Despite the increased use of dating technology for finding and forming romantic relationships, location remains relevant for relationship formation. While current research on relationship formation attends to the ratio of marriageable men to women, marital attitudes, and gendered racial exclusion, this research does not always consider a nuanced look at how location can also constrain opportunities to make short- or long-term romantic connections. Drawing on interviews with 111 Asian, White, Black, and Latina heterosexual college-educated women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three, I find that regardless of race/ethnicity, women observe that some places provide limited opportunities to meet men and that the mismatch between their dating norms, beliefs, and/or expectations for relationships and the location where they reside make their search more difficult. Women of color additionally note that some locations provide fewer opportunities for same-race and/or interracial dating than others. I also find that women of color are more likely to employ strategies to address their locational barriers than White women.

Therefore, I argue that not only does location continue to matter for forming romantic connections in the digital age, but that location and race also intersect to create unique locational barriers for women of color. This intersection, consequently, demonstrates that the opportunities for relationship formation remain stratified despite the rise of dating technology.

Various research has demonstrated that rapid racial demographic change may aid in triggering various forms of backlash under certain conditions. This has led scholars to speak of Whites “defending” their local environment in the face of eroding racial dominance. However, little research has addressed how perceptions of racism among minorities may be triggered under conditions of demographic change. This study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between racial demographic change for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians and perceptions of racial problems among these groups in the United States. Using standard OLS regressions, ordered logistic regressions, multinomial logistic regressions, and techniques accounting for selection into treatment, I find that Blacks and Hispanics living in counties undergoing rapid growth of Black and Hispanic populations, respectively, have higher perceptions of racial problems. Asians show no evidence of increased perceptions of racial problems in counties undergoing rapid Asian growth. For Blacks, this relationship is concentrated among those without at least a four-year degree and residents of counties with lower initial White populations (and higher initial Black populations). For Hispanics, it is similarly concentrated among those without at least a four-year degree, but also is likely stronger among residents of counties with higher initial White populations (and lower initial Hispanic populations), highlighting unique racial dynamics. This research adds to a growing body of work showing the importance of examining demographic change at the local level in order to understand some of today’s most pressing political and social issues.

The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped Northern electorates. Millions of Black voters, who had been unable to vote in the South, became eligible to vote through their resettlement in the North. In many instances, parties and politicians believed that Black voters were the balance of power in elections. This belief led them to change their approaches and make specific appeals to Black voters in an effort to win their support. Although scholars of American politics have revised the dominant narrative about the development of the Democratic Party on issues related to race, they fail to account for the role of Black voters in contributing to the Party’s change. The goal of this work is to describe how the Great Migration influenced Democratic Party interactions with Black voters in presidential elections from 1948–1960. I argue that increasing competition between the Democratic and Republican Parties, coupled with Black migrants’ location in electorally important states, made Black voters an important target of presidential campaign strategy in the post-war era.

The racial composition of couples is a salient indicator of race’s impact on mate selection, but how well do those in intimate partnerships know the racial identities of their partners? While prior research has revealed that an individual’s race may be perceived differently than how they identify, most of what is known comes from brief interactions, with less information on established relationships. This study examines whether discrepancies in the reports of a person’s race or ethnicity can be identified even within intimate relationships, as well as which relational, social, and attitudinal factors are predictive of divergent or concordant reports. We draw on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n=3467), a U.S.-based dataset that uniquely provides both the father’s self-reported race and Hispanic origin and the mother’s report of the father’s race and ethnicity. We compare reports of the father’s race/Hispanic origin from both parents to assess the extent of mismatch, and we distinguish between whether mothers view the father’s race as similar to or different from her own. We find roughly 14% of mothers provide a race and Hispanic origin that is inconsistent with the father’s report, with a large share reflecting differences in the self-identified and perceived race of fathers who are reported as Hispanic. Among mismatched reports, mothers are more likely to report a race/ethnicity for the father that matches her own, depressing the number reporting interracial unions. Perceptions of racial homogamy are especially likely when mothers view racial sameness as important to marriage. Further, mismatches are more common in the midst of weak relational ties (i.e. non-marital relationships) and are less common when both parents are college-educated. These findings reveal that intimate unions are a site where race is socially constructed and provide insight into how norms of endogamy manifest within formed relationships.

