front cover of Race among Friends
Race among Friends
Exploring Race at a Suburban School
Modica, Marianne
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Many saw the 2008 election of Barack Obama as a sign that America had moved past the issue of race, that a colorblind society was finally within reach. But as Marianne Modica reveals in Race Among Friends, attempts to be colorblind do not end racism—in fact, ignoring race increases the likelihood that racism will occur in our schools and in society.
 
This intriguing volume focuses on a “racially friendly” suburban charter school called Excellence Academy, highlighting the ways that students and teachers think about race and act out racial identity. Modica finds that even in an environment where students of all racial backgrounds work and play together harmoniously, race affects the daily experiences of students and teachers in profound but unexamined ways. Some teachers, she notes, feared that talking about race in the classroom would open them to charges of racism, so they avoided the topic. And rather than generate honest and constructive conversations about race, student friendships opened the door for insensitive racial comments by whites, resentment and silence by blacks, and racially biased administrative practices. In the end, the school’s friendly environment did not promote—and may have hindered—serious discussion of race and racial inequity.
 
The desire to ignore race in favor of a “colorblind society,” Modica writes, has become an entrenched part of American culture. But as Race Among Friends shows, when race becomes a taboo subject, it has serious ramifications for students and teachers of all ethnic origins.
[more]

front cover of Race and Authority in Urban Politics
Race and Authority in Urban Politics
David J. Greenstone
Russell Sage Foundation, 1974
What really happened when citizens were asked to participate in their community’s poverty programs? In this revealing new book, the authors provide an answer to this question through a systematic empirical analysis of a single public policy issue—citizen participation in the Community Action Program of the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty.” Beginning with a brief case study description and analysis of the politics of community action in each of America’s five largest cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia—the authors move on to a fascinating examination of race and authority structures in our urban life. In a series of lively chapters, Professors Greenstone and Peterson show how the coalitions that formed around the community action question developed not out of electoral or organizational interests alone, but were strongly influenced by our conceptions of the nature of authority in America. They discuss the factors that affected the development of the action program and they note that democratic elections of low-income representatives, however much preferred by democratic reformers, were an ineffective way of representing the interests of the poor. The book stresses the way in which both machine and reform structures affected the ability of minority groups to organize effectively and to form alliances in urban politics. It considers the wide-ranging critiques made of the Community Action Program by conservative, liberal, and radical analysts and finds that all of them fail to appreciate the significance and intensity of the racial cleavage in American politics.
[more]

front cover of Race and Class Matters at an Elite College
Race and Class Matters at an Elite College
Elizabeth Aries
Temple University Press, 2008

In Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, Elizabeth Aries provides a rare glimpse into the challenges faced by black and white college students from widely different class backgrounds as they come to live together as freshmen. Based on an intensive study Aries conducted with 58 students at Amherst College during the 2005-2006 academic year, this book offers a uniquely personal look at the day-to-day thoughts and feelings of students as they experience racial and economic diversity firsthand, some for the first time.

Through online questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, Aries followed four groups of students throughout their first year of college: affluent whites, affluent blacks, less financially advantaged whites from families with more limited education, and less financially advantaged blacks from the same background. Drawing heavily on the voices of these freshmen, Aries chronicles what they learned from racial and class diversity—and what colleges might do to help their students learn more.

[more]

front cover of Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture
Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture
Perez, Domino
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture is an innovative work that freshly approaches the concept of race as a social factor made concrete in popular forms, such as film, television, and music. The essays collectively push past the reaffirmation of static conceptions of identity, authenticity, or conventional interpretations of stereotypes and bridge the intertextual gap between theories of community enactment and cultural representation. The book also draws together and melds otherwise isolated academic theories and methodologies in order to focus on race as an ideological reality and a process that continues to impact lives despite allegations that we live in a post-racial America. The collection is separated into three parts: Visualizing Race (Representational Media), Sounding Race (Soundscape), and Racialization in Place (Theory), each of which considers visual, audio, and geographic sites of racial representations respectively.  
[more]

front cover of Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas
Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas
New Perspectives
John A. Kirk
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas brings together the work of leading experts to cast a powerful light on the rich and diverse history of Arkansas’s racial and ethic relations. The essays span from slavery to the civil rights era and cover a diverse range of topics including the frontier experience of slavery; the African American experience of emancipation and after; African American migration patterns; the rise of sundown towns; white violence and its continuing legacy; women’s activism and home demon¬stration agents; African American religious figures from the better know Elias Camp (E. C.) Morris to the lesser-known Richard Nathaniel Hogan; the Mexican-American Bracero program; Latina/o and Asian American refugee experiences; and contemporary views of Latina/o immigration in Arkansas. Informing debates about race and ethnicity in Arkansas, the South, and the nation, the book provides both a primer to the history of race and ethnicity in Arkansas and a prospective map for better understanding racial and ethnic relations in the United States.
[more]

front cover of Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California
Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California
Clare V. McKanna
University of Nevada Press, 2007

Nineteenth-century California was a society in turmoil, with a rapidly growing population, booming mining camps, insufficient or nonexistent law-enforcement personnel, and a large number of ethnic groups with differing attitudes toward law and personal honor. Violence, including murder, was common, and legal responses varied broadly. Available now for the first time in paperback, Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California examines coroners’ inquest reports, court case files, prison registers, and other primary and printed sources to analyze patterns of homicide and the state’s embryonic justice system. Author Clare V. McKanna discovers that the nature of crimes varied with the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims, as did the conduct and results of trials and sentencing patterns. He presents specific case studies and a vivid portrait of an unruly society in flux. Enhanced with testimony from contemporary sources and illustrated with period photographs, this study richly portrays a frontier society where the law was neither omnipotent nor impartial.

[more]

front cover of Race and Place
Race and Place
School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland
Deirdre Mayer Dougherty
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland, from 1945 through 1973. The book is organized around several successive policies that emerged in this time: school equalization, school choice, neighborhood schools, school construction, school closure, busing for racial integration, and school discipline. Dougherty shows how these policies contained and reinforced assumptions about place and created new racial truths about people and schooling.
 
[more]

front cover of Race and Retail
Race and Retail
Consumption across the Color Line
Bay, Mia
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses. 
 
Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods.  In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.  
 
Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
 
 

[more]

front cover of Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance
Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance
Jeffrey B. Ferguson
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Jeffrey B. Ferguson is remembered as an Amherst College professor of mythical charisma and for his long-standing engagement with George Schuyler, culminating in his paradigm changing book The Sage of Sugar Hill. Continuing in the vein of his ever questioning the conventions of “race melodrama” through the lens of which so much American cultural history and storytelling has been filtered, Ferguson’s final work is brought together here in Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance.
[more]

front cover of Race Course Against White Supremacy
Race Course Against White Supremacy
Against White Supremacy
Bill Ayers
Northwestern University Press, 2009
White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.
[more]

front cover of Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War
Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War
A Global Perspective
Philip E. Muehlenbeck
Vanderbilt University Press, 2012
A white American woman is raped by a black Panamanian laborer in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone, and the aftermath affects labor relations in the Western hemisphere for the next two decades. And numerous nations use the African continent to exercise their colonial muscle and postwar power, only to encounter the financial and military burdens that will exhaust and alienate their own citizenry half a world away. As Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War reveals, during this dangerous era there were no longer any "isolated incidents." Like the butterfly flapping its wings and changing the weather on the other side of the globe, an instance of racial or ethnic hostility had ripple effects across a Cold War world of brinksmanship between bitter national rivals and ideological opponents.


Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Borders of Race and Nation
Nico Slate

Part I: Race and the International System

Token Diplomacy: The United States, Race, and the Cold War
Michael L. Krenn

A Wind of Change? White Redoubt and the Postcolonial Moment in South Africa, 1960-1963
Ryan M. Irwin

Part II: Race, Ethnicity, and Decolonization

Race, Labor, and Security in the Panama Canal Zone: The 1946 Greaves Rape Case, Local 713, and the Isthmian Cold War Crackdown
Michael Donoghue

Race, Identity, and Diplomacy in the Papua Decolonization Struggle, 1949-1962
David Webster

"For a Better Guinea": Winning Hearts and Minds in Portuguese Guinea
Luís Nuno Rodrigues

Part III: Race and the Interplay of Domestic and International Politics

Testing the Limits of Soviet Internationalism: African Students in the Soviet Union
Maxim Matusevich

Crimes against Humanity in the Congo: Nazi Legacies and the German Cold War in Africa
Katrina M. Hagen

Race and the Cuban Revolution: The Impact of Cuba's Intervention in Angola
Henley Adams

Part IV: Ethnicity and the Interplay of Domestic and International Politics

Ethnic Nationalism in the Cold War Context: The Cyprus Issue in the Greek and Greek American Public Debate, 1954-1989
Zinovia Lialiouti and Philip E. Muehlenbeck

God Bless Reagan and God Help Canada: The Polish Canadian Action Group and Solidarność in Toronto
Eric L. Payseur

Ethnic Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism
Mark R. Beissinger
[more]

front cover of Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom
Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom
Edited by Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten
University of Illinois Press, 2024

The contemporary rethinking and relearning of history and racism has sparked creative approaches for teaching the histories and representations of marginalized communities. Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten edit a collection that illuminates these ideas for a variety of fields, areas of education, and institutional contexts.

The authors draw on their own racial and ethnic backgrounds to examine race and racism in the context of addressing necessary and often difficult classroom conversations about race, histories of exclusion, and racism. Case studies, reflections, and personal experiences provide guidance for addressing race and racism in the classroom. In-depth analysis looks at attacks on teaching Critical Race Theory and other practices for studying marginalized histories and voices. Throughout, the contributors shine a light on how a critical framework focused on race advances an understanding of contemporary and historical US multiethnic literatures for students around the world and in all fields of study.

Contributors: Kristen Brown, Nancy Carranza, Luis Cortes, Marilyn Edelstein, Naomi Edwards, Joanne Lipson Freed, Yadira Gamez, Lauren J. Gantz, Jennifer Ho, Shermaine M. Jones, Norell Martinez, Sarah Minslow, Crystal R. Pérez, Kevin Pyon, Emily Ruth Rutter, Ariel Santos, and C. Anneke Snyder

[more]

front cover of Race, Jobs, and the War
Race, Jobs, and the War
Andrew E. Kersten
University of Illinois Press, 1999
A richly detailed look at the crucial role of federally supported civil rights activism

In this rigorous and thoroughly documented study focusing on the pivotal Midwest, Andrew E. Kersten shows how a tiny government agency--the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC)--influenced the course of civil rights reform, moving the United States closer to a national fair employment policy and laying the foundation for today's contested affirmative action practices.

