For the past several decades, numerous studies have focused on the so-called “crisis of Black fatherhood”—that is, the many ways in which Black fathers struggle to fulfill traditional paternal roles and duties. Given major shifts in both the structural conditions and cultural expectations of fatherhood in general over the past century, we argue that it is necessary to reestablish not only what Black fatherhood looks like today—in particular, the internal diversity and dynamism of this category—but also how Black men (as well as other members of Black families and communities) make sense of these changes and meaningfully negotiate their implications. We outline a two-pronged research agenda that: first, identifies gaps in the existing literature that limit our knowledge of the full range of Black fathering practices and experiences; and second, reclaims and repurposes “cultural analysis,” not to pathologize “what’s wrong with Black families and fathers,” but to shed much needed light on the ways in which Black fathers themselves process and make meaning of their roles and realities.

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling is part of longstanding efforts to maintain American institutions that have provided wide-ranging benefits to White citizens, including disproportionate political power. Over time, such efforts are likely to fail to prevent significant increases in political gains for African Americans, Latinos, and other minority citizens. But they threaten to foster severe conflicts in American politics for years to come.

On 14 June 2014 the Council of the University of Cape Town (UCT) voted to change race-based affirmative action in student admissions. The Council was ratifying an earlier decision by the predominantly White University Senate. According to the new policy race would be considered as only one among several factors, with the greater emphasis now being economic disadvantage. This paper argues that the new emphasis on economic disadvantage is a reflection of a long-standing tendency among left-liberal White academics to downplay race and privilege economic factors in their analysis of disadvantage in South Africa. The arguments behind the decision were that (1) race is an unscientific concept that takes South Africa back to apartheid-era thinking, and (2) that race should be replaced by class or economic disadvantage. These arguments are based on the assumption that race is a recent product of eighteenth century racism, and therefore an immoral and illegitimate social concept.

Drawing on the non-biologistic approaches to race adopted by W. E. B. Du Bois, Tiyo Soga, Pixley ka Seme, S. E. K. Mqhayi, and Steve Biko, this paper argues that awareness of Black perspectives on race as a historical and cultural concept should have led to an appreciation of race as an integral part of people’s identities, particularly those of the Black students on campus. Instead of engaging with these Black intellectual traditions, White academics railroaded their decisions through the governing structures. This decision played a part in the emergence of the #RhodesMustFall movement at UCT.

This paper argues that South African sociology must place Black perspectives on race at the center of its curriculum. These perspectives have been expressed by Black writers since the emergence of a Black literary culture in the middle of the nineteenth century. These perspectives constitute what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a shared “text of Blackness” (Gates 2014, p. 140). This would provide a practical example of the decolonization of the curriculum demanded by students throughout the university system.

This article provides a thematic overview of a subset of controversial officer involved shootings that have occurred in Denver, Colorado during a period of thirty years (1983-2012). Determining whether a shooting was legally justified involved multiple participants, including local, national, and international representatives. The primary stakeholders were City and County District Attorneys regarding whether to file criminal charges against the officer, and Managers of Safety for whether officers acted within police departmental policy. Although most cases were processed without conflict, a small number were challenged by members of the community based on thematic reasons of shooting individuals who had not committed a crime, violating continuum of force standards, and entrusting law enforcement officers with the power to use deadly force both off-duty and while working secondary jobs. Despite outcome legitimacy vested in a small number of public officials, community members often reported a lack of justice and accountability. They struggled to get public officials to take notice and implement systematic change. Reviewing controversial shootings highlights the multiple issues involved in protecting law enforcement officers from encountering criminal charges, and in essence the procurement of colonial control. Critical Race Theory (interest convergence and storytelling), Social Dominance Theory, along with the historical framework of W. E. B. Du Bois, were utilized to explore a number of officer-involved shootings that continue to produce disparate outcomes by race, class, and gender.

