Two of the world’s greatest boxers—Muhammad Ali of Louisville, KY and George Foreman of Houston, TX—met for the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. With concerts by the African American “Godfather of Soul” James Brown and South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” the entwining tones of the U.S. civil rights era and anti-Apartheid movement augmented a cultural moment that displayed Pan-African, Black nationalist, and anti-imperial connections. However, the appearance of an insidious symbol from each aforementioned era is what decidedly swayed the local population against Foreman and for Ali.1

This article addresses recent work on empire and colonisation which calls for a reappraisal of how agency and resistance manifests among groups responding to structural marginalisation. We argue that approaching these questions from within the colonial order reveals important idiosyncrasies regarding how groups understood resistance, agency, and popular organising as possible responses that emerged from within imperial landscapes. Using the example of race as a central regulatory category and practice of colonial power, we analyse two cases which we suggest benefit from an account of agency and resistance within colonial order: the Black Loyalists in English America and the Indigenous royalists of New Granada, two groups which pursued emancipation by choosing to remain under colonial rule. The resulting analysis produces a more dynamic account of resistance and emancipation which responds to the far-reaching influence of colonial order for resistance movements at local, national, and international levels. This account contributes to recent debates which call for theoretical analysis of “middle actors” and popular thinking as it relates to international politics, postcolonial movements, and studies of empire.

In this paper, I examine the factors associated with public attitudes toward foreign policy among white Americans and argue that racial attitudes play an important role. To test this hypothesis, I perform quantitative studies across four iterations of the American National Election Survey (ANES)—(1) 2012, (2) 2016, (3) 2020, and (4) the Cumulative Survey (1986–2020). While the results include white public opinion across several different areas of foreign policy across several decades of data, the findings are consistent: American foreign policy opinion among white Americans is highly racialized—meaning that their views on foreign policy are strongly associated with their views on race and racism. This study contributes to our knowledge of a relatively poorly understood phenomenon in American politics: how the American public forms their attitudes on foreign policy. Overall, I find strong evidence that racial attitudes play an important yet understudied role in the foreign policy attitudes of white Americans. This study also extends our knowledge of the role of racialization in public opinion and reminds us that while racism is one of the most central problems for U.S. domestic politics, we should also be wary of how these hierarchies of domination extend beyond our borders through its foreign relations.

Andrew Kahrl's timely book, The Black Tax, examines the racial disparities present in local governmental property tax systems. By examining the property tax regime, he enters the conversation about the role of tax policy in exacerbating the racial wealth gap. The Black Tax expands the conversation about analyzing tax policies through a racialized lens.

Do locals discriminate against themselves by favoring foreigners with higher expected purchasing power? Drawing on theories of prejudice, discrimination, and colonialism, I argue that in colonized and post-colonial countries, local home sellers discriminate against local potential homebuyers while favoring foreigners with expected higher purchasing power, anticipating a more profitable transaction. I support this argument with evidence from a preregistered online audit study targeting discriminatory attitudes toward local home buyers. In the study, fictitious home buyers with distinctive language and ethnic names emailed 1,512 home sellers (realtors and homeowners) across all municipalities in Puerto Rico. Home sellers reported more houses available to Americans and invited them to more house showings than Puerto Ricans. My estimates indicate that ethnic discrimination exists in the Puerto Rican housing market. These findings provide new insights into ethnic dynamics in colonized and post-colonial societies and underscore concerns about recent legislation that turned Puerto Rico into a tax haven.

During the last decades, political distrust has seemingly become a common trend across Latin American democracies, however, differences in the levels of confidence among groups have also been identified. This article considers the potential effects of ethno-racial structures and their interactions with other forms of socioeconomic inequalities on political trust. Building on data from four waves of the Latinobarometer project and contextual measures from different sources, we analyze these relations and find that both socioeconomic and ethno-racial inequalities affect political trust and impact on the formation of different relations with the political system across Latin America. Furthermore, in particular it is found that at the individual-level interactions between inequalities shape political trust differently depending on the particular ethno-racial identification. These findings contribute to the understanding of ethnicity and race and its associations with other structural inequalities in shaping mass political culture.

Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book that urges us to remember the property taxes. The Black Tax tells us, “The property tax is the most local of all taxes” (5). More than that, though, the property tax is the most literal way that state policy hits close to home. Kahrl thus studies local taxation to show how white people wielded state power to threaten Black Americans’ tenuous grip on property ownership—and generate handsome profits along the way. The ends—dispossession of Black-owned property and unfair tax burdens—will surprise few readers. But the means—tax-buying, fractional assessments, and other bureaucratic technicalities—will shock, frustrate, and anger most. This is the force of The Black Tax: Kahrl reminds us that, for Black people as with other racialized minorities, the barriers to homeownership do not end when the sale closes.

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.

