This essay observes how race adds value to market exchanges at a fisheries facility in Lisbon, Portugal. I examine scenarios that primarily involved interactions between Portuguese men who sold fish and Cape Verdean immigrant women who purchased it. The scenarios show how race is crystallized in interaction and how differently raced actors co-utilize race to accomplish different ends. When vendors initiated difference recognition for the purpose of promoting a sale, the value of race in that moment was not independent of how Cape Verdean women chose to ratify it. I show how racial knowledge could be mediated through its commodity status, as Cape Verdean women's responses codetermined the political contents of Portuguese men's racial ascriptions. Importantly, the argument is not that subjects independently engaged in the reproduction of their privileged or marginal social status. Rather, the dialectic condition of interaction involved paired forms of engagement that produced difference. An examination of this context helps illuminate when and how race recognition, in public, is identified as neutral or politically charged.

Zainichi Koreans are the descendants of colonial subjects who migrated to Japan from 1910 to 1945, when Korea was part of the Japanese empire. In 1952, the Japanese state stripped them of their nationality status and left them stateless. Like racial minority groups in other societies, Korean descendants still face systemic discrimination in contemporary Japan. Although they were colonized by a non-European power and are not physically distinct from the dominant Japanese population, their situation is often compared to that of African Americans. Yet, for scholars who think that race is necessarily based on “phenotype,” anti-Korean oppression cannot qualify as an instance of racism in Japan and the comparison with Black Americans is misguided. This article explores the intellectual and political issues at stake in debates over the use of racial comparisons—what I call the “racial politics of comparison.” Examining the views of scholars and Zainichi Korean activists, I show how the latter have drawn inspiration from the Black liberation struggle and built alliances with African Americans in order to resist oppression. I argue that their unique situation forces us to revise the role attributed to phenotype in current definitions of race and racism.

“Race is the modality in which class is lived” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 394). That's how Stuart Hall evocatively put it, emphasizing the extent to which class relations can actually and substantively “function as race relations” for working class Black Brits (and others). He was arguing, amongst other things, against the neatly reified distinctions scholars traditionally policed between class-based analyses and racial ones.

This paper examines how a nonprofit organization prepares low-income Black and Latino/a students to attend elite boarding high schools. Using ethnographic data, I investigate how the program engineers the experience of academic and emotional struggle for students, how students experience these struggles, and what students learn from this process. I find that the program’s academically-induced emotional rollercoaster serves to strengthen students’ confidence in their academic skills and their ability to persist in the face of academic challenges—a valuable emotional asset for the students as they enter elite boarding schools. However, I argue, the feeling students emerge with of having earned their successes (and failures) may ultimately serve to reproduce the individualistic, meritocratic discourses that support the patterns of social inequality the program helps its students sidestep.

This analysis addresses race knowledge or the connection between race identity and the ability to designate what is socially legitimate. It problematizes race inequality in light of neoliberal, post-Civil Rights racial reforms. Using qualitative data from interviews with second-generation Muslim Americans, the analysis maps their understanding of the racialized social legitimacy of Brown, Black, and White identities. Findings address how racial hierarchy is organized by racial neoliberalism and the persistence of White supremacy. They show that White racial dominance continues in spite of claims of post-racialism. Moreover, second-generation Muslim Americans position their Brown and Black racial identity as subordinate to White racial identity, but Brown and Black races are different rather than hierarchically positioned in reference to one another. The respondents bring neoliberal globalism as well as U.S. racial dynamics to bear on their understandings of racial hierarchy and racialized social legitimacy.

There is a deep irony about the current political moment. Though having an immigrant background is arguably a core feature of how most Americans understand themselves, the topic of immigration has in recent years risen to a fever pitch of political controversy and polarized views. Of course, the immigrant streams to the United States today differ substantially from those that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of bringing in millions of South, Central, and Eastern Europeans looking for better opportunities than were available in their homelands, the current immigrant wave has drawn most heavily from those with Latin American and Asian origins. Concomitant to these changes in economic, cultural, and political context as well as in who constitute the new immigrants, are a series of deep questions about civic belonging, the social consequences of immigration, and what appropriate policy responses to recent immigration should be.

The struggle to end racial segregation in America’s public schools has been long and arduous. It was ostensibly won in the 1954 Brown v. Tulsa Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. But racist resistance has been intense. Years later, extensive school segregation remains for Black children. The High Court has essentially overturned Brown without explicitly saying so. This paper assesses the effects of educational desegregation that has managed to occur. Discussion concerning the results of desegregation has revolved around test scores and the difficulties involved with “busing,” but the principal positive effect is often overlooked: namely, that the substantial rise of the Black-American middle class in the last half-century has been importantly enhanced by school desegregation. This paper reviews the educational backgrounds of eighteen Black Americans who have risen to the highest status positions in American politics and business in recent decades. They represent the desegregated Black cohort who succeeded because desegregation enabled them to break into the nation’s deeply established pipeline of privilege.

