Research finds that white Americans primarily draw upon ancestral ties to assert symbolic ethnicity, often relying on figurative elements to create identity. Through 47 interviews with 56 white adoptive parents, who attend culture camps, the authors find a new avenue through which whites may exercise their ethnic options: domestic and transnational transracial adoption. Drawing on their experience

This article focuses on the cultural narratives underlying U.S. society’s racialized inequalities. Informed by settler colonial theory and Charles Tilly’s work on “durable inequality,” I outline a privilege narratives framework that centers the dual mechanisms of racial dispossession that construct white supremacy’s material foundations: (1) the exploitation of non-Indigenous bodies and (2) the opportunity

Academia, like many other institutions, is experiencing a racial reckoning. As part of this reckoning, members of institutions of higher education are reflecting on how their structures and cultures reproduce racial inequality and how to disrupt the cycle. One aspect of this conversation that has escaped scrutiny has been methodological training, which can be central to the reproduction of inequality

Studies related to disproportionate special education identification of students from historically marginalized groups have used increasingly complex analyses to understand the interplay of factors that cause and maintain disparities. However, information regarding the influence of students’ grade level at initial special education placement remains limited. Situated in labeling theory and life course

Field experiments have proliferated throughout the social sciences and have become a mainstay for identifying racial discrimination during the hiring process. To date, field experiments of labor market discrimination have generally drawn their sample of job postings from limited sources, often from a single major online job posting website. While providing a large pool of job postings across labor

Colorism is a form of discrimination based on skin tone wherein people with light(er) complexions are advantaged over those with dark(er) ones. In this review, we define key terms, explore colorism as an individual and structural phenomenon, and identify some predominant themes in the existing scholarship on colorism. We review three case studies of contemporary uses and ramifications of colorism in

This article offers a pedagogical response to the growing demand that institutions of higher education must contend with their racial pasts. Drawing upon concepts from the literature on collective memory, students work with institutional archives that showcase localized examples of racial injustice. Students are then asked to imagine potential options for the collective redress of these institutional

Based on 29 in-depth interviews during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we examine how Trump supporters engaged in a form of identity work that we call signifying aggrieved white selves. Taking an interactionist approach, we demonstrate how they used racial discourse and emotional communication to engage in three distinct forms of racial identity work: (1) othering racialized freeloaders

In recent decades, an increasing number of Latin American countries have included ethnoracial questions on their censuses, giving rise to unprecedented data on monoracial and multiracial forms of classification. In Mexico, the government launched a count of its black population for the first time in the nation’s history in 2015, in addition to its long-standing practice of enumerating its indigenous

The explosion of Black Lives Matter protests in the mid-2010s rendered visible state violence against Black Americans, producing a barrage of images and videos of lethal police violence and the protests that followed. These images served as a powerful site of contestation about the meaning of race and racism in the United States for both movement supporters and critics. We examine these dynamics through

Discussions of white supremacy focus on patterns of whites’ stature over people of color across institutions. When a minority group achieves more than whites, it is not studied through the lens of white supremacy. For example, arguments of white supremacy in K-12 schools focus on the disfranchisement of African Americans and Latinxs. Discussions of high-achieving Asian American students have not been

Diversity has simultaneously become a pervasive goal and euphemism for racial differences in higher education. Although discourses within the postsecondary context highlight the positive impact of diversity on learning outcomes, organizational diversity efforts nevertheless warrant interrogation, given their possible obfuscation if not reification of, racial inequality and hierarchy. How do Historically

We argue that the public defunding of public higher education and turn to private revenue streams—for example, non-resident tuition, grants, philanthropy, and corporate sponsorship—generates organizational racial resource disparities. We draw on a year-long qualitative case study of a University of California campus with a majority Latinx and low-income student body, including ethnographic observations

