The Siphithemba Choir, an HIV/AIDS support group at the McCord Mission Hospital in Durban, South Africa, uses songs that conflate “Africa” and “Black Race” (abantu abamnyama) or “Black Nation” (Umnyama yezwe) to perform their experience of HIV/AIDS, thus signaling global ethnic/racial consciousness in the context of the HIV/AIDS discourse. This paper argues that the musical referencing of race and ethnicity by this group of HIV-positive South Africans could be explained as a function of related factors: the nature of the AIDS virus, the history and lingering effects of apartheid, the continuing interracial acrimony in the post-apartheid environment, and the global politics of AIDS. A combination of these factors has inevitably impacted how HIV/AIDS is perceived and interpreted through the lens of race. Hence the Siphithemba Choir's musical performance is analyzed in this paper as an expressive articulation of an African and Black experience of AIDS, and a performance of Black identity in the context of the global AIDS pandemic.

During his campaign, Barack Obama inspired record numbers of Americans to donate their time and money to his electoral efforts. Now that the campaign is over, can Obama sustain this civic engagement as he begins to govern? This paper examines the possibilities for sustaining Obama's electoral mobilization, introducing new data from fieldwork conducted from September 2008 to Election Day 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; and Charlotte, North Carolina. The data include staff interviews and observations of canvassing, rallies, and other get-out-the-vote efforts of the local Obama and McCain campaigns, the local Democratic and Republican Parties, and various nonprofit groups in each city. Based on these data it is clear that each city was characterized by excitement and heightened activity; however, the number of activities and the strength of the grassroots organization varied across the cities according to national electoral imperatives in ways that should affect the potential for future mobilization. As such, sustaining the mobilization of Obama's supporters faces several hurdles: campaign staff and volunteers in many cities were drawn from outside the community, tensions arose between local grassroots organizations and the campaign over resources and issue focus, and the extremely large amounts of money needed to finance the mobilization were not distributed evenly across cities and states.

Elections matter. This is perhaps especially true in times of deepening inequality and cultural polarization. Commentators on both sides of the political aisle were in unison on two points: the 2004 presidential election was the most important such contest in a century, and the U.S. electorate has never seemed so sharply divided. The intensity of feeling around the Bush-Kerry contest has solidified in the national consciousness a well understood distinction between “blue states” and “red states.” It has also resulted in the most complete consolidation of conservative Republican control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in history.

Racial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed the Fair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

This paper examines the claim that the historical election of Barack Obama demonstrated a new era of postracial politics in America (Ceaser et al., 2009). Drawing on arguments in the recent American political development literature (King and Smith, 2005; Novkov 2008), this research proposes a racial tension theory to link Obama’s White voter support to the deep-seated racial tension at the state level. In doing so, a theoretic and empirical solution is offered to solve the problem of high correlations between the major contextual variables measuring Black density (Key 1949), racial diversity (Hero 1998), state political culture (Elazar 1984), and social capital (Putnam 2000). The converged findings based on multiple methods clearly show that the state-level White support for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 was directly related to the racial tension of a state. In contrast, racial tension did not affect the White vote for John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in the 2004 Presidential election.

Much of the pivotal debate concerning the validity of affirmative action is situated in a legal context of defending or challenging claims that there may be broad societal gains from increased diversity. Race-conscious affirmative action policies originally advanced legal sanctions to promote racial equity in the United States. Today, increasingly detached from its historical context, defense or rejection of affirmative action is otherwise upheld to achieve diversity. A “diversity” rationale for affirmative action calls for increasing tolerance of the “other,” reducing negative stereotypes, and moderating prejudice as goals—all objectives that deviate from the former aim of race-targeted inclusion intended to resolve racial discrimination in employment and college admissions. Diversity policy provides a tapered defense for affirmative action, one detached from principles of justice and equity. The current article suggests that, despite the fact that the ostensible benefits of “racial inclusion as diversity” may be the remaining legal prop for affirmative action in the U.S., there is a need to consider whether diversity intrinsically can engender the benefits that affirmative action policy seeks to provide.

