This paper shows how social structure shapes many behaviors of low-income Black peoples’ currently labeled “culture.” It refutes both culture of poverty arguments based in welfare dependency and deindustrialization explanations of the post-1960 increase in single-parent Black families. Historically, distinct discrimination experiences in urban versus rural Black enclaves structured distinct child socializations and Black family formations, North and South. Agrarian enclaves socialized conformity to two-parent-families and racist labor markets; urban enclaves socialized resistance to racially stratified labor markets to preserve self-worth, destabilizing families. Any census measure of pre-1960 Black family structure averages low mother-only rates among rural socialized Blacks and high rates among urban socialized Blacks. The 1960-1980 doubling (21% to 41%) of Black children in one-parent families emerged from urbanization converging Blacks toward urban socialized Blacks’ historically high rate. Post-1970 welfare liberalization and/or deindustrialization were exacerbating factors, not causes. Using a family head’s urban/rural residence at age sixteen to proxy socialization location, logistic regressions on 1960s census data confirm hypothesis.

The social category “people of color” has been born twice from the mixing of peoples in the United States. This article seeks to explain the category’s emergence and varied boundaries in the late 1700s and early 1800s, its decline in the mid-1800s, and its re-emergence and spread in a related meaning of enlarged scope since the 1970s. In both phases, “people of color” has served as a bridging identity across racial lines for those not included among whites; both times it has served primarily as a term of respect, not abuse. The category’s revival has rested on a contested people-of-color equation—the equating of other minorities with Black people—and has come in four stages: 1) the advent of a new configuration of governmentally recognized minorities in the 1960s and 1970s; 2) the adoption of “people of color” as a collective identity for those groups, initially among Black, progressive, and feminist activists; 3) the polarized diffusion of “people of color” in the media; and 4) the emergence among activists of second thoughts about the category “people of color” as insufficiently specific. The article concludes with a brief discussion of whether the traditional color line is being redrawn as a people-of-color line.

This article makes a case for weak class reductionism. In particular, we advance a theoretical account that largely “reduces” a social construct called race to another social construct called class. Once you acknowledge that race is not itself a prime mover, but rather something to be explained, class as an explanans turns out to be a strong candidate. Before making this case, we distinguish our account from three alternative forms of class reductionism, which we reject: the notions that (1) class is a more fundamental form of identity than race; (2) class is of greater normative importance than race; and (3) race is an epiphenomenon of class, without independent effects. We then argue for one form of class reduction that establishes race as causally dependent on class. In particular, we provide a general defense of functional explanations, argue that capitalist class relations can functionally explain the persistence of race, and finally, delineate the limits of that explanation. Because the nature of functional explanation requires the explanandum to have important effects in the world, this argument puts race at the center of any discussion of capitalist class relations in racialized societies and explains it on the basis of its effects rather than its causes. Nonetheless, as we show in our conclusion, none of these arguments imply that race or racism is inherent to capitalist class relations. Racism may be explained by capitalism, even if it is not necessary for it.

The size and especially the growth of the Latino population in the United States are associated with anti-Latino and anti-immigrant attitudes. Findings from a recent line of experimental work suggest that Latino growth may also be associated with Whites’ anti-Black attitudes. Racial status threat could account for this association if Whites view Latino growth as a potential challenge to their status within a multi-group system that includes Blacks. Alternatively, or in addition, by engendering instability and uncertainty, Latino growth may promote ideological conservatism, which itself predicts racial attitudes. Building on prior work, this study examines the association between real, local Latino population growth––as opposed to manipulated or perceived growth––and Whites’ anti-Black resentment for a nationally representative sample of White Americans. Using data from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, the study finds that Whites in counties where the Latino population grew more report stronger anti-Black resentment. They are also more likely to perceive a threat to Whites’ racial status and to endorse ideological conservatism. Perceived threat and conservatism each partially account for the association between Latino growth and anti-Black resentment, suggesting the effect of Latino growth on anti-Black resentment is mediated through both channels.

Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois stands as one of the most groundbreaking books in American history. Scholars have acknowledged how the book, published in 1935, and Du Bois’s arguments in it, pioneered the study of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras today. This article explores the genesis and conceptual roots of Black Reconstruction by placing them in conversation with Du Bois’s connection to World War I. For several years, Du Bois labored on a history of the Black experience in World War I that he imagined as a sequel to Black Reconstruction. Du Bois’s work on this project, informed by his personal connection to the war, shaped many of the themes and ideas at the heart of Black Reconstruction. I argue that the full meaning of Black Reconstruction is incomplete without an understanding of the impact of World War I on Du Bois’s political evolution, intellectual development, and radical approach to history.

Black family values and behavior have long been at the center of policy solutions to intergenerational poverty. But in the early twentieth century, the Black family took on paradoxical significance as a solution to child poverty and neglect through the foster family. This was part of a broad realignment in child protection that upheld the “Home” as the best place for children—yet the concept came to mean something different for White and Black youth. Using New York City as a case by which to study broad transformations in child protection ideology and local child welfare response, I find that in the 1930s substitute care underwent a dramatic transformation with many White children cared for in their own homes or in therapeutic institutions, while previously excluded Black youth gained disproportionate access through race-matched foster families. Though a seemingly progressive approach, I argue that the prioritization of the foster home over the biological home illuminates how the family was envisioned as a solution to poverty in the context of racial inequality. Child welfare workers imagined that patterns of placement in race-matched foster families could be manipulated to overcome segregation and exclusion from the emerging welfare state. But as more non-White children entered substitute care, the conditions of poverty and distress in segregated communities necessitated a return to congregate care for “hard-to-place” minority youth as Black families seemingly failed to take care of their own. This case is important because it highlights the way in which official foster care systems emerged not as an extension of Black kinship care strategies, but as an experimental solution to dependency and neglect that mobilized the Black family to resolve the many consequences of state abandonment.

It matters how people view the police—and that there is a substantial racial gap in these views. Research has primarily focused on police experiences to explain generally less-positive views among Black Americans. We recommend a subtle but vital shift in focus, seeking instead to explain the remarkably more favorable average views about the police among White Americans. Utilizing comparable data from two 2016 American National Election Studies surveys, we explore the role of contact with the police, politics, and three different dimensions of racial attitudes and views, finding views about the police among White Americans to be shaped in primary ways by concerns about Black Americans. These factors, and racial resentment in particular, explain a significant portion of the average difference in views of the police between Black and White Americans. We discuss the implications of this subtle shift in focus, particularly for work which sets positive views about the police as the goal.

We examined the influence of racial and ethnic identity of residents and housing market economic conditions on redlining. Data were extracted from archival area description forms from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation for 568 Ohio neighborhoods from 1934–1940. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the relationships between neighborhood characteristics and redlining. Bivariate results indicated a strong association between the presence of African American residents and neighborhood redlining (OR = 40.9, 95% CI 22.9-72.8). Multivariable analysis demonstrated that some neighborhood characteristics were contributors to the decision to redline, including homes in poor condition (OR = 4.3, 95% CI 1.2-15.1), home vacancy (OR = 1.4, 95% CI 1.1-1.6), and housing prices (per thousand dollars) (OR = 0.7, 95% CI 0.4-1.2). Adjusting for these and other factors, the presence of African American residents remained a powerful predictor of redlining (OR = 13.8, 95% CI 4.4-42.8). Racial discrimination was the overriding factor in decisions to redline neighborhoods.

This article builds on settler and domestic colonial histories and theories to advance our understanding of urban changes in segregated, disinvested, U.S. Rust Belt cities. While many major cities have rebounded in population and experienced gentrification since the mid-twentieth century, many Rust Belt cities have continued to decline. The resulting conditions call for new theories to describe their changes, trajectories, and the impacts for majority poor Black populations. We construct a Binocular Colonial Lens: an analytic framework that superimposes shared conceptual descriptions and theoretical explanations of settler and domestic colonialisms. With this lens, we can elucidate the practices of erasure that are deployed throughout colonized communities and focus them on phenomena associated with urban decline and revitalization. While some urban scholarship has used metaphors and language of settler colonialism to describe gentrification, most of these works at best reflect the salience of settler ideology, and at worst reinforce Indigenous erasure. Foregrounding shared conditions of colonization and conquest in the United States, we train this Binocular Colonial Lens on Detroit, which reveals myriad urban processes like ghettoization, urban renewal, suburbanization, and gentrification as ongoing colonization, wherein domestically colonized populations are subject to numerous forms of erasure at the behest of the settler state and toward the advancement of settler society. This lens advances urban theory by expanding the depth of our analyses of urban changes, and scaffolds connections with other axes of racialized inequality by revealing shared tools of erasure operative in, for example, mass incarceration and environmental injustices.