Discussions of U.S. affirmative action policy assume that considering race in undergraduate admissions increases Black and Latinx student enrollments. We show that this assumption that affirmative action is linked to Black and Latinx student enrollments holds true for higher-status colleges and universities, but not institutions across the field of higher education. We use fixed effects modeling to

How do members of racial and ethnic groups explain the origins of unpaid legal debt from monetary sanctions, and how do such attributions undergird group differences in support for policy responses that escalate punishment? Using data from the Chicago Area Finances Survey, 2019, we apply an attributional typology of stratification beliefs to account for why legal debt from fines, fees, and tickets

A burgeoning literature at the intersection of the sociology of race and organizations explores the organization’s role in (re)producing racial inequalities. The present article builds from this growing literature in its analysis of the formation of National Public Radio (NPR), to better understand how organizational actors translate racialized practices into new organizations at their foundation,

Blacks, Latinx, and American Indians are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate than Whites and Asians, but whether racial discrimination accounts for these killings remains disputed. We contribute to this debate by examining structural conditions in U.S. metropolitan areas that are associated with the expected count of police-caused killings. Using an economic competition model, we find

Of course, ensuring safe environments in the U.S. educational system is paramount. It is also evident, however, inequalities associated with immigration, race/ethnicity, and situational context can impede school safety pursuits. Although prior research has revealed a pattern between “downward” assimilation and increased experiences with student-level violence and disorder for the children of racial/ethnic

Reducing race disparities in breastfeeding has become a health objective in the United States, spurring research aimed to identify causes and consequences of disparate rates. This study uses critical discourse analysis to assess how Black women are constructed in 80 quantitative health science research articles on breastfeeding disparities in the United States. Our analysis is grounded in critical

Blood informs a central racial ideology in the United States that has historically been used to racialize many different groups. American Indians (AIs) are the only population in the United States for whom the racial logic of blood remains codified as a means of conferring collective belonging. This article explores how AI blood quantum persists as both a race-making and nation-making instrument. I

Within sociological literature, Indigenous Studies and settler colonial theoretical frameworks are beginning to be regarded with greater respect and consideration. Yet, the discipline still struggles to emerge from the grasp of settler colonial assumptions; we continue to wait for U.S. Sociology to acknowledge and appreciate that all teaching, learning, and research on Turtle Island takes place on

This exercise in reflexive sociology consists of a comparative analysis of the standard verbiage of Introduction to Sociology and Sociology of Race/Ethnicity textbooks on the subject of American slavery. We interrogate whether narratives about slavery in sociology textbooks present the system as a peculiar Southern institution, or as a cross-regional institution that includes the Northern colonies

Critical Race Theory and Inequality in the Labour Market: Racial Stratification in Ireland is a timely exploration of racial stratification and how it shapes starting positions and generates differential outcomes in the labor market. From the outset, Joseph makes it clear that we should not be interested in race per se, but rather in how race is used and the consequences that this has. She is appealing

In this Editorial Feature Review, we reached out to senior race/racism and ethnicity scholars who have theoretically, epistemologically, and empirically contributed in major ways to what we now call the sociology of race and ethnicity. We wanted to pay our respects to these mothers and fathers of the discipline and the gifts that they have given our discipline over their careers. Our review was guided

In this article, three Latina sociologists discuss how they engage in teaching in a predominantly white discipline during a sociopolitical context of overt xenophobia and racism. Under the Trump administration, the United States has witnessed increased rates in harassment, hate crimes, and mass shootings against people of color. Despite the 2020 Presidential Democratic win, the racist ideology that

Despite the proliferation of significant scholarship on Latinos/as over the past four decades and the formal establishment of a Latina/o sociology section in the American Sociological Association in 1994, Latino/a sociology has yet to be systematically defined or fully developed. This essay isolates the underlying premises that mark this developing field. Latino/a sociology is grounded in the standpoints

