, and financial stability). Third, all groups other than Whites and “Americanized” Latinx are penalized on cultural inclusion, though the extent varies by signals of assimilation. Our findings indicate some support for racial triangulation theory but also show that insights from this perspective should be synthesized with those of racial formation theory. We suggest that rather than conform to any existing theory, White Millennials enact an emerging racial order rooted in what we call dynamic racial triangulation.

In the recent article, "Against the New Racial Naturalism", Adam Hochman (2013, p. 332) argues that new racial naturalists have been too hasty in their racial interpretation of genetic clustering results of human populations. While Hochman makes a number of good points, the purpose of this paper is to show that Hochman's attack on new racial naturalists is misguided due to his definition of 'racial naturalism'. Thus, I will show that Hochman's critique is merely a consequence of an unnatural interpretation of racial naturalism.

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era.

Scholarly interest in the correlates and consequences of perceived discrimination has grown exponentially in recent years, yet, despite increased legal and media attention to claims of "anti-white bias," empirical studies predicting reports of racial discrimination by white Americans remain limited. Using data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, we find that evangelical Protestantism increases the odds that whites will report experiencing racial discrimination, even after controlling for racial context and an array of social and psychological characteristics. However, this effect is limited to the South. Outside the South, political affiliation trumps religion, yielding distinct regional profiles of discrimination reporters. These findings suggest that institutions may function as regional "carriers" for whites inclined to report racial discrimination.

This paper presents a close reading of the reports of racial oppression that appeared in issues of two periodicals, Anti-Caste and its successor Fraternity, between 1888 and 1895. Edited in Street, Somerset, these periodicals created an extensive political geographical imagination by mapping international cases of racial prejudice. Although critical of the British empire, neither Anti-Caste nor Fraternity demanded the destruction of the British empire. In a tactic similar to that used by early Pan-Africanists, the papers’ narratives desired an end to the expansion of the British empire and an increase in the respect for and conditions of those who were ruled ‘under the British Flag’. However, Anti-Caste’s focus upon racial inequality across the United States as well as the British empire enabled it to create a distinctive critique of racial prejudice across the English-speaking world. Its criticism of the imperial project combined with support for human brotherhood allowed the paper to develop a framework for debates on racial prejudice that drew together criticisms of labour laws in India, the removal of people from their lands in Southern Africa, the racial segregation of public transport in the United States and the restriction of Chinese labour in Australia.

This selective review of the literature utilizes core life course principles to enhance current understanding of the complex relations between structural constraints, social contextual influences, and racial identification, and their implications for Black–White multiracial youth's developmental pathways. We assert that weakening structural constraints permit overall higher levels of human agency in contemporary multiracial youth's racial identification. We also argue that the social context within which these youth are embedded affords varying levels of human agency. Multiracial youth negotiate their racial identity in response to these micro-level social constraints. Finally, to understand the diversity of developmental pathways among contemporary multiracial youth, scholars must consider the dynamic interplay between macro- and micro-level constraints and racial identification. Research on multiracial youth's racial identity formation and psychosocial adjustment has the potential to inform efforts to promote resilience in this growing population. Mixed-method and longitudinal studies should examine multiple levels of developmental contexts, racial identification, and their joint effects on Black–White multiracial youth's psychosocial development over the life course. Scholars must also carefully attend to race measurement as it relates to sampling bias in studies of youth of color.

Social scientists often arrive at opposite portrayals of American race relations, despite relying on identical data sources. Depending on their ideological predispositions, they either minimize or maximize remaining racial inequalities. The election of President Obama suggests that the reality of American race relations likely falls somewhere in between – but where? This paper applies a simple method of comparing racial gaps across domains on a shared metric. Results suggest that non-violence represents a shared norm rendered invisible by traditional data presentation formats that exaggerate existing ‘crime gaps.’ Other racial gaps are more substantial, e.g., in education, income, and race-related public opinion. However, even in these domains Black–White agreement (group concordance) tends to outweigh disagreement (group discordance). Exceptions are monetary reparations for slavery and presidential approval ratings of Obama. Thus, characterizations of America as ‘post-racial’ seem premature. However, given that racial equality (once achieved) will marked by group concordance and shared norms, equality measures should capture emerging commonalities in addition to remaining gaps.