Rejecting claims that black advancement during the war was due primarily to shortages of labor, Race, Jobs, and the War contends that the FEPC made significant strides in breaking racial barriers, settling complaints, and pursuing a vigorous educational campaign to foster more harmonious industrial relations between white and minority workers.

[more]

front cover of Race, Religion, and Civil Rights
Race, Religion, and Civil Rights
Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900-1968
Hinnershitz, Stephanie
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Histories of civil rights movements in America generally place little or no emphasis on the activism of Asian Americans. Yet, as this fascinating new study reveals, there is a long and distinctive legacy of civil rights activism among foreign and American-born Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino students, who formed crucial alliances based on their shared religious affiliations and experiences of discrimination.  
 
Stephanie Hinnershitz tells the story of the Asian American campus organizations that flourished on the West Coast from the 1900s through the 1960s. Using their faith to point out the hypocrisy of fellow American Protestants who supported segregation and discriminatory practices, the student activists in these groups also performed vital outreach to communities outside the university, from Californian farms to  Alaskan canneries. Highlighting the unique multiethnic composition of these groups, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights explores how the students' interethnic activism weathered a variety of challenges, from the outbreak of war between Japan and China to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
 
Drawing from a variety of archival sources to bring forth the authentic, passionate voices of the students, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights is a testament to the powerful ways they served to shape the social, political, and cultural direction of civil rights movements throughout the West Coast. 
[more]

front cover of Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa
Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa
In British Colonial Africa
Timothy H. Parsons
Ohio University Press, 2004

Conceived by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell as a way to reduce class tensions in Edwardian Britain, scouting evolved into an international youth movement. It offered a vision of romantic outdoor life as a cure for disruption caused by industrialization and urbanization. Scouting’s global spread was due to its success in attaching itself to institutions of authority. As a result, scouting has become embroiled in controversies in the civil rights struggle in the American South, in nationalist resistance movements in India, and in the contemporary American debate over gay rights.

In Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa, Timothy Parsons uses scouting as an analytical tool to explore the tensions in colonial society. Introduced by British officials to strengthen their rule, the movement targeted the students, juvenile delinquents, and urban migrants who threatened the social stability of the regime. Yet Africans themselves used scouting to claim the rights of full imperial citizenship. They invoked the Fourth Scout Law, which declared that a scout was a brother to every other scout, to challenge racial discrimination.

Parsons shows that African scouting was both an instrument of colonial authority and a subversive challenge to the legitimacy of the British Empire. His study of African scouting demonstrates the implications and far-reaching consequences of colonial authority in all its guises.

[more]

front cover of Race Struggles
Race Struggles
Edited by Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen A. Neville
University of Illinois Press, 2008
This collection is a contribution to the ongoing examination of race and its relation to class and gender. The essays in the volume start with the premise that although race, like class and gender, is socially constructed, all three categories have been shaped profoundly by their context in a capitalist society. Race, in other words, is a historical category that develops not only in dialectical relation to class and gender but also in relation to the material conditions in which all three are forged.

These assumptions underlie the organization of the volume, which is divided into three parts: "Racial Structures," which explores the problem of how race has historically been structured in modern capitalist societies; "Racial Ideology and Identity," which tackles diverse but interrelated questions regarding the representation of race and racism in dominant ideologies and discourses; and "Struggle," which builds on the insight that resistance to structures and ideologies of racial oppression is always situated in a particular time and place.

In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa.

Contributors are Pedro Cabán, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Tola Olu Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.

[more]

front cover of Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat
Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat
Jennifer L. Hochschild
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Race and class inequality are at the crux of many policy disputes in American cities. But are they the only factors driving political discord? In Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat, political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild examines significant policies in four major American cities to determine when race and class shape city politics, when they do not, and what additional forces have the power to shape urban policy choices.
 
Hochschild investigates the root causes of disputes in the arenas of policing, development, schooling, and budgeting. She finds that race and class are central to the Stop-Question-Frisk policing policy in New York City and the development of Atlanta’s Beltline. New York’s Stop-Question-Frisk policy was intended to fight crime and keep all New Yorkers safe. In practice, however, young Black and Latino men in low-income neighborhoods were disproportionately stopped by a predominantly White police force. The goal of the Atlanta Beltline, a redevelopment project that includes public parks, new housing, commercial development, and a robust public transit system, is to expand access around the city and keep working-class residents in the city by constructing affordable housing. Instead, the construction completed thus far has encouraged gentrification and displacement of poor, disproportionately Black residents, and has increased the wealth and power of both Black and White city elites.
 
However, Hochschild finds that race and class inequality are not central to all urban policy disputes. When investigating the issues of charter schools in Los Angeles and Chicago’s pension system she identifies a third driver: financial threat that feels existential to the policy and political actors. In Los Angeles, there is a battle between traditional public schools and independent charter schools. Increasingly, families with sufficient resources are moving out of L.A. to areas with better school districts. Traditional public schools and charter schools must fight for the remaining students and the funding that comes with them. There are not enough students to teach and not enough money to teach them. The school district risks school closures, layoffs, and pension deficits; in this context, race/class conflict fades into the background.
 
Chicago’s public sector pension debt is at least three times as large as the city’s annual budget and continues to grow. Policy actors agree that the pension system needs to be stably funded. Yet city leaders, fearful of upsetting constituents and jeopardizing their political careers, fail to implement policies that would do so. Meaningful policy change to rectify the pension deficit continues to get kicked down the line for future policy actors to address. In this context also, race/class conflict fades into the background.
 
Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat is a compelling examination of the role that race, class, and political and fiscal threat play in shaping urban policy.
 
 
[more]

front cover of Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai i
Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai i
Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case
Jonathan Y. Okamura
University of Illinois Press, 2019
On September 18, 1928, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga kidnapped and brutally murdered ten-year-old George Gill Jamieson in Waikîkî. Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, confessed to the crime. Within three weeks, authorities had convicted him and sentenced him to hang, despite questions about Fukunaga's sanity and a deeply flawed defense by his court-appointed attorneys. Jonathan Y. Okamura argues that officials "raced" Fukunaga to death—first viewing the accused only as Japanese despite the law supposedly being colorblind, and then hurrying to satisfy the Haole (white) community's demand for revenge. Okamura sets the case against an analysis of the racial hierarchy that undergirded Hawai‘ian society, which was dominated by Haoles who saw themselves most threatened by the islands' sizable Japanese American community. The Fukunaga case and others like it in the 1920s reinforced Haole supremacy and maintained the racial boundary that separated Haoles from non-Haoles, particularly through racial injustice. As Okamura challenges the representation of Hawai i as a racial paradise, he reveals the ways Haoles usurped the criminal justice system and reevaluates the tense history of anti-Japanese racism in Hawai i.
[more]

front cover of Racial Americana, Volume 104
Racial Americana, Volume 104
John L. Jackson, Jr., ed.
Duke University Press
If sociologist and cultural critic W. E. B. Du Bois proved prophetic about the twentieth century and its color lines, the beginning of the twenty-first century has given rise to divergent pronouncements about the potential of race relations and racial discourse in American society. Older categories of black victims and white victimizers hardly seem up to the task of making social sense out of today’s complex racial issues. Racial Americana explores new modes of racial theorizing that provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the social facts that underpin race (as belief system, as common sense, and as biological mythmaking), examining what those underpinnings forewarn about the future of social difference in the United States.

Imagining America’s racialist future, the diverse contributors to this special issue—anthropologists, sociologists, historians, poets, and literary critics—offer their conceptualizations of race today, discuss how racial ideology has changed through the years, and explain its continuing ability to morph according to geopolitical, cultural, and economic strictures. Essays focus on how notions of race have helped constitute varied definitions of Americanness in the past and the present; offer critiques and recuperations of antiessentialist efforts; excavate the affective links between racism and patriotism after September 11; examine how race and gender intersect in the lives of African American jazz musicians; and determine what Du Bois's earlier arguments say about contemporary representations of “Latinidad.”

Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Tess Chakkalakal, Theodore A. Harris, John Hartigan Jr., Sharon P. Holland, John L. Jackson Jr., Marcyliena Morgan, Vijay Prashad, Don Robotham, Nichole T. Rustin, Brackette F. Williams

[more]

front cover of Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity
Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity
Edited by Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. McBride, and John Carlos Rowe
University of Illinois Press, 2013
The unfinished manuscript of literary and cultural theorist Lindon Barrett, this study offers a genealogy of how the development of racial blackness within the mercantile capitalist system of Euro-American colonial imperialism was constitutive of Western modernity. Masterfully connecting historical systems of racial slavery to post-Enlightenment modernity, this pathbreaking publication shows how Western modernity depended on a particular conception of racism contested by African American writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance.

[more]

front cover of Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis
Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis
Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago
Preston H. Smith II
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

“The African American community.” “The black position.” In accounts of black politics after the Second World War, these phrases reflect how the African American perspective generally appeared consistent, coherent, and unified. In Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, Preston H. Smith II examines housing debates in Chicago that go beyond black and white politics, and he shows how class and factional conflicts among African Americans actually helped to reproduce stunning segregation along economic lines.

Class and factional conflicts were normal in the rough-and-tumble world of land use politics. They are, however, often not visible in accounts of the postwar fight against segregation. Smith outlines the ideological framework that black civic leaders in Chicago used to formulate housing policy, both within and outside the black community, to reveal a surprising picture of leaders who singled out racial segregation as the source of African Americans’ inadequate housing rather than attacking class inequalities. What are generally presented as black positions on housing policy in Chicago, Smith makes clear, belonged to the black elite and did not necessarily reflect black working-class participation or interests.

This book details how black civic leaders fought racial discrimination in ways that promoted—or at least did not sacrifice—their class interests in housing and real estate struggles. And, as Smith demonstrates, their accommodation of the real estate practices and government policy of the time has had a lasting effect: it contributed to a legacy of class segregation in the housing market in Chicago and major metropolitan areas across the country that is still felt today.