Empirical studies have pointed to the increasing importance of procedural justice as a tool for improving the relationship between the police and local communities. The mediating role of procedural justice continues to be embraced by scholars, practitioners, and community members; as a result, we examine in the present study African Americans’ attitudes toward the police via the interpretive lens of procedural justice policing. Using procedural justice questions found in the social-psychology literature, we interviewed seventy-seven African Americans in Durham, NC, to assess their views about the U.S. police. Our results point to the following for improving the relationship between the police and African Americans: respect for African Americans by police, police fairness in the African American community, and increased and improved interaction between police and African Americans. Notably, these findings spanned three distinct educational and socioeconomic spectrums. The implications of our findings for community relations, public policy, and future research are discussed.

Drawing on articles from The New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News, this study analyzes reporting on the police killings of ten-year-old Clifford Glover in 1973, and twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell in 2006, in both instances by New York City Police Department (NYPD) 103rd Precinct officers in Jamaica, Queens. Using critical discourse analysis to study the differences in newspaper representations of police killings, this analysis follows Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s classic 1892 study Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. Wells-Barnett’s framework of Black Press and White Press is applied to this contemporary comparison of news coverage, asking how Black Press and White Press challenge or accept official police accounts of encounters where police kill Black youth and adults, as well as how they engage community members in their account of events leading to fatal police contact. The study historically contextualizes the localized relationship between police violence, media, and protest by focusing on depictions of two separate, publicized police killings and subsequent officer acquittals in the same neighborhood and precinct, thirty-three years apart. Studying the history of policing and rebellion in one neighborhood provides critical insight into representations of localized police violence by Black Press and White Press over time. The findings of this study function together to explain racialized discourse on police, victims, and communities in the wake of historic police violence and officer acquittals.

The current popularity of “racial capitalism” in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti- and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself.

Small businesses employ more than half of the entire workforce, account for more than sixty percent of new jobs created in the United States, and are responsible for about fifty percent of private domestic gross product. It is noteworthy, however, that small business owners in credit markets, in particular minority owners, have difficulty in securing sources of capital for their business operation. The literature on credit market discrimination shows consistent results that can be interpreted as evidence that minority owners are discriminated against compared to their counterparts (i.e., White owners) in obtaining loans, which may be caused by lenders’ discrimination, although such behavior is prohibited under current fair-lending laws. This paper uses pooled cross-sectional data from the Survey of Small Business Finances (1993, 1998, and 2003) and a bivariate probit model based on James J. Heckman’s approach to deal with sample selection bias for those choosing to apply for loans. Those who didn’t apply for loans have been ignored in analyses of credit markets for small business owners. This paper adds to the small business lending market literature by 1) combining cross sectional data from the Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF) for 1993, 1998, and 2003 to get more precise estimates and test statistics with more power; 2) conducting regression analyses with different model specifications to show the robustness of the empirical results; and 3) dealing directly with problems of sample selection based on Heckman’s approach with particular attention to the assumptions required to justify the identification of the effect (i.e., exclusion restrictions).

The analysis confirms previous results, suggesting that minority owners are discriminated against in credit markets. These conclusions are supported in a variety of model specifications.

Building on the theoretical frameworks of both Charles Mills and Juliet Hooker I center race within abjection theory to demonstrate how the lack of concern about the pain and suffering of racial minorities is a link between critical race and abjection theory. The central problematic of this paper is racial abjection—how race creates an altered conceptualization of abjection and what this means for Blacks within the polis. Racial abjection is a powerful mythological, psychological, and physical response to the Black body and Black sexuality. This is the ability and desire of Whites to witness Black pain and suffering. I discuss the relationship among racial abjection, the Black body and Black sexuality. Then I detail the effects of racial abjection on Black masculinity and femininity. Lastly, I offer (dis)identification as a possible starting point for counter-conceptualizing Black identity.