This paper deals with second-generation, one-and-a-half generation and “prolonged sojourner” Trinidadian transnational migrants, who have decided to ‘return’ to the birthplace of their parents. Based on 40 in-depth interviews, the paper considers both the positive and critical things that these youthful transnational migrants report about returning to, and living in, this multi-ethnic plural society and the salience of racial and colour-class stratification as part of their return migration experiences. Our qualitative analysis is based on the narratives provided by these youthful returnees, as relayed “in their own words”, presenting critical reflections on racism, racial identities and experiences as transnational Trinidadians. It is clear that it is contexts such as contemporary working environments, family and community that act as the reference points for the adaptation “back home” of this strongly middle-class cohort. We accordingly encounter a diverse, sometimes contesting set of racial issues that emerge as salient concerns for these returnees. The consensus is that matters racial remain as formidable legacies in the hierarchical stratification of Trinidadian society for a sizeable number. Many of our respondents reported the positive aspects of racial affirmation on return. But for another sub-set, the fact that multi-ethnic and multi-cultural mixing are proudly embraced in Trinidad meant that it was felt that return experiences were not overly hindered, or blighted by obstacles of race and colour-class. For these returnees, Trinidad and Tobago is seen as representing a 21st century “Melting Pot”. But for others the continued existence of racial divisions within society – between ethnic groups and among those of different skin shades – was lamented. In the views of these respondents, too much racial power is still ascribed to ‘near-whiteness’. But for the most part, the returnees felt that where race played a part in their new lives, this generally served to advantage them. However, although the situation in Trinidad appears to have been moderated by assumptions that it remains a racial ‘Melting Pot’, the analysis strongly suggests that the colour-class system of stratification is still playing an essential role, along with racial stereotyping in society at large.

What does racial literacy look and sound like in a teacher education book club? Using the tools of critical discourse analysis, we describe, interpret and explain how each member of the group draws on a range of discursive and embodied resources for racial literacy; particularly, how they maneuver the book club discourse to resolve what constitutes anti-racist action in the book. In this article, we demonstrate the complex ways in which the students seek to make meaning around this issue and in doing so, draw on and develop a set of semiotic tools we refer to as racial literacy. We trace the multiple modes (visual and linguistic) used by individuals and the shifts in these modes over the course of the conversation. Such shifts, we argue, hold the potential for the development of a more intricate form of racial literacy.

Extensive research on racial threat suggests that white Americans living near black Americans adopt more negative racial attitudes. Theoretically, local inter-group exposure has been conceptualized as acting contemporaneously, despite political socialization research indicating that experiences in adolescence are especially influential. Here, we test the impact of adolescent racial contexts on whites' prejudice using two data sets. The first is the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Survey, which followed one cohort from 1965 to 1997. The second is a population-based panel with novel measures of inter-group proximity conducted between 2007 and 2013. Our analyses demonstrate the enduring influence of adolescent contexts: while the racial composition of whites' current counties is not a consistent predictor of racial prejudice, the racial composition of their county during high school is. Exposure during one's formative years appears to increase racial prejudice decades later, providing new insight about the roots of racial threat and prejudice.

In American law, Native nations (denominated in the Constitution and elsewhere as “tribes”) are sovereigns with a direct relationship with the federal government. Tribes’ governmental status situates them differently from other minority groups for many legal purposes, including equal protection analysis. Under current equal protection doctrine, classifications that further the federal government’s unique relationship with tribes and their members are not subject to heightened scrutiny. Yet this deferential approach has been subject to recent criticism and is currently being challenged in pending cases. Swept up in the larger drift toward colorblind or race-neutral understandings of the Constitution, courts and commentators question the distinction between tribes’ political and racial status, and urge courts to strike down child welfare and gaming laws that benefit tribes. Yet tribes (as collectives) must trace their heritage to peoples who preceded European/American settlement in order to establish the political relationship with the federal government. Tribes, in order to be recognized as such under the Constitution, therefore must, as an initial definitional matter, consist of people tied together by something akin to lineage. Descent and ancestry (often conflated with the socio-legal category of “race,”) are the difference between legitimate federal recognition of tribal status and unauthorized and unconstitutional acts by Congress. Congress, in other words, cannot establish a government-to-government relationship with just any group of people. Tribes are treated differently from other groups due to their ties to the indigenous peoples of North America, and federal courts should not use that constitutional distinction against tribes in a misguided effort to eradicate all traces of things currently sounding in “race.”The argument advanced here might be seen as a form of American Indian law exceptionalism. Yet it is consistent with racial formation theory’s project of understanding race as a construction that serves, creates, and perpetuates legalized subordination, and that also shapes daily social conceptions and interactions. Racial formation theory calls for multiple accounts of racialization depending on the social and economic purposes served by each groups’ subordination. On the remedial side, racial formation theory therefore necessarily anticipates what we might think of as multiple exceptionalisms. Reversing policies that aimed to eliminate Native people from the continent, and the racialized understanding of Indians that drove them, requires maintaining the political status of tribes as separate sovereigns, not destroying it in the name of an ahistorical conception of “race” neutrality.