In 2004, the United States elaborately “celebrated” the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The country's mass media acclaimed May 17 as the date of a great national achievement while paying scant attention to the present racial scene in education. Yet those who believed in and fought for the racial desegregation of the nation's public schools found the widespread “celebration” grossly overstated and at best premature. With effective opposition to school desegregation unrelenting during the entire past half century, with the U.S. Supreme Court continually narrowing Brown's scope, and with African American and Hispanic American children still largely attending segregated schools, the nation's unmitigated self-congratulatory stance seemed unwarranted.

Research on interracial marriage and relationships uses the incidence of interracial romantic relationships to measure immigrant assimilation. Little attention, however, has been paid to the implications of interracial relationships for racial group politics. Are those who practice exogamy politically distinct from those who do not? We develop testable hypotheses from existing theories of and literature on interracial marriages/relationships. We test these hypotheses on several outcomes using the 2008 National Asian American Survey of Asian Americans, as this group has one of the highest rates of interracial marriage with Whites. We find that those with interracial partners are more likely to be concerned about racial issues, less likely to favor co-ethnic candidates and belong to ethnically concentrated civic groups, but are no more likely to be concerned about immigration or to favor a pathway to citizenship. We offer some theoretical reasons for these findings and discuss the implications of these findings for immigrant assimilation, interracial marriage, and the American racial order.

In the remarks that follow, I attempt to clarify and further to develop some of the key concepts and arguments that I set forth in In the Shadow of Du Bois (2009). Specifically, I respond to issues that Rogers Smith and Tommie Shelby address with regard to the relationship between elite and democratic politics; to questions that Smith and Cristina Beltrán pose with regard to my “no-foundations” analysis of Black politics; and to a worry Smith presents with regard to my effort to reorient the critique of Black poverty from social theories framed by a technical interest in normalizing the behavior of the ghetto poor to an emancipatory interest in fostering the radical reform of an oppressive social order. I begin with Smith's criticisms and then turn to Shelby's and Beltrán's essays.

This article presents an analysis of the limits of “power to” and agency through an examination of the Barry administration in Washington, DC. I begin by asking why this administration, born of the civil rights movement and tremendous optimism, was unable to live up to its expectations. I provide an in-depth examination of Barry's efforts at reform, his popular appeal, and his appeal to business within the context of Washington's local political history. I find that Barry's power was constrained by a combination of structural factors, personal choices, the legacy of racism and racist exclusion, and a failed identity-deployment strategy. The findings have broader implications for the use of identity-deployment strategies for minority political leaders generally.

This study examines how dimensions of family structure, specifically marriage and parenthood, influence authority attainment among men and women of different racial and ethnic identities. Using survey data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality, we reach several empirical conclusions. First, the link between family structure and authority attainment is much stronger for women than men, and it revolves more strongly around marriage than parenthood. Second, while marriage decreases White women's odds of holding positions of higher authority, it increases these odds for Black women and Latinas. Third, this “marital bonus” for Black women is most pronounced in predominantly White work settings, allowing them to “play against” stereotypes of group members as single mothers. Fourth, and by contrast, the “marital bonus” for Latinas is strongest in predominantly Latina workplaces, suggesting that Latinas must conform to strong cultural expectations for marriage if they are to gain authority in ingroup work settings. These findings help to illuminate how race, ethnicity, and gender intersect to produce unique linkages between family structure and individual opportunities for organizational power.