In this article, we reflect on the pernicious nature of rhetoric aimed at soliciting Black community support for predatory urban development schemes. Highlighting recent examples of Urban One Casino + Resort’s development campaign in Richmond, Virginia, and the messaging leveraged by political leaders on behalf of SoFi stadium and the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, we find that discursive moves made by public and private stakeholders reflect what we call the “predatory rhetorics of urban development.” We argue that these rhetorics intend to enlist divested Black communities as supporters of development projects that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of economic and political elites. They do so by playing on Black desires for social and economic inclusion into American middle-class community life. Four common threads of predatory rhetoric appear across both contexts. They are 1) seizing the real needs and concerns of stigmatized places, 2) relying on representational politics to mitigate issues of trust, 3) the neoliberal framing of American internal colonization as a problem that requires extractive private development solutions and, finally, 4) dissimulating intra-community class interests to consolidate “Black needs.” We reflect on the outcomes supported by these rhetorics across both development projects and raise several points of further consideration as we hope for more organized responses to such rhetorics in the future.

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2060, Latinx, African Americans, Asians, and other “minority” groups will together comprise the majority of the country’s population. Past research has found that non-Hispanic Whites, hereafter Whites, find such projections disquieting or threatening. Yet, recent surveys reveal that when given more than binary good/bad choices, most Whites opt for the middle-point response that this development will be “neither good nor bad for the country.” How can we account for this seemingly ambiguous evaluation of projected ethnoracial demographic futures? Using eight waves of nationally representative U.S. survey data collected between 2015 and 2018, this article begins to unpack the “neither” response among Whites, exploring what it might mean and what factors are associated with it, relative to seemingly optimistic and pessimistic stances. Multinomial Logistic Regression analyses and additional descriptive analyses indicate that “neither good nor bad” in this context is a substantive response: White “Neithers” are socio-demographically and attitudinally distinct from their counterparts. Our study demonstrates the value of moving beyond an exclusive focus on expressions of demographic threat and pessimism. Moreover, it invites further investigation into factors that inform and shape how Whites and other ethnoracial populations in the U.S. understand and assess projected population shifts.

This study examines the racialized and gendered experiences of Black men (N = 20) from elementary school through graduate school. The Black men featured in this article are current STEM doctoral students and were asked to reflect on their K-12 and undergraduate STEM experiences as well as their current experiences as graduate students. Findings conclude that Black men, as children and teens, experienced gendered racism in their STEM courses, which included a severe lack of racial representation of Black scientists, leading them to believe that they could not become scientists in their respective disciplines. At the undergraduate level, Black men encountered racial stereotyping and were self-conscious of their gender and race due to being underrepresented in their STEM courses. And at the doctoral level, Black men deal with psychological health issues due to the racism-related stressors they experience on campus, along with feeling compelled to be the spokesperson for Black students at their respective college campuses.

Hong Kong (a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China) is promoted as “Asia’s World City” due to its interconnectivity, East-meets-West geopolitical orientation, and composition of migrants from both Asian and non-Asian countries. Hong Kong-based scholars have suggested that Hong Kong’s policy towards the social inclusion of non-Chinese communities is ambiguous. For example, the Race Discrimination Ordinance (RDO) lacks an informative description of racial discrimination, which may lead to shortcomings in ethnic minority protections under the current social policy for integration (e.g., ethnic minorities’ experiences related to religious discrimination). Most of the non-White ethnic minority population of Hong Kong consists of low-income South Asians and Southeast Asians, with some ethnic groups (e.g., Nepalese) reported to reside in socially segregated districts. Furthermore, scholars have highlighted that current social policy in Hong Kong appears to be partially or completely different from Western-based approaches to multiculturalism, necessitating further examination to promote social inclusion. To fill this gap, this study explores the perspectives of Chinese and non-Chinese individuals regarding multiculturalism in Hong Kong. The study adopts a qualitative research design and includes interviews with twenty ethnically Chinese and non-Chinese teachers serving minorities in Hong Kong. Three themes emerge in this study: 1) a general understanding of multiculturalism as diverse cultural/ethnic backgrounds, mutual understanding and acceptance, and inclusive social harmony and social justice; 2) perceptions of Hong Kong-based multiculturalism and the perceived hierarchy of ethnic groups; and 3) the main differences between Western and Hong Kong-based multiculturalism, including more acceptance of diversity in the West and geographic location. In sum, this study provides recommendations to ensure a respectful and ethical inclusion of non-White ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, such as developing a tailor-made policy.