Current demographic trends suggest that in less than 30 years the United States will have a majority non-white population. Previous work has shown that racial demography has real consequences on political attitudes and private voting behaviors. In this paper I find that the racial makeup of an individual’s neighborhood also affects public political behaviors. Using data from a congressional primary campaign, I examine the responses of white Republicans when asked to display the yard sign of a white Republican candidate in a primary race against a Latino Republican. I find that individuals in higher density Latino areas are more likely to be willing to post a sign. Using a field experiment run by the campaign, I show that the use of symbolic racism has the biggest influence on the behavior of whites living in high density Latino areas. Specifically, I show that racial demography changes the influence of implicit racial appeals and that implicit racial appeals are most influential in areas where whites are in the minority. These results show that racial diversity plays a significant role in the public political behaviors of white Americans and how the racial environment affects underlying behavioral motivations.

This study uses evolutionary game theory to model the relationship between racial identity formation and inter-racial disparities in economic and non-economic outcomes. Starting with a fixed population of persons who are easily identified according to an exogenous criterion, for example, phenotype, we then allow individuals to pursue either a racialist or an individualist identity strategy in social interactions. The formation of identity norms imposes both positive and negative externalities on each person's identity actions. There are forces in the model that might push society toward racialism, individualism, or a mixed identity equilibrium, depending on matching assumptions, dynamic assumptions, parameter values, and initial conditions.

I consider the issue of racism in academia. Mason, Myers, and Darity's findings of racial bias against economic journals controlled by Black scholars and increasing acceptance of racial deficiency theories support the allegations of Black scholars that academic publishing is racially biased, and that there is a significant amount of racial discrimination in the labor market generally and academia specifically.

I use data on part-American Indian children in the 1990 Census 5% PUMS to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. American Indians present an interesting case study because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by the data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family.

The present study examined the influence of different interethnic ideologies on automatic and explicit forms of racial prejudice. White American college students were exposed to a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to reducing interethnic tension and then completed explicit racial attitude measures, as well as a reaction time measure of automatic evaluations of racial groups. Results suggested that, relative to the multicultural perspective, the color-blind perspective generated greater racial attitude bias measured both explicitly and on the more unobtrusive reaction time measure. The findings of the present study add to previous research advocating a multicultural or dual-identity model of intergroup relations as the more promising route to interracial harmony.

The paper addresses the question of racial integration in Delft South, a desegregated low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town developed through the provision of state funded housing to families previously classified coloured and African. Through a qualitative analysis, the research examines the effect relocation has had on the racial character of economic and social networks around which resident families construct their everyday activities. In light of the importance of race in shaping these networks, the paper then examines the relationship between access to housing and practices of social and spatial integration, in particular organisation of and participation in street- and neighbourhood-level organisations. I demonstrate that in Delft South legacies of segregation persist in residents’ reliance on economic and social networks built on long, durable histories and geographies of racial segregation. Although physical relocation has not led to a lessening of the importance of racial identities, other identities built around issues such as neighbourhood norms, housing politics, and issues of criminality and legality manifest according to circumstances and residents’ interests. Context and situation therefore are significant for whether and to what degree race and place matter in the post-apartheid context.

This article advocates for a fundamental re-understanding about the way that the history of race is understood by the current Supreme Court. Represented by the racial rights opinions of Justice John Roberts that celebrate racial progress, the Supreme Court has equivocated and rendered obsolete the historical experiences of people of color in the United States. This jurisprudence has in turn reified the notion of color-blindness, consigning racial discrimination to a distant and discredited past that has little bearing to how race and inequality is experienced today. The racial history of the Roberts Court is centrally informed by the context and circumstances surrounding Brown v. Board of Education. For the Court, Brown symbolizes all that is wrong with the history of race in the United States - legal segregation, explicit racial discord, and vicious and random acts of violence. Though Roberts Court opinions suggest that some of those vestiges still exits, the bulk of its jurisprudence indicate the opposite. With Brown’s basic factual premises as its point of reference, the Court has consistently argued that the nation has made tremendous strides away from the condition of racial bigotry, intolerance, and inequity. The article accordingly argues that the Roberts Court reliance on Brown to understand racial progress is anachronistic. Especially as the nation’s focus for racial inequality turned national in scope, the same binaries in Brown that had long served to explain the history of race relations in the United States (such as Black-White, North-South, and Urban-Rural) were giving way to massive multicultural demographic and geographic transformations in the United States in the years and decades after World War II. All of the familiar tropes so clear in Brown and its progeny could no longer fully describe the current reality of shifting and transforming patterns of race relations in the United States. In order to reclaim the history of race from the Roberts Court, the article assesses a case that more accurately symbolizes the recent history and current status of race relations today: Keyes v. School District No. 1. This was the first Supreme Court case to confront how the binaries of cases like Brown proved of little probative value in addressing how and in what ways race and racial discrimination was changing in the United States. Thus, understanding Keyesand the history it reflects reveals much about how and in what ways the Roberts Court should rethink its conclusions regarding the history of race relations in the United States for the last 60 years.