[more]

front cover of Racial Equality in America
Racial Equality in America
John Hope Franklin
University of Missouri Press, 1976

This is distinguished historian John Hope Franklin's eloquent and forceful meditation on the persistent disparity between the goal of racial equality in America and the facts of discrimination.

In a searing critique of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin shows that this spokesman for democracy did not include African Americans among those "created equal." Franklin chronicles the events of the nineteenth century that solidified inequality in America and shows how emancipation dealt only with slavery, not with inequality.

In the twentieth century, America finally confronted the fact that equality is indivisible: it must not be divided so that it is extended to some at the expense of others. Once this indivisibility is accepted, Franklin charges, America faces the monumental task of overcoming its long heritage of inequality.

Racial Equality in America is a powerful reminder that our history is more than a record of idealized democratic traditions and institutions. It is a dramatic message to all Americans, calling them to know their history and themselves.

[more]

front cover of The Racial Order Of Things
The Racial Order Of Things
Cultural Imaginaries Of The Post-Soul Era
Roopali Mukherjee
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Why did affirmative action programs implemented during the sixties and seventies suffer vicious assaults in the nineties? How were culturally resonant appeals to individualism and colorblindness turned around during the nineties to epitomize a “toxic system of quotas, preference, and set-asides”?In The Racial Order of Things, Roopali Mukherjee analyzes reversals and reinterpretations that mark the turn from the civil rights era of the sixties to the post-soul decade of the nineties. She begins by surveying a series of intractable disagreements over race- and gender-based social justice that have played out over the past decade, framed by the 1996 passage of California’s Proposition 209 and the 2003 Supreme Court decision on admissions criteria at the University of Michigan. Examining political campaigns for and against affirmative action as well as films about dilemmas of gender and race in the mythic meritocracy, the book exposes a remarkable discursive tug-of-war over antidiscrimination policies during the nineties.Highlighting the ways in which categories such as “blackness” and “women” have operated in these debates, Mukherjee sees the public policy process as a key site where cultural identities are formed, recognized, and discarded. Considering mainstream media, including Hollywood films like Disclosure, G.I. Jane, Courage under Fire, and The Contender, Mukherjee focuses on conflicts following the introduction of women and blacks into the workplace. She explores the politics of public memory about the civil rights era through the lens of feature film, documentary, and network news. Using newspaper articles and legislative records, Mukherjee provides a comparative reading of narratives and counternarratives of the debate surrounding the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti–affirmative action campaigns of the neoliberal nineties.Balancing policy narrative, cinematic reading, and conceptual analysis, Mukherjee demonstrates a shifting and paradoxical racial order that explains how the cultural authority and political career of affirmative action remains in flux, thoroughly contested, and contradictory.Roopali Mukherjee is assistant professor of media studies at Queens College of the City University of New York.
[more]

front cover of Racial Policies and Practices of Real Estate Brokers
Racial Policies and Practices of Real Estate Brokers
Rose Helper
University of Minnesota Press, 1969
Racial Policies and Practices of Real Estate Brokers was first published in 1969.Dr. Helper, a sociologist, reports on a study which takes a close look at one of the basic problems underlying racial discrimination in housing -- the policies and practices of real estate brokers. She has attempted to find out how real estate men themselves regard their racial practices and to analyze the ideology on which their practices are based.The core of the study is a series of interviews conducted in 1955-1956 with 121 real estate brokers located in three different sections of Chicago and a less extensive follow-up survey made in 1964-1965. In addition to the interviews, she obtained information about the ideology and practices of the Chicago Real Estate Board, as well as the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and about other factors affecting the brokers’ practices, such as the characteristics of the community, the policies of lending agencies, and the sources of potential profit in certain kinds of real estate transactions. She also compared the Chicago data with information about brokers’ practices in other cities of the United States.The study will be of interest to the general public and useful in particular to social scientists, to government agencies concerned with housing or civil rights, and to those in the real estate business, on real estate boards, or in related business or financial enterprises, such as banks and insurance firms.Dr. Joseph D. Lohman, School of Criminology, University of California, Berkeley, says in the foreword: “This study is a significant contribution to the understanding of the increasing influence in our social life of the policies, stratagems, and tactics of deliberately organized interest groups.”
[more]

front cover of Racial Resentment in the Political Mind
Racial Resentment in the Political Mind
Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A thought-provoking look at how racial resentment, rather than racial prejudice alone, motivate a growing resistance among whites to improve the circumstances faced by racial minorities.

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to help racial minorities stem from racial prejudice. They argue that racial resentment arises from just-world beliefs and appraisals of deservingness that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in America in ways more consequential than racism or racial prejudice alone. 

The culprits, as many White people see it, are undeserving people of color, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at Whites’ expense—a worldview in which any attempt at modest change is seen as a challenge to the status quo and privilege. Yet, as Davis and Wilson reveal, many Whites have become racially resentful due to their perceptions that African Americans skirt the “rules of the game” and violate traditional values by taking advantage of unearned resources. Resulting attempts at racial progress lead Whites to respond in ways that retain their social advantage—opposing ameliorative policies, minority candidates, and other advancement on racial progress. Because racial resentment is rooted in beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness, ordinary citizens, who may not harbor racist motivations, may wind up in the same political position as racists, but for different reasons. 
[more]

front cover of Racial Revolutions
Racial Revolutions
Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil
Jonathan W. Warren
Duke University Press, 2001
Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the Indian population in Brazil as increasing numbers of pardos (individuals of mixed African, European, and indigenous descent) have chosen to identify themselves as Indians. In Racial Revolutions—the first book-length study of racial formation in Brazil that centers on Indianness—Jonathan W. Warren draws on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews to illuminate the discursive and material forces responsible for this resurgence in the population.
The growing number of pardos who claim Indian identity represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. For centuries, the predominant trend had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favor of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors—including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity—have prompted a reversal of racial aspirations and reimaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognize and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group.
Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation building, and state violence.

Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

[more]

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Racialized Politics
The Debate about Racism in America
Edited by David O. Sears, James Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Are Americans less prejudiced now than they were thirty years ago, or has racism simply gone "underground"? Is racism something we learn as children, or is it a result of certain social groups striving to maintain their privileged positions in society?

In Racialized Politics, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists explore the current debate surrounding the sources of racism in America. Published here for the first time, the essays represent three major approaches to the topic. The social psychological approach maintains that prejudice socialized early in life feeds racial stereotypes, while the social structural viewpoint argues that behavior is shaped by whites' fear of losing their privileged status. The third perspective looks to non-racially inspired ideology, including attitudes about the size and role of government, as the reason for opposition to policies such as affirmative action. Timely and important, this collection provides a state-of-the-field assessment of the current issues and findings on the role of racism in mass politics and public opinion.

Contributors are Lawrence Bobo, Gretchen C. Crosby, Michael C. Dawson, Christopher Federico, P. J. Henry, John J. Hetts, Jennifer L. Hochschild, William G. Howell, Michael Hughes, Donald R. Kinder, Rick Kosterman, Tali Mendelberg, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Howard Schuman, David O. Sears, James Sidanius, Pam Singh, Paul M. Sniderman, Marylee C. Taylor, and Steven A. Tuch.
[more]

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Racially Writing the Republic
Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity
Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, eds.
Duke University Press, 2009
Racially Writing the Republic investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. Drawing on political theory, American studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the contributors to this collection highlight the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major U.S. political and social leaders. At the same time, they examine how nonwhite writers and activists have struggled against racism and for the full realization of America’s political ideals. The essays are arranged chronologically by subject, and, with one exception, each essay is focused on a single figure, from George Washington to James Baldwin.

The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965.

Contributors. Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson

[more]

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Racism
Albert Memmi
University of Minnesota Press, 1999
An eminent social analyst examines the way racism works-and how it can be overcome.

Racism: It is social, not “natural”; it is general, not “personal”; and it is tragically effective. In a remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of American life, Albert Memmi investigates racism as social pathology-a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiographical, Racism moves beyond individual prejudice and taste to engage the broader questions of collective behavior and social responsibility.

The book comprises three sections-“Description,” “Definition,” and “Treatment”-in which Memmi delineates racism’s causes and hidden workings, examines its close affinity to colonialism, and considers its everyday manifestations over a period of centuries throughout the West.

For Memmi, the structure of racism has four “moments”: the insistence on difference; the negative valuation imposed on those who differ; the generalizing of this negative valuation to an entire group; and the use of generalization to legitimize hostility. Memmi shows how it is not racism’s content-which can change at will-but its form that gives it such power and tenacity.

Born in a poor section of Tunis, Tunisia, a Jew among Muslims, an Arab among Europeans, Memmi brings his own experience of the complex contours of prejudice to his analysis of a problem that divides societies the world over. Writing in the tradition of Frantz Fanon, Memmi redirects debates about racism-and offers a rare chance for progress against social prejudice.
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Racism and Cultural Studies
Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference
E. San Juan Jr.
Duke University Press, 2002
In Racism and Cultural Studies E. San Juan Jr. offers a historical-materialist critique of practices in multiculturalism and cultural studies. Rejecting contemporary theories of inclusion as affirmations of the capitalist status quo, San Juan envisions a future of politically equal and economically empowered citizens through the democratization of power and the socialization of property. Calling U.S. nationalism the new “opium of the masses,” he argues that U.S. nationalism is where racist ideas and practices are formed, refined, and reproduced as common sense and consensus.
Individual chapters engage the themes of ethnicity versus racism, gender inequality, sexuality, and the politics of identity configured with the discourse of postcoloniality and postmodernism. Questions of institutional racism, social justice, democratization, and international power relations between the center and the periphery are explored and analyzed. San Juan fashions a critique of dominant disciplinary approaches in the humanities and social sciences and contends that “the racism question” functions as a catalyst and point of departure for cultural critiques based on a radical democratic vision. He also asks urgent questions regarding globalization and the future of socialist transformation of “third world” peoples and others who face oppression.
As one of the most notable cultural theorists in the United States today, San Juan presents a provocative challenge to the academy and other disciplinary institutions. His intervention will surely compel the attention of all engaged in intellectual exchanges where race/ethnicity serves as an urgent focus of concern.
[more]

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Radical Advocate
Ida B. Wells and the Road to Race and Gender Justice
Mary E. Triece
University of Alabama Press, 2025

Pinpoints the persuasive strategies that typified Wells’s efforts to shape broader cultural conversations concerning the causes of racial, social, and gender inequity

Born into the brutal reality of slavery, Ida B. Wells rose to become an audacious journalist, teacher, and activist for racial and gender justice. In Radical Advocate, Mary E. Triece examines the rhetorical strategies employed by Wells to challenge deeply rooted systems of oppression, strategies that remain powerful and relevant today.

