This research examines laws in the colony of Virginia created by a powerful landowning planter class that attempted to draw a color line separating three descent groups: an indigenous native population (Indian), an immigrant population from Europe (English), and an imported population from Africa (Negro). Textual analysis of the Laws of Colonial Virginia shows that the English lawmakers had to learn they were the White component of a color line; they did not, for many years, refer to themselves as White. Contrary to some widely held views that race relations began as soon as these groups came into contact at some point in the seventeenth century, the analysis of written law suggests it took over 100 years, until near the middle third of the eighteenth century in Colonial Virginia, before a definitive concept of race was socially-constructed and a color line was drawn in Black and White.

Previous research suggests that the mainstream media’s portrayals of the U.S. Supreme Court as an objective and impartial institution contribute to its diffuse support among the public. This study explores what happens if people are not exposed to these messages, relying instead on information sources that portray the Court and its justices as being politically oriented and motivated. We use the 2003 Blacks and the U.S. Supreme Court Survey data and coarsened exact matching to examine the effect of exposure to the Black media, whose reports are less likely to include legitimizing symbols of the Court. We find that exposure to the Black media significantly lowers people’s diffuse support for the Court among both Blacks and Whites. This result indicates that differences between Blacks and Whites with respect to their diffuse support for the Court are likely to be a function of the informational environment to which they are exposed rather than race per se.

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

Using data from a mixed methods study with suburban Detroit, middle-class mothers as participants, we explore the relationship between racial microaggressions and the racial battle fatigue experienced by Black mothers with young daughters attending predominantly White schools. We find that Black mothers are regularly subjected to racial microaggressions by the White teachers, administrators, and parents with whom they interact. When experiencing slights, insults, and indignities, mothers report taking direct action—borne from African American motherwork—to combat the racial microaggressions. In the context of predominantly White schools, Black mothers enact aesthetic presence, maintain a visible presence, and are strategic in their interactions with school personnel. Racial battle fatigue is evident as they experience and combat racial microaggressions. To extend understanding of racial microaggressions, we apply the sociological concept of the Du Boisian Veil to our analysis. We discuss how the Veil—a barrier which protects the Black psyche by grounding the racialized self while simultaneously precluding racial equality by sustaining racial oppression—can induce the racial battle fatigue that is manifested when one is deluged by racial microaggressions.

David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State. London: Blackwell, 2002, 319 pages, ISBN 0-631-19919-5, $66.95.

Howard Winant, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II. New York: Basic Books, 2001, 428 pages, ISBN 0-465-04340-2, $32.00.

Most American social scientists interpret racism as an individual malady and miss, ignore, or simply do not believe in the institutional and global nature of “White supremacy” (Mills 1997). Two limitations that ensue from this myopia are, first, the assumption that societies are not racialized entities (for a critique, see Bonilla-Silva 1997) and, second, a high degree of analytical provincialism—most studies by American scholars are narrow in scope and often are confined to the United States (for early exceptions, see Cox 1948, 1959; Du Bois 1920, 1945).

President-elect Barack Obama will take office after a campaign that was pathbreaking on many levels. The argument here, necessarily somewhat speculative, is that Obama's management of his racial identity and of racial politics is roughly predictive of his soon-to-begin management of executive power in the United States. Obama is characterized as a “practical idealist,” a true pragmatist in the deeply grounded, philosophical (as opposed to vulgar) sense of that term. Attention is directed to the way Obama has handled or may be likely to handle the racial politics of the election itself, the ongoing realities of structural racism in the United States and the problem of exercising executive power in an endemically racial state, the role of race in national politics, and the role of race in global politics. The uniqueness of this new administration—headed by a preternaturally skilled and intellectually prepared Black politician—is not chiefly located in the symbolism of Obama's Blackness, important as that is. Rather it is Obama's formation as a Black intellectual and politician that may be expected to guide his thought and action in the White House.

Samuel P. Huntington,Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 448 pages, ISBN: 0-684-86668-4, Cloth, $27.00.

Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters, eds., Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, 448 pages, ISBN: 0-87154-436-9, Cloth, $39.95.

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 400 pages, ISBN: 0-691-12429-9, Paper, $19.95, and 0-691-07471-2, Cloth, $49.95.

The dawn of the twenty-first century confronts Western democracies with a racialized class problem. The globalization of capitalism—mass geographic movement of peoples, capital, and markets on scales unprecedented since the Atlantic slave trade—has brought poor migrants into affluent nations. Migrants' descendants are replicating conditions associated with poor Blacks. Affluent Western democracies are hurtling toward biplural stratification defined by a multiracial underclass. Racialized class stratification stems from economic policies. Capitalist democracies' edifice of social policies—sanctioning expectations of rising prosperity, welfare “safety nets” for minimal consumption, low-wage migration policies—erroneously assumed that jobs and wages would continuously grow to absorb expanding populations. Overuse of low-wage migration policies commodified work relations in low-skilled jobs. Acculturated to demand affluent living standards and egalitarian human relations, educationally deprived descendants of migrants find commodified work regimens repellent. Despite large populations of jobless natives, some maintain that affluent democracies need more migrants to do the jobs that natives won't do. But jobless youth are alienated and prone to agency, as riots in England, the United States, and, more recently, France and other areas of Europe suggest. To avert the solidification of biplural societies, social policy must slow rates of migration from low living-standard economies, expand minimum wages and income transfers to working-citizen households, and provide documented immigrants clear avenues to citizenship. This agenda is more likely to succeed in the United States, where minority voting strength is gathering considerable momentum.