In recent years, antidiscrimination scholars have focused on the productive possibilities of the “universal turn,” a strategy that calls on attorneys to convert particularist claims, like race discrimination claims, into broader universalist claims that secure basic dignity, liberty, and fairness rights for all. Scholars have urged litigators to employ universalist strategies in constitutional and voting rights cases, as well as in employment litigation. Thus far, however, arguments made in favor of universalism have been largely abstract and theoretical and therefore have failed to fully consider the second order effects of universalist strategies on the ground. In this article we challenge the prevailing arguments in favor of universalism by exploring the market consequences as lawyers shift from particularist Title VII race discrimination claims to universalist Fair Labor Standards Act claims. Derived from a preliminary review of case filing statistics and qualitative data from a purposeful sample of attorney interviews, our research has uncovered forces we describe as “post-racial hydraulics,” a set of non-ideological, economic, and pragmatism-based drivers produced by the trend toward universalism. We explain why “post-racial hydraulics” must be understood as key but previously unexplored factors in racial formation. Evidence suggests that, left unchecked, these non-ideological drivers will have substantive ideological effects, as they threaten to fundamentally reshape the employment litigation market and alter our understanding of race discrimination.

Philosophical reflection on racial profiling tends to take one of two forms. The first sees it as an example of ‘statistical discrimination,’ (SD), or when, if ever, probabilistic generalisations about group behaviour or characteristics can be used to judge particular individuals.(Applbaum 2014; Harcourt 2004; Hellman, 2014; Risse and Zeckhauser 2004; Risse 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2006; Lippert-Rasmussen 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2014). This approach treats racial profiling as one example amongst many others of a general problem in egalitarian political philosophy, occasioned by the fact that treating people as equals does not always require, or permit, us to treat them the same. The second form is concerned with how racial profiling illuminates the nature, justification, and reproduction of hierarchies of power and privilege based on skin colour and morphology. This form of reflection on racial profiling is therefore less about the justification for judging people based on the characteristics of the group to which they (appear to) belong, and more concerned with the specific ways in which the association of racialised minorities – and, in particular, black people – with crime, contributes to, and reflects, racial inequality, unfreedom, and oppression.(Kennedy 1998; Zack, 2015; Lever, 2005; Lever 2007). Both approaches to profiling have much to recommend them and, taken together, they form an essential component of the political philosophy of race. The statistical approach has the merits of linking racial profiling, as practice, to a body of other practices that generate and justify inequalities based on factors other than race, but it typically offers little by way of insight into the role of racial profiling itself in sustaining racial inequality and injustice. The racial construction approach, for obvious reasons, is rather better at the latter task, but its insights tend to come at the price of a broader understanding of the ways in which inequality is reproduced and justified, or of the ethical dilemmas raised by our competing claims to security. As we will see, insights from both approaches can be synthesized to clarify what, if anything, is wrong with racial profiling and what broader conclusions for equality and security follow from the study of profiling.

The practice of stopping a disproportionate number of members of a particular racial group for questioning by the police would be regarded, at first sight, as an unacceptable manifestation of racial bias. However, Borooah [Eur. J. Pol. Econ. 17 (2001) 17] makes a distinction between two types of discrimination, that based on bigotry and that based on, what he calls, business necessity. The argument is that racial bias based on a desire to visit disadvantage on a particular racial group should be distinguished from racial discrimination based on the objective probability of offending. He suggests a measurement procedure for separating these two types of discrimination. This is a welcome contribution to the debate—see, for example, McConville et al. [Br. J. Criminol. 37 (1997) 347] and the rejoinder by Smith [J. Criminol. 37 (1997) 319] about the fairness of the criminal justice system. However, there is an assumption underlying Borooah's model which, if placed under critical scrutiny, could undermine his conclusions. This assumption is examined here.

Historically, racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent assumed the development of a Black identity in accordance with the one-drop rule. However, empirical research on the multiracial population suggests that there exists wide variation in racial identification. We explore the interpretive power of Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization model to explain racial identity construction among a sample of 259 mixed-race respondents. We highlight case studies of individuals who have constructed a White identity in order to illustrate how structural changes in race relations have increased the range of racial identities available to multiracial people. While we observe variation in racial identification among our respondents, their “choices” continue to be differentially available due to their physical appearance and social context.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has painted with broad strokes a portrait of the future of racial relations in the United States in his paper entitled, “We are all Americans: Toward a New System of Racial Stratification in the U.S.A.” [Race and Society (forthcoming)]. In essence, he sees the United States moving from a two-tier, black-white racial system toward a three-tier racial system where persons will be categorized as “white”, “honorary white”, or “collective black”. Additionally, Bonilla-Silva believes that we are moving from a system in which race is commonly taken into account, toward a system of “color-blind” racism. In this article, we closely examine Bonilla-Silva’s ideas, and although we appreciate the broad scale of his work and its challenge to traditional race relations, we make adjustments to his work, particularly concerning the location of Latinos in the U.S. racial hierarchy, which lead both to a better understanding of the current and future racial situation in the United States, and toward policy recommendations which could ameliorate the bleak situation in which we find ourselves concerning life chances of people of color.