The nation-state is one powerful entity that makes race. For instance, the mid-twentieth-century South African apartheid racial state cultivated a triracial hierarchy through officially naming three groups into law: White, Black (native African), and Coloured, with Coloured being defined and situated in the “racial middle” as neither White nor Black African. Yet because race is a social construction

The study of race and racism in the digital society must produce theoretically distinct and robust formulations of Internet technologies as key characteristics of the political economy. The author puts forth racial capitalism as a coherent framework for this research agenda. The argument for racial capitalism draws on two examples of its engagement with two characteristics of the digital society: obfuscation

Intermarriage is an important indicator of immigrant integration trajectories and the rigidity of ethnoracial boundaries. Although questions of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) integration and social exclusion occupy a central place in public discourse, little is known about their marriage patterns. The authors use the 2017 American Community Survey to estimate patterns of coethnic, panethnic

The author takes a social argument—that spaces can be racialized—and asks whether the directionality of the association between space and race reflects a limitation of extant scholarship and an underlaying commitment to race as a social terminus. In response to David Delany’s 2002 articulation of how race constructs space, the author offers an inversion of this line of thinking. The author argues that

The recurring, horrific deaths of minority residents at the hands of police officers and vigilantes have led social movements and international protests to amplify the charge that whereas the loss of White lives is seen as tragic, the loss of Black and Hispanic lives is treated as normal, acceptable, and even inevitable. Building on and advancing theories of “color-blind racism,” the authors examine

Black sociology developed as a response to mainstream, white sociology’s failures to address the condition of Black people in the Unites States. Central to the practice of Black sociology is that it necessitates sociological work be used, where possible, for the benefit of Black people. The contemporary practice of public sociology has similar aims of bringing sociological knowledges to various publics

The authors investigate the association between self-reported experiences of discrimination and social media use among Black American adults. Experiences of discrimination were assessed using a 10-question scale of self-reported discrimination encounters. Data analysis was based on a sample of 220 Black American adult respondents residing in Texas. The results indicate that Black Americans reporting

Much of the contemporary scholarship on Black identities focuses on how multiraciality, immigrant status, class, and neighborhood characteristics shape how social actors negotiate identities. In contrast, little analysis exists of how internal migration and regional origin or ancestry shape such negotiations. The study addresses this gap using interview data to examine how U.S.-born Black Louisianans

Racial and ethnic differences in educational outcomes significantly narrowed during the 1970s and 1980s when K–12 public schools were desegregated. However, when schools resegregated starting rough...

Stark ethno-racial differences in reported neighborhood crime are a major facet of contemporary U.S. inequality. However, the most generalizable research on neighborhood inequality in crime across ...

is filled predominantly with minority ethnic faces (likely to be the case given the U.S. criminal justice system’s longstanding predilection for ethnic minority incarceration), your face is probably less likely to be recognized if you are white. Additionally, if you are black, your face potentially stands a higher chance of being falsely recognized because of the limitations of facial recognition software

In this article the author examines how the frameworks of color-blind racism have influenced many topics during the pandemic. Using readily available material from popular culture (TV shows, newspa...

Although the relationship between organizations and structural racism is well established, less is known about how racialization occurs within organizations. Overlooking how racial ideology is imbu...

How does skin color shape the social networks and integration pathways of phenotypically diverse immigrant groups? Focusing on Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, groups with considerable diversity acros...

Immigrant and multiracial populations have both attracted attention for their significant impact on the demographic makeup of the United States. The anticipation of their continued growth raises im...

We are outraged at the police brutality that allows the state-sanctioned murder of Black people in the United States. Time and again we have seen Black lives cut short by the police. In addition to the actions of the police, we have repeatedly seen innocent Black people harassed or killed by their White neighbors simply because they were suspicious, were nervous, or gave in to their collective paranoia

Recent research finds negative impacts of racial microaggressions, defined as racial slights, on a variety of outcomes. Targets of racial microaggressions often report feeling pressured to remain s...