On August 27, 1992, the General Motors (GM) auto plant in Van Nuys closed after a half-century serving the Northeast San Fernando Valley. Its closure undercut the livelihoods of auto workers like Raymond Álvarez and his father Ramón. Today, the father and son duo look at “The Plant,” an outdoor shopping mall, and wonder whether the In-N-Out fast-food restaurant or T-Mobile store marks where they once stood on the assembly line. The departure of the GM plant and other long-standing manufacturing firms propelled the area into economic distress as Los Angeles was reeling from another crisis, the 1992 Uprising. In the wake of these events, elected officials clamored to revitalize the city. Six years later, “revitalization” came in the form of the shopping center, The Plant. By tracing the historical trajectory of one shuttered auto plant, from factory to shopping mall, this article demonstrates how neoliberal ideology gained legitimacy over the last several decades.

Thousands of Latin Americans migrate to the United States every year. This article seeks to understand how immigrants’ premigration political experiences influence the acquisition of party identification upon arrival in the United States. This research proposes that premigration political experiences influence the acquisition of party identification among Latino immigrants in the United States. Utilizing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) and Proyecto Élites Parlamentarias Latinoamericanas (Latin American Parliamentary Elites Project), this paper analyzes how the ideology of the government in power in the immigrants’ country of origin influences party identification among Latino immigrants in the United States. Employing multinomial regression analysis, I demonstrate that the ideology of governments in power in Latin American countries when Latinos migrate influences the party identification of those immigrants in the United States. The results of this study contribute to the conversations on premigration experiences and challenge the applicability of classical theories of party identification for immigrants.

Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party are among the many movements that have reignited media attention to protest activity. Yet, there is much to learn about what this media coverage conveys. In particular, how much does who is protesting matter for how the media portray protesters and their objectives? In this paper, we draw on an extensive content analysis of cable and broadcast news media coverage of protest activities to demonstrate substantial differences in how protests are covered depending on the race and objective of the protesters. We find that media are much more likely to depict protests by people of color using language that evokes a sense of threat by using anger- and fear-laden language than comparable coverage of protest activity involving mostly White individuals. Our results demonstrate that racial biases in news coverage are much broader than previously thought. In doing so, our work highlights the powerful role that a protester’s race plays in whether the media will condone or challenge their political voice.

Clinical supervision is a relationship-based education, considered crucial in providing clinicians with emotional support, skill development and improving client outcomes. Culturally responsive supervision assumes that culture permeates clinical practice and supervision. Culturally responsive supervisors promote the development of cultural competence in supervision, through modelling, reflective discussion and responsivity. Research has demonstrated that greater perceived cultural responsivity in supervision may result in greater satisfaction for supervisees, particularly those from racially or ethnically minoritised (REM) backgrounds. The current study explores supervisee perceptions of culturally responsive supervision and supervisory relationships between different supervisory dyads, comprising supervisees from REM and White backgrounds. This was a cross-sectional design incorporating a between-groups comparison. Trainee and qualified clinical psychologists, counselling psychologists and CBT therapists (n = 222) completed an online survey. Perceptions of cultural responsivity and the supervisory relationship were explored. Participants provided information about their supervisor’s race and ethnicity and their own, and were organised into four supervisory dyads. Participants from REM backgrounds in dyads with White supervisors perceived their supervision as significantly less culturally responsive, with significantly lower quality supervisory relationships. Greater perceived cultural responsivity in supervision significantly predicted better supervisory relationships (regardless of participant cultural background). Findings suggest that culturally responsive supervisory practices may play an important role in developing cultural competence and strengthening the supervisory relationship, particularly in cross-cultural supervisory dyads. Findings present important clinical and theoretical implications.

It is hard to review African American history without confronting the multiple meanings of debt. There was debt owed, debt paid, debt inherited, and debt hidden in the social tax associated with a subordinate status in the United States. All of these meanings are embedded in the murder of Elmore Bolling. Called Buddy by his relatives, Bolling defied probability by building a highly successful business in Lowndesboro, Alabama, in the 1930s and 1940s. He used debt in a conventional sense, to lease a plantation. Yet his entrepreneurial skills allowed him to offset that debt and amass wealth. He grew corn, cotton, and sugar cane. More impressively, he owned a general store, a gas station, a fleet of trucks, and a catering business, which enabled him to employ at least forty other Black residents. His business acumen allowed him to maintain $40,000 in the bank and another $5,000 in other assets, a remarkable sum for a Black man in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

Prior research has shown that racial minority groups are more likely than Whites to hold negative views of Jews. We discuss several theories that may explain this phenomenon, including group competition, anti-White attitudes manifesting as antisemitism, spillover from anti-Israel attitudes, and more. Some theories, especially those developed in the mid-20th century, may be less applicable today, particularly to young adults. Through an original survey of 3,500 Americans, including an oversample of 18–30 year olds, we discover that antisemitic views remain far more common among minorities than Whites, especially among young people. However, the racial differences do not seem to be explained by common theories cited and explored in prior literature. But with Black and Hispanic Americans agreeing with antisemitic statements at similar levels as White alt-right identifiers in our sample, our findings call for renewed interest in the topic of race and antisemitism.