As social scientists, race scholars, and demographers, how do we begin to make sense of recent changes in the Census Bureau’s system of racial classification, as well as of the popular response to those changes? This paper explores the lacuna between popular and scientific understandings of race. It reviews the theoretical understanding of race as a social construct, providing a brief history of racial classification in the United States. In addition, it examines the concepts of race mixing and racial ambiguity as a function of the peculiar and distinctive construction of race in the United States. Finally, the essay critically assesses how race is currently used in social research and how race might be more accurately represented and effectively employed in that research.

The South African government has previously used racial classification as a tool in its official state policies to control its population. In this essay, we examine the role racial classification and stratification has played in South Africa’s modern censuses. We define the modern period as between 1911 and 1996. We show how racial identity is part of the collective identity in South Africa. Racial identity is part of the government’s sense of what it means to be a South African, and, the population transfigured and imagined in this racialised context is what appears as race. The modern South African census illustrates how important race can be in a political context.

The academic declining significance of race did not begin with William Julius Wilson’s work in the late 1970s. In this paper, we take a broad look at the methods mainstream sociologists have used to validate Whites’ racial common sense about racial matters in the post-civil rights era. Our general goal is to succinctly examine the major tactics sociologists have used to minimize the significance of racism in explaining minorities’ plight. Specifically, we survey how (1) most work on racial attitudes creates a mythical view on Whites’ racial attitudes, (2) the various demographic indices used to asses post-civil rights’ racial matters miss how race affects minorities today, (3) perspectives on the culture of minorities are based on ethnocentric perspectives that tend to hide the centrality of racially based networks, and (4) the way most sociologists report their results distorts the significance of racial stratification. We conclude by suggesting that work on racial matters will need to be revamped if it is going to have any practical use for those at the “bottom of the well.”

In this paper we examine some conceptual and methodological problems associated with the measurement of racial and ethnic identity. We discuss the initial use of racial terms, examine early racial classification systems and the bases for these systems. We then consider the characteristics of racial and ethnic identity and address common problems of ethnic classification today. We argue for a classification system based on self identification, and we review some current self-identity measures.

This article provides an overview of the major Black racial identity-development theories to date, summarizing the general strengths and limitations of these models. In addition, the authors discuss salient issues that should be considered in future conceptualizations of Black racial identity development.

Despite its repudiation of scientific racism, the liberal paradigm on race had two fateful flaws: 1. 1) it conceptualized racism in terms of attitudes rather than conditions, and 2. 2) it failed to specify what elements of “environment” accounted for persistent racial inequalities. The result has been another victim-blaming paradigm that merely substituted culture for genes, deflecting attention away from the crucial role that political and economic institutions play in the production and reproduction of racial inequality.

What explains the persistence of racial or ethnic inequalities in descriptive representation in the absence of strongly politicized racial or ethnic cleavages? This article uses new data to demonstrate a substantial racial gap between voters and politicians in Brazil. The authors show that this disparity is not plausibly due to racial preferences in the electorate as a whole, for instance, deference toward white candidates or discrimination against nonwhites, and that barriers to candidate entry or discrimination by party leaders do not likely explain the gap. Instead, they document persistent resource disparities between white and nonwhite candidates, including large differences in personal assets and campaign contributions. The findings suggest that elite closure—investments by racial and economic elites on behalf of elite candidates—help perpetuate a white political class, even in the absence of racialized politics. By underscoring this avenue through which representational disparities persist, the article contributes to research on elite power in democratic settings.

The importance of race as a social category in the United States is evident in how the federal government over time has defined the racial categories on the census forms starting with the first census in 1790. Minority groups have always contested these official categorizations (Miller, 2007; Simon & Piche, 2012) because these categorizations were at variance with how these groups defined themselves. These categorizations are even more problematic because there is usually no single racial definition within the various racial groups in the United States. Moreover, these racial definitions are influenced by the history of White racial privilege and discrimination against non-Whites. Race is a major feature of American society (Philogene, 2004a; Zinn, 2005). Therefore, studying the evolving categorizations of race on the census forms in the United States is a study of the history of the cultural representations of race which is the objective of this chapter. The evolution and expansion of racial categories suggest that race as a social category is not fixed. The Jews and the Irish from Europe for example, were not considered White when the first major waves of Jewish and Irish immigrants came to the United States despite their white physicality. They were subsequently accepted as Whites in the society (Brodkin, 1998; Ignatiev, 2008). The decennial censuses of the United States since 1790 provide historical and contemporary evidence that race is a floating signifier (Hall, 1997b). This chapter explicates the content and evolution of these dynamic racial representations. The chapter starts with a discussion of how race has been represented in the United States followed by a discussion of social representation theory (SRT) which frames the study. Next, the method is outlined and the findings presented and discussed using SRT.

DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.In my Article Racial Capitalism, I expressed concern about the ongoing process of racial exploitation in which white people and predominantly white institutions derive value from the racial identity of people of color. I see this process as troubling and undesirable. Rendering racial identity a commodity harms people of color in many ways: by treating a deeply-felt aspect of identity as merely another thing to be bought and sold; by giving outsiders a stake in the identities of nonwhite people; and by providing yet another obstacle to improved race relations in America.Since the publication of Racial Capitalism, two events have occurred that relate to the Article’s conclusions. First, the Supreme Court decided Fisher v. University of Texas, which considered the constitutionality of the school’s race-conscious admissions scheme. Second, Professor Richard Ford has responded directly to my Article in the online Forum provided by the Harvard Law Review. My goal in this brief Response, which will also appear in the online Forum, is to consider these two contributions in light of Racial Capitalism.

Previous work on the effects of race on the political behaviors of white Americans is beset with two problems. First, much of the work on the effect of race has looked primarily at attitudes as opposed to political action around a policy. Second, studies of the relationship between race and policy have revolved around issues for which it is inherently difficult to separate the effects of racial prejudice from conservative ideology. To address these problems, we examine the willingness of individuals to write their member of Congress in support of a non-racial political cause, which we experimentally treat with racial cues. We also experimentally present a comparison with a non-racial but similar ‘specialized’ group, which allows us to distinguish concerns about race from concerns about specialized benefits objectionable to conservatives. We show that whites with higher levels of racial resentment are less likely to act politically in support of a policy perceived as benefiting ethnic and racial minorities.

As the demographics of the workforce change from predominantly White to more racially diverse, it is important to understand the various reactions White individuals may have to working in more heterogeneous organizations. The present study examined the relation between White racial identity attitudes and reactions to interracial situations at work. Participants were full-time employees. As predicted by White racial identity theory (Helms, 1990), those individuals with high levels of Autonomy attitudes had more positive reactions to interracial situations at work, and those individuals characterized by high levels of Disintegration and Reintegration attitudes had more negative reactions to interracial situations at work. The results for Contact and Pseudo-Independent attitudes were less straightforward. The results are supportive of the theory and suggest that further research using White racial identity theory in organizational contexts would be fruitful.

Despite cultural progress in reducing overt acts of racism, stark racial disparities continue to define American life. This book is for anyone who wonders why race still matters and is interested in what emerging social science can contribute to the discussion. The book explores how scientific evidence on the human mind might help to explain why racial equality is so elusive. This new evidence reveals how human mental machinery can be skewed by lurking stereotypes, often bending to accommodate hidden biases reinforced by years of social learning. Through the lens of these powerful and pervasive implicit racial attitudes and stereotypes, Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law examines both the continued subordination of historically disadvantaged groups and the legal system's complicity in the subordination.

Recreational DNA ancestry testing may seem frivolous, or at least unconnected with important issues in politics. However, it opens new vistas onto two crucial questions: what is the relationship, if any, between biology and race? How much and why do people prefer clear, singular racial identities or blurred, mixed racial self-understandings? We probe those old questions from a new and unusual angle: media treatment of and public responses to various choices in DNA ancestry testing. Using automated content analysis and hand coding, respectively, we analyze two databases of U.S. newspaper articles, one with almost 6,000 and a second of 700 items. We also analyze two new public opinion surveys of nationally representative samples of adult Americans. The bulk of the evidence comes from the second survey, which uses vignettes to obtain views about results of DNA ancestry testing from large samples of several racial and ethnic groups. We find that the media encourage an association between biological inheritance and race, and emphasize singular racial ancestry more than multiple heritages. We also find that African Americans hold distinct, though not wholly different, views from other Americans. In particular, blacks (and Hispanics, to some degree) are especially receptive to DNA ancestry testing, particularly pleased with a message of group singularity, but also positive about a message of multiple points of origin. We conclude with a brief discussion of the political importance of DNA ancestry testing.

In this paper, we argue that racial identity theory has the potential to explain some aspects of vocational development. However, we hypothesize that its heuristic value would be maximized by deliberatively focusing on the racial aspects of vocational development at the individual and systemic levels. Toward encouraging the use of racial identity theory in vocational psychology, we discuss the concepts of career salience, satisfaction, and satisfactoriness.

Contemporary approaches to career development emphasize the psychological and developmental dimensions of the task. This study suggests not only that consideration of race should form an integral part of that process but also that race too needs to be understood in a psychological and developmental way. While some claim that constructs associated with both racial identity theory and career development measure aspects of a client′s personality, virtually no research has explored the relation between these two perspectives. In this test using a White sample (N = 109), a canonical analysis revealed a significant relation between the psychological variables of "racial identity" and "work values" consistent with the theory of White racial identity development. Suggestions for future research are considered.