In recent decades the number of women and minorities elected to public office has increased significantly, prompting a wealth of studies examining the ways these different gender and racial identities shape elected officials’ appeals to constituents. However, much previous research focuses on representational differences among either men and women or Anglos and minorities, neglecting the intersection of race and gender. We seek to fill this void by examining differences in presentation styles among Latina and African American congresswomen, their Anglo female counterparts, and minority male peers. Relying on a detailed content analysis of the biographical pages available on U.S. Representatives’ websites, we conduct an exploratory examination of the differences in representatives’ presentation of self. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper identifies the unique ways minority congresswomen present themselves and issue positions to constituents. We conclude by considering the implications of our results for minority women holding and seeking public office.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the Caribbean attained greater socioeconomic status than African Americans. Although Black immigrants remain an understudied population, recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans continue to outperform African Americans in the labor market. Given that these groups share a set of racialized physical features, some contend that this gap highlights the role of cultural attributes in the manufacture of Black ethnic and Black-White racial disparities. In this study, I investigate the degree to which cultural attributes associated with a specific form of the model minority hypothesis are responsible for disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I use data from the National Survey of American Life in order to test for the relative roles of work ethic, economic autonomy, oppositionality, family structure and function, and racial attitudes in the manufacture of disparate labor market outcomes between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I find mixed support for the idea that Afro Caribbeans constitute a model minority vis-à-vis African Americans and that differences in model minority attributes are only partially responsible for these labor market disparities. My findings suggest that racial inequality will not be undone if the racially stigmatized and marginalized simply work harder and complain less about race and racism in the United States.

In 2010, the Alabama GOP took control of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The next year, in a sharply partisan vote, the legislature passed, and Governor Robert Bentley (R) signed into law, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, also known as House Bill 56, the harshest immigration law in the country. This punitive state law was the impetus for Black elites in Birmingham to frame the immigration debate as a matter of civil rights and thus to see the issue in a new light. When Alabama Republicans moved to the Right on immigration, Black leaders in Birmingham moved Left. In this study, backed up by an event analysis of local newspapers, an analysis of interviews with members of the Black elite in Birmingham in 2013, who were previously interviewed in 2007, helps to substantiate this claim. In the summer of 2007, against the backdrop of an immigration debate in Washington, our Black elite study participants largely told us they had no stake in immigration. By 2013, many were willing to fight for immigrant rights at the highest level.

Increasingly, African Americans find themselves living side-by-side with immigrant newcomers from Latin America, the largest source of today’s immigrant population. Research on “Black/Brown” relations tends to a priori define groupness in ethnoracial terms and gloss over potential nuance in inter-group relations. Taking an inductive approach to understanding how African Americans interpret the boundaries that result from immigration-driven change, this paper draws on fieldwork among African Americans in East Palo Alto, California, a Black-majority-turned-Latino-majority city, to examine how African Americans construct multiple symbolic boundaries in the context of a Latino-immigrant settlement. Blacks’ rendering of these boundaries at the communal level invokes ethnoracial boundaries as a source of significant division. They see Latinos as having overwhelmed Black material and symbolic prowess. However, accounts of inter-personal interactions evince symbolic boundaries defined by language and neighborhood tenure that render ethnoracial boundaries porous. Respondents note intra-group differences among Latinos, pointing out how the ability to speak English and long-time residence in the neighborhood are important factors facilitating ties and cooperation across ethnoracial boundaries. The findings point to the importance of intra-ethnoracial-group differences for inter-ethnoracial-group attitudes and relations. Adopting ethnographic and survey research practices that treat boundaries as multiplex will better capture how growing intra-ethnoracial-group diversity shapes inter-ethnoracial-group relations.

Since the early 1960s, there has been a movement among activists, scholars, and policymakers to redefine racism as a psychopathological condition, identifiable and treatable through psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. This development reflects, and is reflected by, the popular framing among mass media and ordinary social actors of racism and racist events as individual pathology rather than as a social problem. This shifting perspective on racism, from a social problem and a system to an individual pathology, has increasingly become a part of academic and psychiatric discourse since Jim Crow. In this article, we have two aims: first, to trace the emergence of “psychopathological racism”; second, to illustrate the relationship between “psychopathological racism” and “colorblind racism” in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the psychopathological view of racism compliments colorblindness in that larger structural issues are dismissed in favor of individual pathos. Furthermore, psychopathological explanations for racism dismiss socio-political contexts, eschewing the contributions of well over fifty years of social scientific research in the process.