Triece introduces the concept of “radical embodied advocacy” to give an account of Wells’s unique position as a Black woman whose personal encounters with white violence were palpable, experienced physically and mentally. White men lynched Wells’s friends and threatened her own life, forcing her into exile after destroying the very press on which she wrote and edited. From this perspective, Wells understood lynching as linked to white economic and political control. Through a close analysis of Wells’s speeches, writings, and journalism, Triece reveals how Wells pioneered a form of “intersectional journalism” that centered the voices of those marginalized by race, gender, and class.

By examining Wells’s work through the lens of philosophy, rhetoric, and Black feminism, Triece underscores the epistemic challenges faced by marginalized advocates and the importance of their perspectives in shaping social change. Radical Advocate ultimately positions Wells as a prophetic figure whose insights into the systemic nature of racism remain profoundly relevant in today’s world.

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Recasting Race after World War II
Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany
Timothy L. Schroer
University Press of Colorado, 2007
Historian Timothy L. Schroer's Recasting Race after World War II explores the renegotiation of race by Germans and African American GIs in post-World War II Germany. Schroer dissects the ways in which notions of blackness and whiteness became especially problematic in interactions between Germans and American soldiers serving as part of the victorious occupying army at the end of the war.

The segregation of U.S. Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratizing force in postwar Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which postwar conditions necessitated reexamination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace. He also traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.

Recasting Race after World War II will appeal to historians and scholars of American, African American, and German studies.
[more]

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Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race
How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown
Kevin J. McMahon
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Many have questioned FDR's record on race, suggesting that he had the opportunity but not the will to advance the civil rights of African Americans. Kevin J. McMahon challenges this view, arguing instead that Roosevelt's administration played a crucial role in the Supreme Court's increasing commitment to racial equality—which culminated in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

McMahon shows how FDR's attempt to strengthen the presidency and undermine the power of conservative Southern Democrats dovetailed with his efforts to seek racial equality through the federal courts. By appointing a majority of rights-based liberals deferential to presidential power, Roosevelt ensured that the Supreme Court would be receptive to civil rights claims, especially when those claims had the support of the executive branch.
[more]

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Reconstructing Dixie
Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South
Tara McPherson
Duke University Press, 2003
The South has long played a central role in America’s national imagination—the site of the trauma of slavery and of a vast nostalgia industry, alternatively the nation’s moral other and its moral center. Reconstructing Dixie explores how ideas about the South function within American culture. Narratives of the region often cohere around such tropes as southern hospitality and the southern (white) lady. Tara McPherson argues that these discursive constructions tend to conceal and disavow hard historical truths, particularly regarding race relations and the ways racial inequities underwrite southern femininity. Advocating conceptions of the South less mythologized and more tethered to complex realities, McPherson seeks to bring into view that which is repeatedly obscured—the South’s history of both racial injustice and cross-racial alliance.

Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race, gender, and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography. She examines modes of affect or ways of "feeling southern" to reveal how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging cultural studies critique, Reconstructing Dixie calls for vibrant new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and reinvigorated southern studies.

Reconstructing Dixie will appeal to scholars in American, southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American, media, and women’s studies.

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Red Star Over Malaya
Resistance and Social Conflict During and After the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946
Cheah Boon Kheng
National University of Singapore Press, 2012
Red Star Over Malaya is an account of the inter-racial relations between Malays and Chinese during the final stages of the Japanese occupation. In 1947, none of the three major race of Malaya - Malays, Chinese, and Indians - regarded themselves as pan-ethnic "Malayans" with common duties and problems. With the occupation forcibly cut them off from China, Chinese residents began to look inwards towards Malaya and stake political claims, leading inevitably to a political contest with the Malays. As the country advanced towards nationhood and self-government, there was tension between traditional loyalties to the Malay rulers and the states, or to ancestral homelands elsewhere, and the need to cultivate an enduring loyalty to Malaya on the part of those who would make their home there in future. 
 
 As Japanese forces withdrew from the countryside, the Chinese guerrillas of the communist-led resistance movement, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), emerged from the jungle and took control of some 70 per cent of the country's smaller towns and villages, seriously alarming the Malay population. When the British Military Administration sought to regain control of these liberated areas, the ensuing conflict set the tone for future political conflicts and marked a crucial stage in the history of Malaya. Based on extensive archival research, Red Star Over Malaya provides a riveting account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed Japan's surrender. This book is fundamental to an understanding of social and political developments in Malaysia during the second half of the 20th century.
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Red, White, Black, and Blue
A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia
William M. Drennen Jr., Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr.
Ohio University Press, 2004
Red, White, Black, and Blue began as a collaborative memoir by William M. “Bill” Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. As boys they played on the same Little League baseball team and experienced just one year together as schoolmates after the all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated in 1955. After that, class, race, and choice separated their life experiences for forty-five years. In 1992 both had returned to Charleston from lives mostly lived elsewhere. They decided to work together on a memoir of growing up through the trauma of desegregation. Their aim was to foster understanding between their distinct cultures for themselves and for their own and future generations. Dolores Johnson, in editing the two texts, observed two very different modes of expression: Bill Drennen’s narrative is threaded with references that connote wealth, status, and personal privilege; Kojo Jones’s memoir is interwoven with African American signification, protest, and moral outrage. The stories of their Appalachian upbringing in homes less than a mile apart are anecdotal in nature, but their diverse uses of the English language as they endeavor to communicate shared memories and common meanings reveal significant cultural connotations that transform standard American English into two different languages, rendering interracial communication problematic. Dr. Johnson’s analysis is to the point. Red, White, Black, and Blue is a groundbreaking approach to studying not only cultural linguistics but also the cultural heritage of a historic time and place in America. It gives witness to the issues of race and class inherent in the way we write, speak, and think.
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Redefining Japaneseness
Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland
Yamashiro, Jane H
Rutgers University Press, 2017
There is a rich body of literature on the experience of Japanese immigrants in the United States, and there are also numerous accounts of the cultural dislocation felt by American expats in Japan. But what happens when Japanese Americans, born and raised in the United States, are the ones living abroad in Japan? 
 
Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan navigate and complicate the categories of Japanese and “foreigner.” Drawing from extensive interviews and fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Jane H. Yamashiro tracks the multiple ways these migrants strategically negotiate and interpret their daily interactions. Following a diverse group of subjects—some of only Japanese ancestry and others of mixed heritage, some fluent in Japanese and others struggling with the language, some from Hawaii and others from the US continent—her study reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness. 
 
Making an important contribution to both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration, Redefining Japaneseness critically interrogates the common assumption that people of Japanese ancestry identify as members of a global diaspora. Furthermore, through its close examination of subjects who migrate from one highly-industrialized nation to another, it dramatically expands our picture of the migrant experience.  
 
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Redefining Race
Asian American Panethnicity and Shifting Ethnic Boundaries
Dina G. Okamoto is associate professor of sociology and director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2014
In 2012, the Pew Research Center issued a report that named Asian Americans as the “highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” Despite this seemingly optimistic conclusion, over thirty Asian American advocacy groups challenged the findings. As many pointed out, the term “Asian American” itself is complicated. It currently denotes a wide range of ethnicities, national origins, and languages, and encompasses a number of significant economic and social disparities. In Redefining Race, sociologist Dina G. Okamoto traces the complex evolution of this racial designation to show how the use of “Asian American” as a panethnic label and identity has been a deliberate social achievement negotiated by members of this group themselves, rather than an organic and inevitable process. Drawing on original research and a series of interviews, Okamoto investigates how different Asian ethnic groups in the U.S. were able to create a collective identity in the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Okamoto argues that a variety of broad social forces created the conditions for this developing panethnic identity. Racial segregation, for example, shaped how Asian immigrants of different national origins were distributed in similar occupations and industries. This segregation of Asians within local labor markets produced a shared experience of racial discrimination, which encouraged Asian ethnic groups to develop shared interests and identities. By constructing a panethnic label and identity, ethnic group members took part in creating their own collective histories, and in the process challenged and redefined current notions of race. The emergence of a panethnic racial identity also depended, somewhat paradoxically, on different groups organizing along distinct ethnic lines in order to gain recognition and rights from the larger society. According to Okamoto, these ethnic organizations provided the foundation necessary to build solidarity within different Asian-origin communities. Leaders and community members who created inclusive narratives and advocated policies that benefited groups beyond their own were then able to move these discrete ethnic organizations toward a panethnic model. For example, a number of ethnic-specific organizations in San Francisco expanded their services and programs to include other ethnic group members after their original constituencies dwindled. A Laotian organization included refugees from different parts of Asia, a Japanese organization began to advocate for South Asian populations, and a Chinese organization opened its doors to Filipinos and Vietnamese. As Okamoto argues, the process of building ties between ethnic communities while also recognizing ethnic diversity is the hallmark of panethnicity. Redefining Race is a groundbreaking analysis of the processes through which group boundaries are drawn and contested. In mapping the genesis of a panethnic Asian American identity, Okamoto illustrates the ways in which concepts of race continue to shape how ethnic and immigrant groups view themselves and organize for representation in the public arena.
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Reel Inequality
Hollywood Actors and Racism
Nancy Wang Yuen
Rutgers University Press, 2016
When the 2016 Oscar acting nominations all went to whites for the second consecutive year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending topic. Yet these enduring racial biases afflict not only the Academy Awards, but also Hollywood as a whole. Why do actors of color, despite exhibiting talent and bankability, continue to lag behind white actors in presence and prominence? 
 
Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers minority actors face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. The book charts how white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Nancy Wang Yuen interviewed nearly a hundred working actors and drew on published interviews with celebrities, such as Viola Davis, Chris Rock, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac, Lucy Liu, and Ken Jeong, to explore how racial stereotypes categorize and constrain actors. Their stories reveal the day-to-day racism actors of color experience in talent agents’ offices, at auditions, and on sets. Yuen also exposes sexist hiring and programming practices, highlighting the structural inequalities that actors of color, particularly women, continue to face in Hollywood. 
 
