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A history of European immigrants in Texas and how they redefined racial identity.

While the creation of a Black-White racial binary was foundational to most of the United States, nineteenth-century Texas developed a unique tripartite system that acknowledged the role of individuals of Mexican ancestry in a region that was Spanish, Mexican, and an independent nation before becoming a US (and briefly Confederate) state. Yet this framework was fraught, struggling to accommodate new arrivals from beyond North America, in particular the Irish, Germans, and Czechs. Texan Crucible tells the story of these immigrants and how they became Anglo.

Marian Barber reveals the ways language, religion, alcohol use, and attitudes toward slavery distinguished these newcomers to Texas from those arriving from the eastern United States and how they nevertheless created thriving, influential communities. Their status was shaped by events inside and far beyond Texas, including an 1887 prohibition fight, the Civil War, and two world wars that encouraged them to erase their distinctiveness. As segregation was formally outlawed and civil rights activism grew, understandings of race shifted, cementing these groups’ status as Anglo. Texan Crucible recovers the histories of German, Irish, and Czech immigrants and unveils the social construction of racial difference underpinning Texan identity.

Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life.

Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

Winner, Section on the Sociology of Emotions Outstanding Recent Contribution (Book) Award, American Sociological Association, 2016
Charles Horton Cooley Award for Recent Book, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, 2017
Best Publication Award, Section on Body and Embodiment, American Sociological Association (ASA), 2018

The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families.

Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvador’s inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the “blackest” in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities.

An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life.

Thought-provoking and original, The Global History of Black Girlhood opens up new possibilities for understanding Black girls in the past while offering useful tools for present-day Black girls eager to explore the histories of those who came before them.

Contributors: Janaé E. Bonsu, Ruth Nicole Brown, Tara Bynum, Casidy Campbell, Katherine Capshaw, Bev Palesa Ditsie, Sarah Duff, Cynthia Greenlee, Claudrena Harold, Anasa Hicks, Lindsey Jones, Phindile Kunene, Denise Oliver-Velez, Jennifer Palmer, Vanessa Plumly, Shani Roper, SA Smythe, Nastassja Swift, Dara Walker, Najya Williams, and Nazera Wright

Throughout the nineteenth century, African heritage played an important role in black America, as personal memories and cultural practices continued to shape the everyday experience of people of African descent living under the shadow of slavery. Resisting efforts to de-Africanize their values, customs, and beliefs, Black Americans invoked their African roots in public arguments about their identity and place in the “new” world. At the outset of the twentieth century many still saw Africa primarily as the source of a common cultural and spiritual past. But after the 1920s, the meaning of African heritage changed as people of African descent expressed new relationships between themselves, the United States, and the African Diaspora.

In The Insistent Call, Aric Putnam studies the rhetoric of newspapers, literature, and political pamphlets that expressed this shift. He demonstrates that as people of African descent debated the United States' occupation of Haiti, the Liberian labor crisis, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, they formed a new collective identity, one that understood the African Diaspora in primarily political rather than cultural terms. In addition to uncovering a neglected period in the history of Black rhetoric, Putnam shows how rhetoric that articulates the interests of a population not defined by the boundaries of a state can still motivate collective action and influence policies.

A nuanced examination of the salience of skin tone within African American politics.

Research shows that skin tone is associated with significant differences in life experiences. On average, African Americans with darker skin earn lower wages, suffer worse health outcomes, and endure more negative criminal justice experiences than lighter-skinned African Americans. Nicole D. Yadon conceptualizes skin tone as one facet of the multidimensional construct of race that powerfully influences racialized experiences which, in turn, can influence political identities and attitudes.

Drawing on evidence from one hundred in-depth interviews, multiple surveys, and a survey experiment, The Politics of Skin Tone investigates the political associations of skin tone. Yadon finds that skin tone correlates with political attitudes, particularly on issues where color-based disparities are especially pronounced such as criminal justice. Moreover, a sizable number of African Americans adopt a skin tone-based identity. In an era of shifting racial boundaries and growing color-based discrimination, The Politics of Skin Tone examines the implications for both scholars and policymakers.

There is a long history of sororities such as Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) and Delta Sigma Theta (Delta) participating in activism and social justice efforts—from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to Kamala Harris’s recent political campaigns. But radical movements like Black Lives Matter have posed more challenging questions for these organizations.

In The Power We Need Right Now, Aisha Upton Azzam investigates the legacies of AKA and Delta to understand the considerations that weigh on their engagement with present day Black movements. These organizations wield a significant amount of political power to mobilize in support of their causes. The response each sorority has had to movements fifty years apart is strikingly similar—even if their approaches are quite different.

Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, Upton Azzam brings context and meaning to the interactions of these sororities with Black radical movements. She highlights the costs communities bear from sororities’ adherence to respectability and racial uplift ideologies by tracing each sorority’s history and response to emerging Black feminist and Black Power movements during the tumultuous 1970s.

The Power We Need Right Now emphasizes that Black communities still have the ability to wield their political power and influence to further the struggle for Black liberation.

Tracing how the “Great Replacement” narrative has shaped far-right extremism and propelled its dangerous political projects and acts of violence

The “Great Replacement” narrative, which imagines that historic white majorities are being intentionally replaced through immigration policies crafted by global elites, has effectively mobilized racist, nationalist, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. The Rage of Replacement tracks how this narrative has shaped the politics and worldview of the far right, binding its various camps into a community of rage obsessed with nostalgia for a white-supremacist past.

Showing how the replacement narrative has found significant purchase in recent mainstream discourse through the rise of Trumpism, right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, and events such as 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Michael Feola diagnoses the dangers this racist theory poses as it shapes the far-right imagination, expands through civil society, and deforms political culture. In particular, he tracks how the replacement narrative has given rise to malignant political strategies designed to “take back” the nation from its perceived enemies—by force if deemed necessary.

Identifying the Great Replacement narrative as a central force behind the rise and expansion of far-right extremism, Feola shows how it has motivated a variety of dangerous political projects in pursuit of illiberal, antidemocratic futures. From calls for the creation of segregated white ethnostates to extremist violence such as the mass shootings in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo, The Rage of Replacement makes clear that replacement theory poses a dire threat to democracy and safety.

Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy (Jefferson’s defense of slavery, Lincoln’s frequently minimized racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow) to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.

Mura turns to literature, comparing the white savior portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelization of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists; depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison; and race’s absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin’s essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.

Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives—what white people must do—to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.