In this paper we argue that the conventional narrative of homogeneity in black public opinion masks variation in the attitudes individual blacks hold about their own communities, personal identities, and their sense of class-consciousness. Utilizing the 2008 CAAPS/ABC News Black Politics Survey, this analysis shows how core American beliefs undermine racial group solidarity while experiences of racial discrimination and feelings of political marginality reinforce communal values among African Americans. The analysis also documents sharp divides among African Americans regarding preferences for national versus racial identities, individual versus communal beliefs, and social class versus racial group attachments. Our analysis reveals that these divides in black opinion over the primacy of identities are conditioned by various factors, specifically the frequency of personal experiences with racial discrimination, attitudes toward racial identity, social class standing, residency in majority black neighborhoods, and financial security. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of heterogeneity in black public opinion for understanding American public opinion wit large.

The notion of race continues to permeate every aspect of both public and private life in South Africa. Race insinuates itself into our responses to situations and people and even when we claim that we have escaped the perceived shackles of race, we are merely confirming its presence by our stated yearning for its absence. Against this background, and given the constitutional commitment to non-racialism, some academics and commentators argue against the use of race-based corrective measures on the basis that such measures perpetuate racial thinking and entrench racial identities - instead of helping us to move away from them. In the article the author takes issue with this view, contending that the effects of past and on-going racism and racial discrimination cannot be addressed merely by assuming that the consequences of race - including racism - can be addressed by attending to the material conditions of inequality and by ignoring race. What is required is to question the positions and discourses of privilege and dominance that stem from an ideology of white superiority and hegemony and to engage more critically and in a nuanced manner with the power of race and the effects of ongoing racism and racial discrimination.

This paper elaborates on the multiple racial and ethnic planes that form the complex environment that is unique to global Chinese suburbs and the nuanced political strategies that Chinese American candidates must pursue through the process referred to as multiplexing. Chinese American candidates must negotiate the racial formations that cast and conflate them and other Asian candidates as “permanent aliens” or “perpetual foreigners” whose interests are seen as suspect and as a threat to the group interests by those Caucasian residents who oppose the demographic shifts and political changes taking shape in these global suburbs. To illustrate the prospects and challenges of new Chinese American politics, this paper draws primarily from the two suburbs of Cupertino, California and Sugar Land, Texas, which are both witnessing dramatic demographic and political shifts among their respectively large Chinese immigrant populations during the last decade. Both cities are emblematic of the complex environments that envelop contemporary global Chinese suburbs and provide cautionary tales on the importance of multiplexing as a necessary political strategy for electoral success.

A string of recent studies has documented significant racial disparities in police stops, searches, and arrests across the country. The issue of racial profiling, however, did not receive national attention until the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his home in Cambridge. This raises three questions: First, did Sergeant Crowley engage in racial profiling when he arrested Professor Gates? Second, why does it take the wrongful arrest of a respected member of an elite community to focus the attention of the country? Third, why is racial profiling so pervasive in American policing?The answers to these questions are interconnected: they turn on the fact that racial profiling is just another form of statistical discrimination and that, today, we all embrace statistical discrimination as efficient and justified whenever there are group-based differences in behavior or fact disparities. We have all become, today, statistical discriminators. This answer, though, points to a solution in the racial profiling quandary, because statistical discrimination is misguided in dynamic situations where there are feedback effects. In policing, it is counter-productive to the law enforcement objective of reducing crime. Like Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s metaphor of the miner’s canary, the racial dimension of racial profiling is what troubles us in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. But, just like the canary whose distress is a warning that the air in the mine is poisoned, the troubling aspect of race in the debate over racial profiling points to the larger problems of statistical discrimination writ large.

One of the oldest debates in the study of racial attitudes and voting contrasts the racial threat hypothesis - which posits that racial identities and attitudes intensify in proximity to the outgroup - and the contact hypothesis - which argues that exposure to outgroup members will actually temper such attitudes, rather than heighten them. Studies to date have not emphasized geography and multivariate regression to examine this question. This paper uses geographically weighted regression (GWR) to estimate the relationship between racial composition and voting on Proposition 209, the 1996 anti-affirmative action measure that passed in California. The fine-grained results show that neither mechanism serves as a good universal predictor of the relationship between race and racial voting, but that racial threat may be at play in Los Angeles. These results also pinpoint particular places where further qualitative work may shed light on the context-bound mechanisms of racial behavior.