This book not only conveys the harsh realities of racial inequality in Hollywood, but also provides vital insights from actors who have succeeded on their own terms, whether by sidestepping the system or subverting it from within. Considering how their struggles impact real-world attitudes about race and diversity, Reel Inequality follows actors of color as they suffer, strive, and thrive in Hollywood.
 
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Reformed American Dreams
Welfare Mothers, Higher Education, and Activism
Sheila M. Katz
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Reformed American Dreams explores the experiences of low-income single mothers who pursued higher education while on welfare after the 1996 welfare reforms. This research occurred in an area where grassroots activism by and for mothers on welfare in higher education was directly able to affect the implementation of public policy. Half of the participants in Sheila M. Katz’s research were activists with the grassroots welfare rights organization, LIFETIME, trying to change welfare policy and to advocate for better access to higher education. Reformed American Dreams takes up their struggle to raise families, attend school, and become student activists, all while trying to escape poverty. Katz highlights mothers’ experiences as they pursued higher education on welfare and became grassroots activists during the Great Recession.
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Regulating Difference
Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West
Marian Burchardt
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2021 ISSR Best Book Award (International Society for the Sociology of Religion)

Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.
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Reichsrock
The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music
Dyck, Kirsten
Rutgers University Press, 2016
From rap to folk to punk, music has often sought to shape its listeners’ political views, uniting them as a global community and inspiring them to take action. Yet the rallying potential of music can also be harnessed for sinister ends. As this groundbreaking new book reveals, white-power music has served as a key recruiting tool for neo-Nazi and racist hate groups worldwide. 
 
Reichsrock shines a light on the international white-power music industry, the fandoms it has spawned, and the virulently racist beliefs it perpetuates. Kirsten Dyck not only investigates how white-power bands and their fans have used the internet to spread their message globally, but also considers how distinctly local white-power scenes have emerged in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the United States, and many other sites. While exploring how white-power bands draw from a common well of nationalist, racist, and neo-Nazi ideologies, the book thus also illuminates how white-power musicians adapt their music to different locations, many of which have their own terms for defining whiteness and racial otherness. 
 
Closely tracking the online presence of white-power musicians and their fans, Dyck analyzes the virtual forums and media they use to articulate their hateful rhetoric. This book also demonstrates how this fandom has sparked spectacular violence in the real world, from bombings to mass shootings. Reichsrock thus sounds an urgent message about a global menace. 
 
[more]

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Reinventing the Austin City Council
Ann O'M. Bowman
Temple University Press, 2020
Until recently, Austin, the progressive, politically liberal capital of Texas, elected its city council using a not-so-progressive system. Candidates competed citywide for seats, and voters could cast ballots for as many candidates as there were seats up for election. However, this approach disadvantages the representation of geographically-concentrated minority groups, thereby—among other things—preventing the benefits of growth from reaching all of the city’s communities. 

Reinventing the Austin City Council explores the puzzle that was Austin’s reluctance to alter its at-large system and establish a geographically-based, single-member district system. Ann Bowman chronicles the repeated attempts to change the system, the eventual decision to do so, and the consequences of that change. In the process, she explores the many twists and turns that occurred in Austin as it struggled to design a fair system of representation. Reinventing the Austin City Council assesses the impact of the new district system since its inception in 2014. 

Austin’s experience ultimately offers a political lesson for creating institutional change.
[more]

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Re-Membering and Surviving
African American Fiction of the Vietnam War
Shirley A. James Hanshaw
Michigan State University Press, 2020
The first book-length critical study of the black experience in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, this text interrogates the meaning of heroism based on models from African and African American expressive culture. It focuses on four novels: Captain Blackman (1972) by John A. Williams, Tragic Magic (1978) by Wesley Brown, Coming Home (1971) by George Davis, and De Mojo Blues (1985) by A. R. Flowers. Discussions of the novels are framed within the historical context of all wars prior to Vietnam in which Black Americans fought. The success or failure of the hero on his identity quest is predicated upon the extent to which he can reconnect with African or African American cultural memory. He is engaged therefore in “re-membering,” a term laden with the specificity of race that implies a cultural history comprised of African retentions and an interdependent relationship with the community for survival. The reader will find that a common history of racism and exploitation that African Americans and Vietnamese share sometimes results in the hero’s empathy with and compassion for the so-called enemy, a unique contribution of the black novelist to American war literature.
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Remembering the Alamo
Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol
By Richard R. Flores
University of Texas Press, 2002

"Remember the Alamo!" reverberates through Texas history and culture, but what exactly are we remembering? Over nearly two centuries, the Mexican victory over an outnumbered band of Alamo defenders has been transformed into an American victory for the love of liberty. Why did the historical battle of 1836 undergo this metamorphosis in memory and mythology to become such a potent master symbol in Texan and American culture?

In this probing book, Richard Flores seeks to answer that question by examining how the Alamo's transformation into an American cultural icon helped to shape social, economic, and political relations between Anglo and Mexican Texans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the first part of the book, he looks at how the attempts of heritage society members and political leaders to define the Alamo as a place have reflected struggles within Texas society over the place and status of Anglos and Mexicans. In the second part, he explores how Alamo movies and the transformation of Davy Crockett into an Alamo hero/martyr have advanced deeply racialized, ambiguous, and even invented understandings of the past.

[more]

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Repealed
Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights
Camilla Fitzsimons
Pluto Press, 2021

*Winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize 2022*

In Ireland, 2018, a constitutional ban that equated the life of a woman to the life of a fertilized embryo was overturned and abortion was finally legalized. This victory for the Irish feminist movement set the country alight with euphoria. But the celebrations were short-lived - the new legislation turned out to be one of the most conservative in Europe. This book tells the story of the ‘Repeal’ campaign through the lens of the activists.

The authors trace the shocking history of the origins of the eighth amendment, which was drawn up in fear of a tide of liberal reforms across Europe. They draw out the lessons learned through the decades and from the groundbreaking campaign in 2018, which was an inspiring example of modern grassroots activism. They also recount the tensions between a medicalized approach and reproductive justice approach to abortion, as well as the harsh effect of the campaign on the health of activists.

Grounded in a radical feminist politics, this book is an honest and inspirational account of a movement that is only just beginning.

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Represent and Destroy
Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism
Jodi Melamed
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This is the story Jodi Melamed tells in Represent and Destroy, portraying the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference.

Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference—to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race—Melamed focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. She examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country’s global ascendancy. She shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality.

Yet Represent and Destroy also recovers an anticapitalist “race radical” tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States—a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.

[more]

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Reproducing the French Race
Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century
Elisa Camiscioli
Duke University Press, 2009
In Reproducing the French Race, Elisa Camiscioli argues that immigration was a defining feature of early-twentieth-century France, and she examines the political, cultural, and social issues implicated in public debates about immigration and national identity at the time. Camiscioli demonstrates that mass immigration provided politicians, jurists, industrialists, racial theorists, feminists, and others with ample opportunity to explore questions of French racial belonging, France’s relationship to the colonial empire and the rest of Europe, and the connections between race and national anxieties regarding depopulation and degeneration. She also shows that discussions of the nation and its citizenry consistently returned to the body: its color and gender, its expenditure of labor power, its reproductive capacity, and its experience of desire. Of paramount importance was the question of which kinds of bodies could assimilate into the “French race.”

By focusing on telling aspects of the immigration debate, Camiscioli reveals how racial hierarchies were constructed, how gender figured in their creation, and how only white Europeans were cast as assimilable. Delving into pronatalist politics, she describes how potential immigrants were ranked according to their imagined capacity to adapt to the workplace and family life in France. She traces the links between racialized categories and concerns about industrial skills and output, and she examines medico-hygienic texts on interracial sex, connecting those to the crusade against prostitution and the related campaign to abolish “white slavery,” the alleged entrapment of (white) women for sale into prostitution abroad. Camiscioli also explores the debate surrounding the 1927 law that first made it possible for French women who married foreigners to keep their French nationality. She concludes by linking the Third Republic’s impulse to create racial hierarchies to the emergence of the Vichy regime.

[more]

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Reshaping Ethnic Relations
Immigrants in a Divided City
Judith Goode and Jo Anne Schneider
Temple University Press, 1994

What happens when people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds come together to live and work in the same neighborhood? Unlike other examinations of this question that focus on one group, this book looks at the interaction of both old and new immigrant populations in three Philadelphia neighborhoods.

In this ethnographic study, which is a result of the Ford Foundation-funded Changing Relations: Newcomers and Established Residents in Philadelphia Project, the authors consider five primary groups—whites, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, and Eastern Europeans—in Olney, Kensington, and Port Richmond. Focusing on the interaction of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in schools, organized community celebrations and social events, the workplace, shopping areas, and neighborhood politics, the authors show that the contradictions of individual beliefs, actions, and strategies of power are not easily resolved.

By examining the local, citywide, and national economy and government, previous human relations efforts, changing immigration patterns, community-level power structures, real estate turnover, and gentrification, the authors evaluate current strategies to create harmony in communities with an ever-changing mix of established residents and newly arrived immigrants. Through their findings, Judith Goode and Jo Anne Schneider develop better alternatives that will encourage understanding and cooperation among different racial and ethnic groups sharing their lives and neighborhoods.

[more]

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Resolving Racial Conflict
The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964-1989
Bertram Levine
University of Missouri Press, 2005


In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, Congress wisely created an agency based in the U.S. Department of Justice to help forestall or resolve racial or ethnic disputes evolving from the act. Mandated by law and by its own methodology to shun publicity, the Community Relations Service developed self-effacement to a fine art. Thus the accomplishments, as well as the shortcomings, of this federal venture into conflict resolution are barely known in official Washington, and even less so by the American public. This first written history of the Community Relations Service uses the experiences of the men and women who sought to resolve the most volatile issues of the day to tell the fascinating story of this unfamiliar agency.