Has the adoption of “new governance” reforms over the last two decades eroded the public sector as a long-standing occupational niche for African Americans? Utilizing data from the General Social Survey, we address this issue in the context of earnings “returns” to three levels of job authority for African American men and women relative to their White counterparts. Findings, derived from analyses of three waves of the General Social Survey, indicate that the acceleration of this “business model” of work organization in the public sector has had relatively profound and negative consequences for African American income. Specifically, racial parity in earnings returns at all levels of authority in the “pre-reform” period (1992–1994) progressively eroded during “early reform” (2000–2002) and then even more so during the “late reform” (2010–2012) period. Much of this growing public sector disadvantage—a disadvantage that is approaching that seen in the private sector—is driven largely by income gaps between White and African American men, although a similar (though smaller) racial gap is witnessed among women. We conclude by discussing the occupational niche status of public sector work for African Americans, calling for further analyses of the growing inequality patterns identified in our analyses, and drawing attention to the implications for contemporary racial disadvantages.

While the socioeconomic status (SES)–psychological distress gradient is well-documented in the social science literature, less attention has been devoted to how this relationship varies within sociodemographic subgroups. I contribute to this small but growing literature by first examining the relationship between multiple dimensions of SES and two measures of psychological distress (depression and anxiety) among working-age African Americans. I then test whether three social mediators explain the SES–psychological distress relationship, and whether gender modifies these associations and/or the social mediators that shape them. To address these aims, I analyze two waves of population-representative data from the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study (N=685). Data were collected between 2008 and 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession. I utilize structural equation modeling with latent variables to assess these relationships, and test indirect and conditional effects to detect the presence of mediation and/or moderation, respectively. Findings revealed associations between higher total household income and lower levels of depression/anxiety, as well as unemployment and increased depression/anxiety among working-age African Americans. Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with reduced anxiety, but not depression, in this population. Gender moderated these findings such that unemployment was associated with higher levels of depression/anxiety among women but not men. I also found that trauma mediated the relationship between unemployment and depression/anxiety as well as educational attainment and anxiety. Gender, however, moderated the association between unemployment and depression/anxiety via traumatic events such that the relationship was stronger among women than men. Collectively, these findings contribute to our limited understanding of African Americans’ mental health and underscore the importance of how both socioeconomic forces and life course experiences with traumatic events contribute to poor mental health among this population.

Waves of migration to and flight from Atlanta by both White and Black residents and businesses have constantly imagined and re-imagined the city as both politically regressive and racially progressive, and from an environmental health perspective, as both a riskscape and a safe haven. We argue that the persistent racial, social, environmental, and health inequities in Atlanta have been fostered and exacerbated by the exponential growth of the city and the persistent rhetoric of it being “the city too busy to hate.” This paper is informed by extant research on housing and transportation policies and processes at work in Atlanta since the end of the Civil War, and in particular, the predatory and subprime lending practices during the past thirty years. This paper examines how young people, living in a neighborhood where over 50% of the houses are currently vacant and contending with threats of school closures, experience the contemporary foreclosure crisis. Using qualitative data from focus groups with middle school youth, this paper offers youth-informed perspectives and local knowledge by offering responses of marginalized populations in Atlanta who inhabit, rather than flee, their built and social environments.

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

This study investigates the characteristics of cases of police killing unarmed Blacks that receive national news coverage. I analyze an original quantitative dataset measuring the parameters of 111 cases occurring between 2013 and 2015, and the amount of coverage they received in six national news outlets. Multivariate models indicate that cases’ national newsworthiness is positively associated with Blacks’ share of the population where the fatal encounter occurred, and the presence of video evidence, peaceful demonstrations, or civil lawsuits. National newsworthiness is negatively associated with encounters that were initiated by a call to police, and those involving decedents who resisted arrest, suffered electroshock injuries, or were impaired by drugs or alcohol. The findings strongly suggest that the most newsworthy cases are those that align with an injustice frame. I discuss the results using theories of newsworthiness, describing how patterns of story availability and story suitability might shape which cases rise to the top of the national agenda. Using the social construction of reality approach, I discuss the implications of the results for how the public understands the empirical nature of police killing unarmed Blacks, and the symbolic meaning of these events.

The article evaluates Robert Putnam's discussion of two differing concepts of the role of the diversity perspective toward inter-ethnic/inter-racial relationships in American society since the 1960s—namely, the “contact theory” and the “conflict theory.” The former was initially formulated by Harvard social psychologist Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Putnam's analysis—published in the comparative politics journal Scandinavian Political Studies (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2007)—favors the “conflict theory,” which holds that diversity sharpens “us-against-them” inter-ethnic/inter-racial interactions. Putnam's view opposes diversity-influenced public policies. By contrast, “contact theory” holds that diversity erodes “us-against-them” interactions and thus eventually democratizes such interactions, and thereby American society generally. “Contact theory” influenced the NAACP-led civil-rights movement's quest for desegregation public policies during the 1950s, 1960s, and onward.

Until 2008, only White candidates represented either of the two major parties as presidential nominees. Hence, little is known about how race appeals are framed by or against non-White presidential candidates. Barack Obama's election as the Democratic Party nominee allows us to investigate this issue. In this article, we conduct a content analysis of over 160 advertisements from the 2008 U.S. presidential election to examine how race appeals were framed (or countered) by each campaign. We find that the Republican campaign employed implicit racial appeals that played upon stereotypes of non-Whites as “un-American” and “other” and Blacks as “dangerous,” “criminal,” “incompetent,” and “uppity.” In contrast, the Democratic campaign de-emphasized race, portrayed “other” as positive, reinforced American identity, and spoke out against negative advertisements.

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