The experience of various countries demonstrates the critical role that ethnic data and statistics can play in the elaboration, implementation, and assessment of policies aimed at combating racial and ethnic discrimination. Yet, many EU member states remain deeply reluctant to collect data on racial or ethnic origin. The objection most commonly raised is that processing such data would infringe upon the right to privacy. It is widely believed that collecting these data would infringe personal data protection rules. In addition, the idea of classifying people into racial or ethnic categories is itself contentious, as some fear it would conflict with individual self-determination. This paper explores to what extent and under which conditions the data needed to combat racial and ethnic discrimination can be collected, while fully respecting the rights of individuals. First, it seeks to clarify the implications of personal data protection under European law. Second, it grapples with the issue of constructing racial or ethnic categories and setting criteria to classify individuals into them. The discussion is based on analysis of international human rights law as well as laws and practices of several states: the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have all developed different classification schemes to collect data needed for their antidiscrimination policies. In France, by contrast, there is a priori a strong opposition towards classifying people on the basis of racial or ethnic origin. Yet, the idea of developing means to better measure racial or ethnic discrimination has emerged in the French public debate and is the subject of intense discussions. Examination of states' practices enables to highlight the tensions and difficulties raised by the enterprise of classifying individuals into racial or ethnic categories in the antidiscrimination context. Nonetheless, the paper shows that human rights standards, and in particular the right to privacy, do not preclude the collection of data on racial or ethnic origin for antidiscrimination purposes, but rather define fundamental safeguards and limits that constrain the extent to and the manner in which this type of information can be gathered and processed.

The article addresses the tension between views of racial identity that are premised on its inherent subjectivity (personal choice) and those that assume its objective (and verifiable) nature (fraud). The fraud perspective arises out of the administrative necessities for accurate racial classification in federal anti-discrimination laws and other programs that consider race. The personal choice perspective is a consequence of efforts to disassociate racial identity from the oppressive uses of race and recast it as a matter of personal autonomy. It has been championed most vigorously in the context of the Decennial Census. Unfortunately, both approaches have had significant deficiencies. Even though self-identification allows the individual with the most complete information to make the racial classification, it also creates opportunities for manipulation and abuse. In contrast, third-party determination of race deals poorly with its socially constructed nature and is tainted by its historical association with the oppression and exploitation of various racial minority groups. Neither approach manages to address the contingency of racial identity over time and in different social contexts. I argue that a functional approach that distinguishes between physically descriptive, expressive affiliative, and social/regulatory conclusive meanings would avoid the deficiencies of the choice and fraud frameworks. I apply this framework to race conscious and remedial programs, the Census, and a select number of instances that arise in non-governmental settings.

We live in a race-conscious culture. As Americans, we are a nation of people who self-consciously chose to adopt a vision of society that embraced lofty ideals of individual freedom and democracy for all along with powerful mechanisms for devastating racial oppression. Our history is replete with instances of differential treatment on account of race - slavery being only the most egregious example - that achieved the desired effect of generating remarkable disparities in socioeconomic well-being among individuals and between different racial groups. Such disparities are not simply historical artifacts. They are facts of the contemporary American racial landscape as well. Racial disparity in socioeconomic well-being has always been, and continues to be, a central feature of American life. Of course, we each choose how we come to terms with racial inequality, how we rationalize, compartmentalize, or explain this phenomenon, and how we integrate our "raced" existence into our personal view of the world. For nearly three generations, we have undertaken a largely sustained collective effort to eliminate racial discrimination in American society. For some, the persistence of chronic racial inequality in the face of sustained efforts to ameliorate racial discrimination provides subtle confirmation of deeply held suspicions regarding the intellectual, cultural, or economic capacity of African Americans. For others, the persistence of racial disparity highlights the limits of the prevailing approach to antidiscrimination law and makes the case for greater intervention. Professor Glenn C. Loury's "The Anatomy of Racial Inequality" is a thoroughgoing attempt to ascertain the root causes of racial inequality and provide insight into the thought process that causes us to view racial disparity with complacency and indifference. However, Loury's project is not merely descriptive. His structural account of racial inequality provides the staging ground from which he launches a deep critique of prevailing views on American race relations. Racial inequity is not the product of some inherent deficiency in the minds and hearts of African Americans. Rather, it is a social pathology "deeply rooted in American history" - a pathology that "evolved in tandem with American political and economic institutions, and with cultural practices that supported and legitimated those institutions . . . that were often deeply biased against blacks." Loury therefore rejects the conservative policy of indifference toward racial disparities, and declares emphatically that racial inequality is "an American tragedy [and] a national, not merely a communal disgrace." In a very real sense, Loury's free and extended meditation on racial inequality and the prospects of racial reform provides us with an insightful theoretical and discursive structure through which we can engage the struggle for racial justice anew. In this review essay, I offer an extended examination and critique of the major arguments presented in the book. In the course of connecting Loury's work with historic and contemporary literature on racial disparities in American life, I offer some thoughts on the impact his project may have upon the shape of American race relations to come.