This multiracial cadre of conciliation and mediation specialists worked behind the scenes in more than 20,000 confrontations involving racial and ethnic minorities. From Selma to Montgomery, at the encampment of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign in Resurrection City, to the urban riots of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, from the school desegregation battles north and south, at the siege of Wounded Knee, and during the Texas Gulf Coast fishing wars between Southeast Asian refugees and Anglos, these federal peacemakers lessened the atmosphere of racial violence in every major U.S. city and thousands of small towns.



These confrontations ranged from disputes that attracted worldwide attention to the everyday affronts, assaults, and upheavals that marked the nation’s adjustment to wider power sharing within an increasingly diverse population. While Resolving Racial Conflict examines some of the celebrated breakthroughs that made change possible, it also delves deeply into the countless behind-the-scenes local efforts that converted possibility to reality.



Among the many themes in this book that provide new perspective for understanding racial conflict in America are the effects of protest and conflict in engineering social change; the variety of civil rights views and experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics; the role of police in minority relations; and the development and refinement of techniques for community conflict resolution from seat-of-the-pants intervention to sophisticated professional practice. Resolving Racial Conflict will appeal to students of civil rights and American history in both the general and academic communities, as well as students of alternative dispute resolution and peace and conflict studies.
[more]

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Resurrecting Slavery
Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France
Crystal Marie Fleming
Temple University Press, 2017

How can politicians and ordinary citizens face the racial past in a country that frames itself as colorblind? In her timely and provocative book, Resurrecting Slavery, Crystal Fleming shows how people make sense of slavery in a nation where talking about race, colonialism, and slavery remains taboo. Noting how struggles over the meaning of racial history are informed by contemporary politics of race, she asks: What kinds of group identities are at stake today for activists and French people with ties to overseas territories where slavery took place?

Fleming investigates the connections and disconnections that are made between racism, slavery, and colonialism in France. She provides historical context and examines how politicians and commemorative activists interpret the racial past and present. Resurrecting Slavery also includes in-depth interviews with French Caribbean migrants outside the commemorative movement to address the everyday racial politics of remembrance.

Bringing a critical race perspective to the study of French racism, Fleming’s groundbreaking study provides a more nuanced understanding of race in France along with new ways of thinking about the global dimensions of slavery, anti-blackness, and white supremacy.

[more]

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The Returned
Former U.S. Migrants’ Lives in Mexico City
Claudia Masferrer
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
In the first two decades of the 21st century, more than two million Mexican migrants returned to Mexico from the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people who returned to Mexico was so large that, for the first time in at least fifty years, more people entered Mexico from the United States than entered the United States from Mexico. Many of these migrants were destined for urban areas, and we know little about how they fare after they return to cities. In The Returned, sociologists Claudia Masferrer, Erin R. Hamilton, and Nicole Denier examine the experiences of returned migrants in Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Masferrer, Hamilton, and Denier draw on interviews with former U.S. migrants living in Mexico City to better understand the experience of return migration to urban areas. Each of the migrants they spoke with lived in the United States for long periods with noncitizen status during the last four decades. During this time, U.S. immigration policy became increasingly focused on restriction and enforcement, which made it difficult for migrants to safely move back and forth across the border for work or to visit family without documentation. The authors find that upon their return, migrants in Mexico City felt disoriented and lost and had difficulty adapting to a massive urban environment where there is little support for returnees. They struggled to translate their work experience from their time in the U.S. to find quality jobs. Additionally, many found their family lives upended as they reunited with or formed families in the U.S.. Some found themselves separated from family members still in the U.S. with no ability to legally visit them. Others brought their families back to Mexico, some of whom were U.S. citizens and had never been to Mexico before. They, too, struggled to adapt and integrate to life in Mexico City.

The authors use the experiences of return migrants to discuss policies and practices that would improve their lives and ease their reintegration. To help with the disorientation they experience, returnees proposed ongoing psychological support with mental health professionals who have knowledge and training in the social and legal issues that return migrants face. Return migrants also advocated for policies to enhance skill matching, job creation, and entrepreneurship, as many felt the occupational skills they developed in the U.S. were undervalued in Mexico. To address family separation, returnees argued for legal and policy reform to accommodate family reunification.
The Returned is an illuminating account of the difficulties faced by return migrants and their families in Mexico City.
 
[more]

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Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices
Perspectives from the Past and Present
Wendy Sims-Schouten
University College London, 2025
Resilience is more than survival—Wendy Sims-Schouten amplifies the resistant and transformative voices of marginalized and displaced children across history.

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices resists the way we think about resilience, shifting the focus from personal perseverance to the lived realities of children and young people pushed to society’s margins. Wendy Sims-Schouten moves beyond the familiar idea of resilience as individual grit, instead exploring how defiance and even compliance emerge as survival strategies for care leavers, bullied youth, ethnic minorities, and those with histories of migration and displacement.

Spanning one hundred and fifty years of personal and collective histories, this book brings together interdisciplinary research co-produced with those too often left out of resilience studies. By centering their voices, it unveils how resilience is shaped not just by inner strength, but by systemic barriers and the availability of support. Revisiting Childhood Resilience calls on policymakers and practitioners to rethink resilience as something far more complex than an individual trait; a process deeply rooted in context and agency.
[more]

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Right Here, Right Now
Life Stories from America's Death Row
Lynden Harris, editor
Duke University Press, 2021
Upon receiving his execution date, one of the thousands of men living on death row in the United States had an epiphany: “All there ever is, is this moment. You, me, all of us, right here, right now, this minute, that's love.” Right Here, Right Now collects the powerful, first-person stories of dozens of men on death rows across the country. From childhood experiences living with poverty, hunger, and violence to mental illness and police misconduct to coming to terms with their executions, these men outline their struggle to maintain their connection to society and sustain the humanity that incarceration and its daily insults attempt to extinguish. By offering their hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, failures, and wounds, the men challenge us to reconsider whether our current justice system offers actual justice or simply perpetuates the social injustices that obscure our shared humanity.
[more]

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The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan
Right-Wing Movements and National Politics
Rory McVeigh
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
In 1915, forty years after the original Ku Klux Klan disbanded, a former farmer, circuit preacher, and university lecturer named Colonel William Joseph Simmons revived the secret society. By the early 1920s the KKK had been transformed into a national movement with millions of dues-paying members and chapters in all of the nation’s forty-eight states. And unlike the Reconstruction-era society, the Klan in the 1920s exerted its influence far beyond the South. In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Rory McVeigh provides a revealing analysis of the broad social agenda of 1920s-era KKK, showing that although the organization continued to promote white supremacy, it also addressed a surprisingly wide range of social and economic issues, targeting immigrants and, particularly, Catholics, as well as African Americans, as dangers to American society. In sharp contrast to earlier studies of the KKK, which focus on the local or regional level, McVeigh treats the Klan as it saw itself—as a national organization concerned with national issues. Drawing on extensive research into the Klan’s national publication, the Imperial Night-Hawk, he traces the ways in which Klan leaders interpreted national issues and how they attempted—and finally failed—to influence national politics. More broadly, in detailing the Klan’s expansion in the early 1920s and its collapse by the end of the decade, McVeigh ultimately sheds light on the dynamics that fuel contemporary right-wing social movements that similarly blur the line between race, religion, and values. 
[more]

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Risking Everything
A Freedom Summer Reader
Michael Edmonds
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014

Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader documents the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, when SNCC and CORE workers and volunteers arrived in the Deep South to register voters and teach non-violence, and more than 60,000 black Mississippians risked everything to overturn a system that had brutally exploited them.

In the 44 original documents in this anthology, you’ll read their letters, eavesdrop on their meetings, shudder at their suffering, and admire their courage. You’ll witness the final hours of three workers murdered on the project’s first day, hear testimony by black residents who bravely stood up to police torture and Klan firebombs, and watch the liberal establishment betray them. 

These vivid primary sources, collected by the Wisconsin Historical Society, provide both first-hand accounts of this astounding grassroots struggle as well as a broader understanding of the Civil Rights movement.


The selected documents are among the 25,000 pages about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The manuscripts were collected in the mid-1960s, at a time when few other institutions were interested in saving the stories of common people in McComb or Ruleville, Mississippi. Most have never been published before.

[more]

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The Road to Citizenship
What Naturalization Means for Immigrants and the United States
Aptekar, Sofya
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Between 2000 and 2011, eight million immigrants became American citizens. In naturalization ceremonies large and small these new Americans pledged an oath of allegiance to the United States, gaining the right to vote, serve on juries, and hold political office; access to certain jobs; and the legal rights of full citizens. 

In The Road to Citizenship, Sofya Aptekar analyzes what the process of becoming a citizen means for these newly minted Americans and what it means for the United States as a whole. Examining the evolution of the discursive role of immigrants in American society from potential traitors to morally superior “supercitizens,” Aptekar’s in-depth research uncovers considerable contradictions with the way naturalization works today. Census data reveal that citizenship is distributed in ways that increasingly exacerbate existing class and racial inequalities, at the same time that immigrants’ own understandings of naturalization defy accepted stories we tell about assimilation, citizenship, and becoming American. Aptekar contends that debates about immigration must be broadened beyond the current focus on borders and documentation to include larger questions about the definition of citizenship. 

Aptekar’s work brings into sharp relief key questions about the overall system: does the current naturalization process accurately reflect our priorities as a nation and reflect the values we wish to instill in new residents and citizens? Should barriers to full membership in the American polity be lowered? What are the implications of keeping the process the same or changing it? Using archival research, interviews, analysis of census and survey data, and participant observation of citizenship ceremonies, The Road to Citizenship demonstrates the ways in which naturalization itself reflects the larger operations of social cohesion and democracy in America.
[more]

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Robo Sacer
Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias
David S. Dalton
Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

Harvey L. Johnson Publication Award, Southwest Council of Latin American Studies, 2026
Premio Alambique, Alambique: Revista Académica de Ciencia Ficción y Fantasía, 2025

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery.

And yet the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance.

Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.

[more]

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Room 306
The National Story of the Lorraine Motel
Ben Kamin
Michigan State University Press, 2012
A tragic landmark in the civil rights movement, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is best known for what occurred there on April 4, 1968. As he stood on the balcony of Room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, ending a golden age of nonviolent resistance, and sparking riots in more than one hundred cities. Formerly a seedy, segregated motel, and prior to that a brothel, the motel quickly achieved the status of national shrine. The motel attracts a variety of pilgrims—white politicians seeking photo ops, aging civil rights leaders, New Age musicians, and visitors to its current incarnation, the National Civil Rights Museum. A moving and emotional account that comprises a panorama of voices, Room 306 is an important oral history unlike any other.
[more]

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The Roots of Rough Justice
Origins of American Lynching
Michael J. Pfeifer
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era.
 
Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
 
Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples, The Roots of Rough Justice tackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.
[more]

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Black Reparations: Insights from the Social Sciences
William Darity, Jr.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Note the catalog copy pertains to both parts of this double issue:

Slavery in the United States was a brutal, racialized system of forced labor which helped provide the startup capital for the U.S. economy’s meteoric rise. Post-slavery legal race discrimination produced segregation not only the Jim Crow South but also in northern states, where Blacks were denied many benefits of the New Deal that helped lift whites into the middle class. The 60 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have witnessed mass incarceration, ongoing police killings of unarmed Blacks, continued discrimination in housing, employment, and credit markers, and a persistent devaluation of Black lives. This history of enslavement and discrimination has yielded disastrous intergenerational consequences for Black wealth and socioeconomic well-being, and calls for reparations have gained currency as a way to redress these historical wrongs. This special double issue of RSF brings together the most current social science research and policy options with regard to reparations for Black Americans.
 
While reparations have been issued to many peoples around the world, including in the U.S., reparations to Black Americans remain highly contested. Contributor Kathryn Anne Edwards and co-authors use case studies of previous reparations policies to offer important insights into the features that might shape reparations policy for Black Americans. Trina Shanks and colleagues argue that the structure of existing child development accounts provides a practical framework for delivering reparations payments to recipients of all ages through structured savings plans that promote asset growth and fiscal autonomy.
 
The political feasibility of reparations programs will largely depend on public opinion. Jesse Rhodes and colleagues draw on surveys administered between 2021 and 2023 to show that up to 28 percent of White Americans support cash reparations, up from a tiny 4 percent in 2000. Kamri Hudgins and co-authors suggest that public education on racial disparities may increase the feasibility of a reparations program. Thus, education on real-existing racial disparities in intergenerational wealth, income, health, homeownership, and education may prove to be crucial to affect a federal Black reparations program.
 
This important double issue of RSF employs rigorous social science research to shed new light on one of the most pressing and contentious policy proposals of our times. Engaging the debate over reparations from the past to the present and from the global to the local, this double issue of RSF provides a valuable roadmap to the issues at stake in the Black American reparations movement.
 
[more]

logo for Russell Sage Foundation
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Black Reparations: Insights from the Social Sciences
William Darity, Jr.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Note the catalog copy pertains to both parts of this double issue:

Slavery in the United States was a brutal, racialized system of forced labor which helped provide the startup capital for the U.S. economy’s meteoric rise. Post-slavery legal race discrimination produced segregation not only the Jim Crow South but also in northern states, where Blacks were denied many benefits of the New Deal that helped lift whites into the middle class. The 60 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have witnessed mass incarceration, ongoing police killings of unarmed Blacks, continued discrimination in housing, employment, and credit markers, and a persistent devaluation of Black lives. This history of enslavement and discrimination has yielded disastrous intergenerational consequences for Black wealth and socioeconomic well-being, and calls for reparations have gained currency as a way to redress these historical wrongs. This special double issue of RSF brings together the most current social science research and policy options with regard to reparations for Black Americans.
 
While reparations have been issued to many peoples around the world, including in the U.S., reparations to Black Americans remain highly contested. Contributor Kathryn Anne Edwards and co-authors use case studies of previous reparations policies to offer important insights into the features that might shape reparations policy for Black Americans. Trina Shanks and colleagues argue that the structure of existing child development accounts provides a practical framework for delivering reparations payments to recipients of all ages through structured savings plans that promote asset growth and fiscal autonomy.
 
The political feasibility of reparations programs will largely depend on public opinion. Jesse Rhodes and colleagues draw on surveys administered between 2021 and 2023 to show that up to 28 percent of White Americans support cash reparations, up from a tiny 4 percent in 2000. Kamri Hudgins and co-authors suggest that public education on racial disparities may increase the feasibility of a reparations program. Thus, education on real-existing racial disparities in intergenerational wealth, income, health, homeownership, and education may prove to be crucial to affect a federal Black reparations program.
 
This important double issue of RSF employs rigorous social science research to shed new light on one of the most pressing and contentious policy proposals of our times. Engaging the debate over reparations from the past to the present and from the global to the local, this double issue of RSF provides a valuable roadmap to the issues at stake in the Black American reparations movement.
 
[more]

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Spatial Foundations of Inequality
George Galster
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017
From school and residential segregation to increased pollution and aggressive policing in low-income neighborhoods, socioeconomic inequality is organized and reinforced through space and place. In this issue of RSF, editors George Galster and Patrick Sharkey and contributors present a new conceptual model for understanding space as one of the  foundations of inequality. They bring together empirical research on neighborhoods, schools, and communities to demonstrate the extent to which people’s environments influence their life chances.
 
Articles in this issue explore the scale and dimensions of spatial inequality. Sean Reardon and coauthors develop a novel method of describing the joint distribution of race and income among neighborhoods. They demonstrate how blacks and Hispanics at all income levels typically live in substantially poorer neighborhoods than whites and Asians of the same income. Ann Owens investigates the relationship between residential segregation and school boundaries and finds that because parents often decide where to live based on school districts, school-age children live in more segregated neighborhoods than adults on the whole. John Hipp and Charis Kubrin examine how changes in the racial, ethnic, and economic composition of the areas that surround a given neighborhood affect it, and find that when inequality rises in a neighborhood’s surrounding areas, crime tends to increase in that neighborhood.
 
Other contributors study how space serves to maintain or reproduce inequalities. Anna Maria Santiago and coauthors find that neighborhood conditions—including racial and socioeconomic makeup and levels of violent crime—affect the chances that black and Latino youths will engage in risky behaviors, such as running away and using marijuana. For instance, low-income African American youths who live in neighborhoods inhabited by higher status residents are less likely to run away from home. Christopher Browning and coauthors examine the extent to which people of different socioeconomic status share space in their day-to-day lives, including working, shopping, and spending leisure time. They find that families of higher socioeconomic status are less likely to share common spaces with neighbors of any class, in part because they have more choice and control over where they go.
 
As the articles in this issue show, space is a core dimension of social stratification and is fundamental to understanding social and economic inequality.
 
[more]

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Special Issue: Racial Bias in Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, and Incarceration
Suzanne Nichols
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Status: What Is It and Why It Matters for Inequality
Cecilia L. Ridgeway
Russell Sage Foundation, 2022

Note the copy pertains to two issues of RSF:

Status – a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor – affects how people are treated in all aspects of their lives, including in schools, workplaces, politics, and even the family. It shapes people’s access to valued outcomes in life, such as income, education, and health. However, status is poorly understood and its significance in the construction of inequality is often underestimated. In this special double issue of RSF, sociologist Cecilia L. Ridgeway, social psychologist Hazel Rose Markus, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how status functions in society and its role in inequality.
 
Issue 1 demonstrates that status is fundamental to inequality and shows that it is different from other forms of inequality. Tali Mendelberg presents a theory of how status functions in politics and differentiates the potent symbolic value of achieving greater esteem from status-seeking as a means to obtain resources, such as income, assets, or property. Biko Koeing finds that Trump voters were motivated not only by a perceived loss of status, but by the belief that this loss was unjust. Fabien Accominotti and colleagues assess the characteristics of status hierarchies and find that those with greater clarity, rigidity, and order have greater inequality between high and low status members.
 
Issue 2 examines how status is created and reinforced through cultural norms and in our relationships with one another. Hilary Holbrow finds that the gender pay gap is nearly three times greater in companies where low-status support roles are held primarily by females. Natasha Quadlin finds that college graduates who are perceived to be wealthy are also perceived to be more intelligent than they would be if they were perceived to be members of a lower socioeconomic group. Annette Lareau finds that married women often behave in ways – such as disengagement from financial matters or downplaying their own financial knowledge – that sustain their husband’s status as economic expert of the family. Bianca Manago and colleagues find that prior contact and group interaction between Whites, Blacks, and Mexican Americans decreases Whites’ anxiety about working with Blacks and Mexican Americans, but does not increase Whites’ perceptions of Blacks’ and Mexican Americans’ competence. Status interventions during interaction, however, do increase Whites’ perceptions of Mexican Americans’ competence and their influence in the group.  Lehn Benjamin finds that staff at nonprofit organizations who share control and establish common ground with their clients reduce status hierarchies between staff and clients.
 
This volume of RSF sheds light on status as a powerful social force which pervades our lives, and demonstrates its role in creating and preserving inequality.

[more]

front cover of RSF
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Status: What It Is and Why It Matters for Inequality
Cecilia L. Ridgeway
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002

Note the copy pertains to two issues of RSF:

Status – a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor – affects how people are treated in all aspects of their lives, including in schools, workplaces, politics, and even the family. It shapes people’s access to valued outcomes in life, such as income, education, and health. However, status is poorly understood and its significance in the construction of inequality is often underestimated. In this special double issue of RSF, sociologist Cecilia L. Ridgeway, social psychologist Hazel Rose Markus, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how status functions in society and its role in inequality.
 
Issue 1 demonstrates that status is fundamental to inequality and shows that it is different from other forms of inequality. Tali Mendelberg presents a theory of how status functions in politics and differentiates the potent symbolic value of achieving greater esteem from status-seeking as a means to obtain resources, such as income, assets, or property. Biko Koeing finds that Trump voters were motivated not only by a perceived loss of status, but by the belief that this loss was unjust. Fabien Accominotti and colleagues assess the characteristics of status hierarchies and find that those with greater clarity, rigidity, and order have greater inequality between high and low status members.
 