This article brings Frazier's ideas about male and female family roles into focus. Although Frazier was at the forefront of arguing for racial equality in the 1930s, his ideas remained limited by his belief that African Americans should assimilate into the gender and sexual ideals of patriarchal U.S. culture. At the center of this article is Frazier's conviction that middle-class egalitarian marriages, women's participation in the waged work force, and increased consumption of material goods would perpetuate or worsen African Americans' family health. Importantly, this article argues that Frazier's socialist political alignments and his suspicion of bourgeois norms were inseparable from his suspicion of middle-class Black women and notions of morality. Ultimately, it suggests that his mistrust of women colors social scientists' treatments of Black Americans throughout the twentieth century.

Gun violence and related risk factors differ for African American and European Americans. However, there may be overlap in the psychosocial and contextual factors with respect to cultural processes related to gun violence in Black and White communities. The purpose of this article is to compare the culture of honor perspective associated with rural and suburban gun violence of European American males in the southern region to the code of the street value system ascribed to the gun violence of African American males in northern urban cities. The cultural values underlying gun violence will be reviewed in terms of cultural origins, family and community support, and ecological evidence. The central question is whether there are sufficient commonalities between the cultural ecology of the two value systems such that one has practice and policy implications for the other. The current analysis of culture-of-honor and code-of-the-street value systems vis-à-vis gun violence reveals several points of overlap in philosophy and function. Implications for policies and practices to prevent gun violence stemming from culture-of-honor and code-of-the-street value systems include (1) psychological interventions to address the perceived threats to the self; (2) neighborhood interventions to promote a sense of collective efficacy among residents; (3) addressing racial and economic inequality; (4) better gun control laws; and (5) media campaigns and interventions designed to change social and cultural norms for violence. It is important to note the pervasiveness of these value systems may vary by ethnicity and race which must be taken into consideration in violence prevention efforts.

Once nearly eighty percent Black, South LA is now two-thirds Latino. The demographic change was due to many factors, including a Black exodus driven by economic precarity, fear of crime, and experiences of over-policing and a Latino influx initially spurred by an immigration surge that could not be accommodated in traditional entry neighborhoods. While earlier research often focused on the conflicts between groups, time has passed and our new work points to contemporary quotidian accommodations between residents. We also document an emerging style of Black-Brown community organizing that seeks to both acknowledge the nuance of difference and create a shared sense of place identity. This article lifts up the Black experience in that transition of space and politics and notes how a sense of loss can result from such a dramatic change in a place that was once an iconic and literal home for much of Black Los Angeles. We suggest that that sense of loss is exacerbated by a legacy of racist asset-stripping and a deep worry about Black erasure due to current displacement pressures from gentrification. We close by discussing how organizers and political leaders need to take these dynamics into account when both building coalitions and ensuring Black futures in what is now a Black-Brown political and social space.

Within the last eighteen months we have seen both the Katrina disaster and the Obama candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination for president reshape the political landscape within the United States. Equally important, for our analytical purposes, both phenomena are strong indicators of the evolving nature of the American racial order. The Obama candidacy points to important changes in the racial terrain within the United States. His candidacy highlights the more tolerant nature of public racial discourse in the United States—it was not very long ago when a Black candidate for president was considered unelectable. Obama's candidacy also highlights how immigration from non-European countries has fundamentally reshaped the racial landscape. Obama is, of course, not the “traditional” Black candidate, as his African heritage is due to recent immigration, not the slave trade. Relatedly, his candidacy also highlights the evolving nature of, and contestation over, racial categories. Over the past decade we have seen similar processes transforming conceptualizations/categories such as Hispanic, Latino/a, and Asian American. With even more recent waves of immigration from Africa and the African diaspora, we are now seeing the category Black under heavy contestation—which was brought to the (White) public eye as a result of the furor over whether Obama is “Black” enough to garner African American support and whether (as Senator Joseph Biden implied) part of Obama's crossover appeal is the perceived absence of a “tainted” African American cultural heritage. The Obama candidacy is emblematic of one type of change that marks the American racial landscape.