Political theory is catching up to Du Bois. More than a century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997), political theorists have begun to realize that “the problem of the color-line” (pp. 45, 61) is constitutive of modernity. That it has taken this long for political theorists to recognize what Du Bois saw so clearly more than a century ago reflects the field's all-too-frequent parochialism. At the same time, the field is home to dissenting voices which insist that we cannot understand modern politics without confronting the White supremacist character of the modern West.

This essay attempts to broaden the context of public and policy discourses about the nature and complexities associated with migration to the United States. Several dimensions are examined: (1) global and U.S. migration trends; (2) the effects of migration on both the communities of origin and destination; (3) issues related to the rights and standing of migrants; (4) the gendered dimensions related to migration; (5) patterns of migrants' integration into their host society; (6) the impact of human-capital investment and its consequences; and (7) the limitations of the current policy discussions and initiatives. In the case of the latter, the need to move away from polarizing and simplistic perspectives and to integrate the many socioeconomic and political complexities associated with international migration is discussed. A more comprehensive understanding of migration recognizes that it is not exclusively the result of individual behaviors and motivations. Structural relationships, both domestically and internationally, as well as public policies have also had an effect on migration flows and patterns.

We analyze historical data to conduct an exploratory structural investigation into the process that Harriet Tubman used to free her family and friends as a member of the New York State Underground Railroad (UGRR). We suggest that she accomplished this feat because of her ability to rely on embedded (Granovetter 1985; Uzzi 1996) network contacts that allowed her to bridge structural holes (Burt 1992) and link with people with whom she was not previously linked (Lin et al., 2001). We conclude by discussing the importance of network analysis for providing empirical meaning to historical events and episodes.

W. E. B. Du Bois is a figure of legendary stature, with accomplishments that run from the purely academic to the profoundly political. In the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, we at once memorialize and aim to continuously re-energize one core strand of the great man's life work: namely, Du Bois's legacy as a producer and catalyst for critical scholarship on the global problem of race. As had no other social scientist of his generation when he began, nor any other over his long life course, Du Bois gazed with the most penetrating intensity into what may figuratively be called “the soul” of the problem of race and he saw just how central a role race would play in the future of human affairs far into an unwritten future.

For too long, questions of racism and colonialism have not been part of historical sociology’s understanding of modernity. Yet, a new generation of scholars has begun to address this, placing racism and empire at the center of their inquiries. This new generation looks to previously marginalized scholars for guidelines and inspiration. In line with this shift in historical sociology, this paper brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in the Black Radical Tradition to bear on longer-standing analytic and methodological debates: How do these authors allow us to think about theory-building and comparison? What is the goal of explanation? How should we approach archives and sources? Building on these insights, this paper explains how the work of Du Bois and the Black Radical Tradition provides a model for a new historical sociology, and a framework that allows us to see the connections between racism, colonialism, and modernity.

After overseeing the adoption of two landmark civil rights proposals in 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress sought to implement the third item of its broader agenda: a legal prohibition on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Enacting fair housing legislation, however, proved to be a vexing process. Advocates had to win support from northern White Democrats skeptical of the policy, as well as Republicans who were often (and increasingly) unreliable allies. Fair housing legislation failed in 1966 (89th Congress) but passed two years later, during the 90th Congress. We provide a legislative policy history detailing how, after three tumultuous years, Congress came to enact the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Overall, the battle to enact fair housing legislation presaged a dynamic that would take hold as the Great Society gave way to the Nixon years: once federal civil rights policies started to bear directly on the lives of White northerners, they became much harder to pass and implement. It also showcased the moment at which the Republican Party in Congress first moved to the right on civil rights and explicitly adopted a position of racial conservatism.

Robert Strausz-Hupé (1903-2002) and Stefan Possony (1913-1995) were two scholars and policy makers who reached the peak of their careers as the tutelary spirits of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), founded in 1955 at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the FPRI and its journal, Orbis, the influence of these two anti-”totalitarian” crusaders reached the high echelons of the United States military and U.S. policy makers. This article analyzes the way in which the intellectuals of the FPRI—“defense intellectuals”—tweaked concepts such as “human rights,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “open society” in order to promote the interests of the United States’s military-industrial establishment, court racist lobbies, and accommodate problematic Cold War allies such as South Africa.