I first discuss the Obama administration's efforts to promote racial diversity on college campuses in the face of recent court challenges to affirmative action. I then analyze opposition in this country to “racial preferences” as a way to overcome inequality. I follow that with a discussion of why class-based affirmative action, as a response to cries from conservatives to abolish “racial preferences,” would not be an adequate substitute for race-based affirmative action. Instead of class-based affirmative action, I present an argument for opportunity enhancing affirmative action programs that rely on flexible, merit-based criteria of evaluation as opposed to numerical guidelines or quotas. Using the term “affirmative opportunity” to describe such programs, I illustrate their application with three cases: the University of California, Irvine's revised affirmative action admissions procedure; the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action program, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003; and the hiring and promotion of faculty of color at colleges and universities as seen in how I myself benefited from a type of affirmative action based on flexible merit-based criteria at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. I conclude by relating affirmative opportunity programs for people of color to the important principle of “equality of life chances.”

Much of the scholarship on poor Black urban communities focuses on social disorganization at the neighborhood level and how Blacks experience various institutional inequalities that impact their access to quality education and housing, jobs, and equitable public transportation. But Black social life is not a monolith of chaos, subjugation, and inequalities, nor is it confined to stationary neighborhoods. Black urban life is in fact vibrant, celebratory, and communal. Using two years of ethnographic observations on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains, we highlight the sociality of Black mobile experiences within Black spaces. Specifically, we examine how Blacks, while traveling into and through majority Black communities, form positive intraracial relationships that we refer to as Black transit affinities, which are a type of actively developed, temporal, meaningful interactions that take place on mobile systems. These transit affinities move beyond linked fate and solidarity but are actively formed and have four distinctive features, they are: 1) personal; 2) mutually engaged; 3) actively maintained although interrupted by stops on the bus or train; and, 4) particular to majority-minority areas of the city. These transit affinities are intraracial and were not observed, as defined, interracially or in majority White areas of the city. We do not argue that they are exclusive to Blacks but that they took place among Blacks in Black spaces that have often been ascribed a narrative of disorganization, violence, and social fragmentation.

Using a wide array of official and unofficial data spanning two decades in the neighborhoods of Chicago, we explore connections between legal cynicism, the electoral regime of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and citizen calls for police assistance and police reports of drug crime. We find that the disproportionate concentration of legal cynicism about law enforcement in African American neighborhoods played a prominent and insufficiently understood role in building opposition to Mayor Daley’s political machine. This race linked legal cynicism was grounded in neighborhood concerns about effective prevention of and protection from drug crime. The more punitive than preventative and protective approach to drug law enforcement that characterized the politics of the Daley crime machine contributed to a legacy that foreshadowed the growing and ultimately explosive demands for new mechanisms of police accountability in Chicago.

This is a story about gay/queer globalization unfolded through the narratives of Korean gay men in Seoul. In this paper, I make use of talanoa dialogues to apprehend the way race and racial hierarchies can provide insights into the conditions in which the gay subject in Seoul is intelligible in intercultural interactions. I present these narratives in the format of a thematic talanoa using Pacific Research Methodologies (PRM). In doing so, I advance a unique way to negotiate communication with participants in a cross-cultural setting, rendering myself visible as a racialized (Sāmoan) researcher. Empirically, I argue that the narratives of Korean gay men party to this study demonstrate how the Korea/local–West/global binary is an important referential, in that there exists a structural connection through immigration policies that facilitates a transnational convergence of local and global racial hierarchies. This connection, I also argue, helps to structure and position Whiteness at the apex of racial hierarchies around foreigner subjectivities in South Korea.

Qualitative research can clarify how the racialized social system of Whiteness influences White Americans’ health beliefs in ways that are not easily captured through survey data. This secondary analysis draws upon oral history interviews (n=24) conducted in 2019 with Whites in a rural region of Appalachian western North Carolina. Interviewees discussed personal life history, community culture, health beliefs, and experiences with healthcare systems and services. Thematic analysis conveyed two distinct orientations toward health and healthcare: (1) bootstraps perspective, and (2) structural perspective. Whiteness did not uniformly shape interviewees’ perceptions of health and healthcare, rather, individual experiences throughout their life course and the racialized social system contributed to these Appalachian residents’ assessments of who is responsible for health and healthcare. Dissatisfaction with the Affordable Care Act was salient among interviewees whose life stories reflected meritocratic ideals, regardless of education level, age, or gender identity. They apprised strong work ethic as a core community value, assuming that personal contributions to the social system match the rewards that one receives in return for individual effort. Conversely, interviewees who were primarily socialized outside of rural Appalachia acknowledged some macro-level social determinants of health and expressed support for universal healthcare models. Findings suggest that there is not one uniform type of “rural White” within this region of Appalachia. Interventions designed to increase support for health equity promoting policies and programs should consider how regional and place-based factors shape White Americans’ sense of identity and subsequent health beliefs, attitudes, and voting behaviors. In this Appalachian region, some White residents’ general mistrust of outsiders indicates that efforts to garner more political will for health-promoting social programs should be presented by local, trusted residents who exhibit a structural perspective of health and healthcare.