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

One of the most controversial figures in Black intellectual history is psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. Prominently identified as the main proponent of the idea that racial segregation led to psychological damage in Black children, Clark's work heavily influenced the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Almost immediately afterwards, his research methods and conclusions were challenged as incomplete and biased. Scholars now argue that Clark and other racial liberals became solely wedded to the idea of racial psychological damage in order to secure victory in Brown. Yet a closer analysis of his thought reveals a more complex picture. During the early 1940s, he developed a new psychological concept which he called the “zoot effect.” He defined the zoot effect as the attempt by a person to gain psychological security in a society which mandated that individual's inferiority. The zoot effect or zoot personality reflected the larger society's pathology, which manifested itself internally in individuals. This concept was heavily shaped by ideas about race, class, and in particular the work of Alfred Adler, which he first learned as a student at Howard University. Using archival and secondary sources, I argue for a reconceptualization of Clark within the broader context of his social thought, suggesting that the zoot-effect concept grounded his research on Black children and set the stage for his later views on desegregation, civil rights, and American society.

School reform policies, such as the closure of “low-performing” schools and the competitive introduction of school choice and charters, were presented to communities of color as the fix to educational inequities and the lifeline needed for urban Black students to have a chance at a quality education and social mobility. The ways in which reforms have under-delivered on this promise, and in some cases exacerbated negative academic outcomes, particularly for Black boys, are documented. Yet, research on the experience of Black adolescent girls is sparse. We explore ways that policies aimed at delivering a school choice environment have affected daily life for Black adolescent girls. We examine this issue in the context of the Detroit metropolitan area with Black adolescent girls, reflecting on their high school education experiences that spanned a time-period of rapid transitions in the schooling environment (2014–2016) prompted by a series of school reforms in Michigan. Through in-depth interviews we found that girls sought to invest in their high school education as a path to college; yet the very reforms advanced as ways to clear this path hindered their ability to spend time on the human and social capital activities believed to be important to their academic success and social mobility. Our findings suggest advantages for those students with proximal access to high quality neighborhood schools cannot be replicated in a choice environment. There may also be health consequences of the coping strategies girls are compelled to employ to carry on under adverse educational circumstances.

This article argues that Americans operate with a concept and practice of political autonomy centered on a notion of “mastery,” which is inextricably linked to race, gender, and class hierarchy. I adopt Max Weber's concept of mastery and use it to broaden the construct of a Herrenvolk democracy beyond its traditional association with White supremacy. I then use this theoretical framework to illuminate the emergence of segregation in Atlanta between 1880 and 1910. This period marks a crucial transformation in the concept of race in the United States, as the paternalism of Southern agricultural relations is transposed by Southern Progressives into more urban and industrial settings. I conclude by raising the possibility that the concept of political autonomy currently operative in the United States shares important common ground with the ideological achievements of the Southern Progressives, confounding institutional attempts to foster citizen autonomy.

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

In the literature on transitional justice, there is disagreement about whether countries like the United States can be characterized as transitional societies. Though it is widely recognized that transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and reparations can be used by Global North nations to address racial injustice, some consider societies to be transitional only when they are undergoing a formal democratic regime change. We conceptualize the political situation of low-income Black communities under the U.S. imprisonment and policing regime in terms of three criteria for identifying transitional contexts: normalized collective and political wrongdoing, pervasive structural inequality, and the failure of the rule of law. That these criteria are met, however, does not necessarily mean that a transition is taking place. Drawing on the American political development and abolition democracy literatures, we discuss what it would mean for the United States to transition out of its present imprisonment and policing regime. A transitional justice perspective shows the importance of not only pushing for truth and reparation, but for an actual transition.

The year 2008 has provided many opportunities to look back and take stock of what has and has not changed along the color line. Perhaps of greatest salience is that this year marks four decades of uneven progress since the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It also marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of what became known as the Kerner Commission report (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968). The great sadness following those tragic deaths, and the somber tone set by the “two nations” declaration at the heart of the Kerner Report, call to mind an era of acute racial division, but also of steady struggle for change.