Issue 2 examines how status is created and reinforced through cultural norms and in our relationships with one another. Hilary Holbrow finds that the gender pay gap is nearly three times greater in companies where low-status support roles are held primarily by females. Natasha Quadlin finds that college graduates who are perceived to be wealthy are also perceived to be more intelligent than they would be if they were perceived to be members of a lower socioeconomic group. Annette Lareau finds that married women often behave in ways – such as disengagement from financial matters or downplaying their own financial knowledge – that sustain their husband’s status as economic expert of the family. Bianca Manago and colleagues find that prior contact and group interaction between Whites, Blacks, and Mexican Americans decreases Whites’ anxiety about working with Blacks and Mexican Americans, but does not increase Whites’ perceptions of Blacks’ and Mexican Americans’ competence. Status interventions during interaction, however, do increase Whites’ perceptions of Mexican Americans’ competence and their influence in the group.  Lehn Benjamin finds that staff at nonprofit organizations who share control and establish common ground with their clients reduce status hierarchies between staff and clients.
 
This volume of RSF sheds light on status as a powerful social force which pervades our lives, and demonstrates its role in creating and preserving inequality.
 

[more]

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Criminal Justuce System as a Labor Market Insitution
Sandra Susan Smith
Russell Sage Foundation, 2020

Inmate labor fuels prisons. The incarcerated work in prison industries that collaborate with private corporations. Fair labor laws do not apply to prisons, where it is common for inmates to earn less than one dollar per hour. But involvement with the criminal justice system continues to shape and hinder the future employment and earnings of the formerly incarcerated long after they have been released. In this issue of RSF, edited by sociologist Sandra Susan Smith and legal scholar Jonathan Simon, an interdisciplinary group of scholars analyze how the criminal justice system acts as a de facto labor market institution by compelling or coercing labor from the justice-involved. 

The social and economic effects of criminal justice involvement are widespread, with almost seven million people under some form of direct supervision. The contributors to this issue examine how the criminal justice system affects the livelihood and families of both the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. Cody Warner, Joshua Kaiser, and Jason Houle explore how “hidden sentences” --restricted access to voting rights, public housing, and professional licensing--negatively impact labor market outcomes for young adults with criminal records. Michele Cadigan and Garbriela Kirk look at the burden of court fees and fines, or legal financial obligations, that place a strain on the work commitments and resources of low-income people. Joe LaBriola sheds new light on how employment affects recidivism; he shows that parolees who find high-quality jobs, such as in the manufacturing industry, are less likely to return to prison than those employed in low-quality jobs. Noah Zatz and Michael Stoll demonstrate how the threat of imprisonment for nonpayment of child support coerces labor among noncustodial fathers, particularly African-American men. Allison Dwyer Emory and her coauthors show that previously incarcerated fathers are less likely to pay either formal or informal cash child support or offer in-kind assistance to their children’s mothers.

This issue of RSF is a timely contribution to the field of scholarly literature that illuminates the far and often destructive reach that the criminal justice system has on those whose lives it touches. It advances our understanding of how the system functions as a labor market institution and the price it extracts from those involved with it. 

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Deportation System and Its Aftermath
Caitlin Patler
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025

The United States is home to the largest deportation system in the world: Between 2001 and 2022, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out nearly 6.5 million deportations. Deportation is often framed as a singular event that happens to an individual. However, as public policy scholar Caitlin Patler and political scientist Brad Jones argue in this issue of RSF, deportation is a system that encompasses premigration, within-U.S., and post-deportation contexts and outcomes. With Congress recently approving a massive expansion of the US deportation system, understanding its consequences is more important than ever before. 

In this issue, an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore the wide range of impacts of the U.S. deportation system. The introductory chapter by Patler and Jones defines the U.S. deportation system and provides a comprehensive historical context for understanding its causes and consequences. Mass deportation is enabled primarily through the merging of U.S. immigration and criminal laws. Ian Peacock explores the proliferation of 287(g) agreements, which deputize local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. He shows that counties with stronger ties to public official associations, such as the National Sheriff’s Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America, were more likely to adopt identical 287(g) agreements, devote more jail space to ICE detainees, and comply with ICE detainer requests at higher rates. The issue also presents empirical analyses of the consequences of the US deportation system. Articles by Youngjin Stephanie Hong and colleagues, Cora Bennett and colleagues, and J. Jacob Kirksey and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, link deportation to reduced Head Start enrollment, lower K-12 test scores, and declines in college enrollment, respectively. The remaining articles turn to the aftermath of deportation. Erin R. Hamilton and colleagues show that between 2015 and 2020, 11,000 individuals were de facto deportees—family members who leave the country because another family member has been deported—in Mexico, with a disproportionate number being women and children. Further highlighting the importance of family, Ángel A. Escamilla García and Adriana M. Cerón analyze survey data from recently deported Central Americans and find those who left minor children in the U.S. were more likely to intend to remigrate to the U.S. 

This issue of RSF sheds light on various dimensions of the increasingly punitive U.S. deportation system and the many ways it harms individuals and communities. In the current era of mass expansion of immigration law enforcement, it will be a valuable educational tool for students, faculty, policymakers, and many other stakeholders.

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The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at Fifty and Beyond
David A. Gamson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2015
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, a key component of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, was designed to aid low-income students and to combat racial segregation in schools. Over the last several decades, the ESEA has become the federal government’s main source of leverage on states and school districts to enact its preferred reforms, including controversial measures such as standardized testing. In this issue of RSF, an esteemed group of education scholars examine the historical evolution of the ESEA, its successes and pitfalls, and what they portend for the future of education policies.
 
The ESEA has historically enabled the federal government to address educational inequality at the local level. Among the nine articles in the issue, Erica Frankenberg and Kendra Taylor discuss how the ESEA, in conjunction with the Civil Rights Act, accelerated desegregation in the South in the 1960s by withholding federal funding from school districts that failed to integrate. Rucker C. Johnson shows that higher ESEA spending in school districts between 1965 and 1980 led to increased likelihood of high school graduation for students, and low-income students in particular. Students in districts with higher spending were also less likely to repeat grades or to be suspended from school. Yet, as Patrick McGuinn shows, the institutional and administrative capacity of the U.S. Department of Education has never been sufficient to force instructional changes at the school level. This was particularly true with the 2001 renewal of the ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act, which linked federal funding to schools’ test-score outcomes rather than to programs designed to combat social inequalities.
 
The issue also investigates the unintended consequences of the ESEA and offers solutions to offset them. As Patricia Gándara and Gloria Ladson-Billings demonstrate, ESEA reforms have, in some circumstances, led to the neglect of the needs of minority students and second-language learners. Gándara shows that No Child Left Behind requires “bilingual” education programs to focus on rapid acquisition of English, often to the detriment of those learning English as a second language. Ladson-Billings shows that the ESEA’s standardized testing mandates may suppress innovative teaching methods, and argues for reforms that use multidisciplinary approaches to craft new curricula. Bringing together research on the successes and shortcomings of the ESEA, this issue of RSF offers new insights into federal education policy and demonstrates that this landmark legislation remains a powerful force in the lives of educators and students fifty years after its initial implementation.
 
 
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The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report
Susan T. Gooden
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of the more than 150 urban riots sweeping cities throughout the nation. In 1968, the commission released its findings, widely known as the Kerner Report, and warned that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This special issue of RSF, edited by political scientist Susan Gooden and economist Samuel Myers, revisits the Kerner Report’s conclusions and recommendations on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. How far have we come? What worked and what didn’t? How does the Kerner Report help us understand racial disparities in the twenty-first century?
 
Articles in the issue examine the extent to which the recommendations in the Kerner Report contributed to policy changes and improvements in the social and economic well-being of urban residents . In their introduction, Gooden and Myers analyze changes in socioeconomic inequality between whites and blacks over the last five decades. They find that while the black poverty rate has declined and black educational attainment has increased, disparities still remain. Additionally, the income gap and disparities in unemployment between blacks and whites remain virtually unchanged. Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen similarly note the persistence of these disparities, but also show that some of the Kerner Report’s recommendations were adopted at local levels and have provided the foundation for increased racial diversity in media, law enforcement reforms, and public housing desegregation.
 
Other contributors study the urban areas that were sites of the riots. Reynolds Farley shows that in Detroit, residential segregation has declined and interracial marriage has increased over the last fifty years. However, on key economic measures such as income and wealth, African Americans have fallen even further behind whites than they were in 1967 due to dramatic changes in Detroit’s labor market. In their study of wealth inequality in Los Angeles, Melany De La Cruz-Viesca and coauthors show that much of the wealth gap between blacks and whites is due to disparities in home ownership, a subject neglected in the Kerner Report. Marcus Casey and Bradley Hardy study the evolution of African American neighborhoods since the Kerner Report and find that neighborhoods directly affected by riots in the 1960s still remain among the most economically disadvantaged today.
 
The Kerner Report endures as a classic touchstone in the nation’s search for a path toward equality. Together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the long-term influence of the report and show where further progress is needed to close the racial divide.
 
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The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Undocumented Immigrants and Their Experience with Illegality
Roberto G. Gonzales
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017
Today, an estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. Most have family members who are citizens or lawful permanent residents, and over half have lived here for at least thirteen years. Yet, the threat of deportation and lack of citizenship rights have profound effects on the well-being of both undocumented individuals and their families. In this issue of RSF, editors Roberto G. Gonzales and Steven Raphael and an interdisciplinary team of scholars examine the lives of undocumented immigrants and the challenges that confront them.
 
Caitlin Patler and Nicholas Branic find that undocumented individuals in immigrant detention facilities that are privately operated are less likely to be visited by family members than those in county or city jails, in part because private facilities have restricted visiting hours and are more difficult to access via public transportation. Lauren Heidbrink finds that unaccompanied minors in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) are less likely to be released to guardians or reunited with family members because ORR standards are much tougher than those used by child protective services for minor citizens.
 
Lauren E. Gulbas and Luis H. Zayas find that many children with undocumented parents experience symptoms of anxiety and depression due to fears about their parents’ status. Yet, increased access to financial, educational, legal, and other immigration-related resources for these families can help buffer these children against trauma related to deportation and family separations. Susan K. Brown and Alejandra J. Sanchez focus on children with undocumented mothers and show that because having an undocumented mother is associated with a reduction in children’s years of schooling, it also indirectly lowers their levels of voting, activism, and political awareness as young adults.
 
Although undocumented immigrants are more enmeshed in the U.S. than they have been in the past, their status prevents further integration into society. This issue reveals the consequences of illegality not just for undocumented immigrants, but also for their families and their communities.
 
 
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front cover of The Rural Face of White Supremacy
The Rural Face of White Supremacy
BEYOND JIM CROW
Mark Schultz
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.
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