Friendships between members of different ethnoracial groups can help to reduce prejudice and ease tensions across ethnoracial groups. A large body of literature has explored possible determinants for the formation of these friendships. One unexplored factor is the role of an individual’s skin color in influencing their opportunities to befriend members of other ethnoracial groups. This study seeks to answer two questions: For ethnoracial minorities, how is an individual’s skin color associated with the likelihood that they will engage in a cross-ethnoracial friendship? Does the role of skin color depend on the ethnoracial combination of the two groups that befriend one another? Using waves 1, 2, and 3 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen and a series of multinomial logit models, the results suggest that the role of skin color is a function of the relative levels of social status of the two ethnoracial groups that befriend one another. I argue that lighter-skinned members of lower status ethnoracial groups have a greater likelihood of having close friendships with members of higher status ethnoracial groups. There is also limited evidence that darker-skinned members of a higher status group, specifically Asians, have a greater likelihood of having close friends from a lower status group.

The emergence of an African American and Latino-dominated coalition with the potential to reconfigure American government and politics at the national, state, and local levels is one of the most noteworthy developments in U.S. politics over the past two decades. Racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement are impediments to this coalition’s political power. Social scientists, legal scholars, and activists have long paid attention to how devices like poll taxes, English competency tests, voter intimidation, racial gerrymandering, and voter identification laws restrict participation and diluted the political influence of racial and ethnic minorities. This essay seeks to direct renewed scholarly attention to racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement as similar devices for suppressing and containing minority group political power.

The late Booker T. Washington may be considered in four aspects. First there can be no doubt that his chief significance lies in the fact that he cannot be considered simply as an individual but that he is so inextricably woven into the national and even world movements of his day that his death becomes historic. Again, most Colored men in America are simply “Colored.” They are submerged in a great undifferentiated group; they are not considered as individuals but are lumped together as a “race.” Mr. Washington was more than “Colored.” He was an American, and the comments upon his career tend continually to emphasize the fact that such a struggle upward against terrific odds, such indomitable persistence and versatility of expedient was peculiarly American. After Frederick Douglass, Mr. Washington was the next great exemplification and revelation of problems of race and labor in America, so significant as to go to the very core of our democracy; and finally, there is to consider Mr. Washington's own personality: the silent, watchful, cautious man, rugged, nervous, popular but unsocial, slow but tireless.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration initiated a dramatic policy shift towards a new housing voucher program, which simultaneously resulted in a near-halt in public and project-based assisted housing funding. When analyzing this historic policy shift, many affordable housing scholars have overemphasized race-absent narratives about fiscal austerity to explain the Reagan administration’s policy rejection of public housing and embrace of housing vouchers. To present a more comprehensive and intersectional history of the Reagan administration’s transition to housing vouchers, I employ an alternative methodological lens that I call Black feminist critical policy studies. This paper traces how the Office of Management and Budget and Housing and Urban Development officials relied on obscured racial and gender bias in their debate informing Reagan's alternative housing voucher program. By revealing the social bias endemic in the Reagan administration’s housing debate, this article illustrates that housing vouchers were not simply a neutral, cost-efficient policy tool but helped ensure low-income black mothers’ continued subjection to anti-welfare backlash, housing discrimination, and paternal supervision.

Hurricane Katrina was a horrible tragedy. Rather than reprising the obvious pitfalls of governmental response or the dire consequences of social inequalities, however, I pose a series of questions. In particular, I seek to highlight the blind spots and silences that the media frenzy generated. These range from the fate of the Native Americans and the complexity of New Orleans' racial history to the explanatory adequacy of the dominant narrative and the unreflective premise of the reconstruction effort. The precarious state of nature and civilization demands a way to think and act beyond short-term palliatives.

Major questions remain about the extent and political significance of White racial attitudes. In this paper, we examine an alternative source of data on racial attitudes—actual voting on the purely symbolic repeal of antimiscegenation referenda. By applying cross-level (ecological) inference methods to this unique data, we find, surprisingly, that White voting behavior differs dramatically from what would be predicted based on previous survey research on public and private attitudes.