In the war on terror, the state frames terrorism as an exceptional form of violence. This research examines the role of race in that framing. Analysis of the 2017 Federal Bureau of Investigation mo...

Increasingly, race scholars define racism as a structural and systemic phenomenon, rather than a matter of personal prejudice alone. Various theories of racism have been developed by asking “What c...

How people understand ethnoracial inequality, or their stratification beliefs, is an important concern for social scientists. Stratification beliefs can be highly influential in the development of ...

The interplay between race and technology has captured the attention of scholars in sociology, communication, media studies, and beyond. Previous research has focused on a range of topics including the centrality of race to the structure and function of the Internet, critiques of digital divide studies, and the phenomenon of Black Twitter. Although a robust history of critical race and digital studies

Do employers penalize Asian-origin workers for personality-related reasons during real hiring decisions? Current theoretical approaches—the Model Minority Myth perspective and the Heterogeneity app...

By documenting the erasure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s scientific contributions to sociology, Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied was a catalyst for scholars to rethink how we teach and understand social theory and a call to recognize the racialized origins of our discipline. How can we incorporate these insights into our teaching beyond a token addition of Du Bois to classical theory courses? Drawing on comments

that it was “better than it used to be” (p. 42). A number of highly racist incidents also came to light at Lyon. However, these were discussed largely under the racially neutral term bullying (p. 45). Stoll found that almost all examples of bullying provided by teachers were linked to race, and so although bullying may have been a neutral term, the actual act of bullying was not. Defining individual

This study examines the mental health significance of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election for black adults. His election was a milestone moment. Hence, we expect black adults would experience...

Efforts have been under way by Indigenous peoples to reanimate governance that includes people of all ages and genders. Simultaneous initiatives to decolonize science within environmental fields must confront how settler colonial systems can continue to operate under the guise of partnership. Indigenous feminist theories aid understanding of ongoing colonialism alongside heteropatriarchy and racism

A robust body of literature has used feminist analysis to study white evangelical women in the United States, but few of these studies have addressed the reproduction of racial inequality. Beginnin...

A generative turn in scholarship examines the institutional and political dimensions of Islamophobia, conceptualizing Muslim representations as a mechanism of ethnoracial formation in which the media is one such site of racialization. Moments of great political and cultural transformation can motivate and activate these racial projects, generating racialized representations that attach racial meaning

During the past several years a growing body of literature has encouraged sociologists to examine the intersection of race and Islam as a distinct form of racialization. What is further needed is an understanding of the experiences of racialization of Muslims through the prism of intersectionality. Applying and expanding Selod’s (2018a, 2018b) conceptualization of “gendered racialization” we argue

Although sociologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the processes and patterns associated with work (both paid and unpaid), it is crucial to bridge that with the extensive research that documents how work is constructed through racial, gendered, and classed practices. Sociological thinkers have offered important empirical contributions that highlight how intersections of race, gender, and

Recent work has called for sociologists to incorporate postcolonial theory into their toolkits to better understand the mechanics of race in the United States. The authors answer this call by showing how postcolonial and field theories can be bridged to explain how movements of the 1970s developed distinct visions of panethnicity. Drawing on published case studies, as well as a unique data set of pioneering

Homeschooling is an increasingly common schooling option for middle-class black families yet is often overlooked in research on race and education. Drawing on interviews with 67 middle-class black and white mothers living in one northeastern metropolitan area—half of whom homeschool, while the other half enroll their children in conventional school—the author examines how race influences mothers’ decisions

Integrating the intersectionality framework and stress theory, this study identifies the stressors and psychosocial resources contributing to the physical and psychological health status of African...

The authors investigate how American and Dutch rock music consumers navigate the whiteness of rock music practice and discourse. In doing so, they address the complex connection between aesthetic categories (popular music) and ethnoracial categories and to what extent this relationship is open or resistant to structural change. Connecting literature on the racialization of cultural genres and on symbolic