Abstract This article applies Critical School Finance theory to analyze the $543.9 billion in U.S. school district debt as a mechanism of racialized wealth extraction. Using the framework’s five core concepts—dispossession, kleptocracy, extraction/super-expropriation, racial capitalism, and inequality—we examine how debt systematically transfers educational resources from predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income students to financial institutions and bondholders. Case studies of Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA reveal how districts serving students of color carry disproportionate debt burdens, divert billions from instruction to debt service, and experience compounding educational disadvantages. We argue that school debt is not neutral fiscal management but represents organized theft that reproduces racial inequality across generations, demanding transformative rather than incremental reform.
W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the way Black Americans understand the racial world and their place within it shapes their connections to national identity differently from those of White Americans. This article juxtaposes Du Bois's theory of racialized subjectivity with Identity Theory's constructs of prominence and change to examine differences in attachment to American nationhood during a turbulent period of American politics: the Trumpism era. Using data from three waves of the American National Election Studies (2012, 2016, 2020), this study examines the extent to which White and Black Americans viewed their national identities as important before, during, and after Trump's first presidential administration. I employ "racial identity prominence" as a nuanced measure of race to illustrate a phenomenological element of American national identity that differentially shapes attachment. The findings reveal that the Trumpism period catalyzed significant identity change between 2012 and 2020. Moreover, the degree to which White and Black Americans connected to their national identity across the three election years largely depended on the subjective importance they assigned to their racial identity-that is, their racial identity prominence. The White American archetype was reinforced, as Whites with strong attachment to their racial identity also expressed strong national identity. Interestingly, Black Americans also expressed strong ties to their national identity during this period, particularly those with a strong racial identity. Still, the question of how White and Black Americans envision the country and their place in it remains complex.
Policing has become a popular topic of inquiry in social science literature, but much of this attention has been confined to traditional forms of policing, focusing on state and municipal police departments or, in the case of schools, have focused on disciplinary policies. In seeking to expand the contours of what the scholarly community defines as police, we focus our attention on the origins of K-12 school policing. Specifically, using a multi-modal historical approach, we provide a history of when and why police were stationed in schools in cities throughout the United States. Focusing on the sequencing of events, we show that when the dominant White status quo is challenged by the movement of Black people into formerly White dominated areas and demands are made for education equity from those groups, the state responds by bolstering fears of violence from Black youth and implementing punitive state structures in the form of placing police officers in schools.
Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the city of Chicago, we find that racial meanings and categories played a central role in efforts by developers and community members to characterize, support, and challenge the casino project. Comparing public interactions across three different communities, we argue that developers deployed a shifting array of discursive strategies-territorial ascription, multiculturalism, colorblind racialization, and a more novel variety of racial equity claims-to mobilize the unique geographic and organizational characteristics of their proposed projects as assurances of racial equity. We identify three distinct discourses that organized the racial equity claims of developers and community members: Black-led capitalism, racially representative capitalism, and spatially connective capitalism. We conclude that while community members actively contested developers' claims and called for greater specificity concerning beneficiaries, they did not challenge the capitalist logic that merely redistributing the benefits of development among owners and workers-however racialized-could bring about racial equity.
One way to understand the trajectories and outcomes of immigrant political incorporation is to examine changes in political participation across immigrant generations. Yet, patterns of political participation other than voting among Asian Americans across immigrant generations, particularly beyond the second generation, remain understudied. In addition, little empirical research has examined the mechanisms that generate the differences in the extent of political participation across immigrant generations. This study investigates whether, and to what extent, observed patterns of political participation across length of residence among first-generation immigrants and across successive immigrant generations can be accounted for by indicators of social integration, particularly engagement in political discussion with family and friends and involvement in civic organizations in the community, net of marriage patterns and other sociodemographic characteristics. Using data from the 2008 National Asian American Survey, the analysis focuses on the six largest Asian American groups: Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. An overall political participation index is constructed by counting five dichotomous indicators of nonvoting political activity-campaigning, making political donations, contacting government officials, working with others to solve a community problem, and protesting-in the last twelve months. Descriptive results show that political participation increases with length of residence among first-generation immigrants and across immigrant generations, but tapers off in the third generation. Multivariate analyses indicate that these generational differences in the number of political activities are largely explained by variation in social integration, with the exception of recent immigrants with fewer than ten years of residence. Overall, the findings highlight social integration as a key mechanism of political incorporation among Asian immigrants and their descendants.
Recent scholarship has significantly advanced social scientific understanding of the socioeconomic consequences of skin tone and ethnoracial identity in several Latin American countries. We update and extend this literature by conceptualizing colortocracies as countries that exhibit a preference for Whiteness as evidenced by lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher levels of socioeconomic status than their darker-skinned counterparts. Specifically, we test the preference for Whiteness hypothesis using data from the 2018 Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)-a nationally representative dataset covering approximately 90% of the Latin American population (about 578 million people) across sixteen countries. We find strong evidence that wealth-based colortocracies are three times as prevalent throughout Latin America as occupational-based colortocracies. Interviewer-rated skin tone is a stronger predictor of inequality than self-designated racial categories, but the magnitude of its strength is far greater when predicting wealth than occupational status. We conclude that the extent to which colortocracies (e.g., preference for Whiteness) exist in Latin America simultaneously depends on the outcome measure and the country under consideration. We document this cross-national variation and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.
Scholars rightly argue that partiality towards one's children hinders justice and that some expressions of partiality constitute illegitimate conferrals of advantage. Some have extended this critique to elite educational experiences as a form of unjust advantage conferral. In this paper, I argue that for Black parents, the pursuit of elite educational experiences for their children may function as legitimate partiality and advantage conferral. I motivate my argument in the corrective capability of elite education, both its ability to redress past exclusion and its potential to protect Black people from some societal disadvantage, as well as the operationalization of Blackness that suggests that educational advantage conferral might promote racial advancement. Ultimately, I argue, the provision of elite education for Black families remediates past injustices while mitigating present disparities in ways that redistribute opportunity towards educational justice.
Comparing the coverage by The New York Times and two Black newspapers of four episodes of protests about police violence in New York in the late 1990s reveals key differences in the implicit political agendas of the two sources. The New York Times implicitly reinforced dominant political institutions and focused on short-term issues. It emphasized partisan politics as protest motivations, quoted police extensively and often printed material sympathetic to police, and typically portrayed protesters as angry or motivated by politics. Black newspapers emphasized collective resistance to long-term systemic problems with police, moral condemnation of police violence, the connection of current protests with past oppression and struggles, the involvement of youth, and Black immigrants' growing awareness of anti-Blackness. The findings of this study explain how racialized collective memories and collective identities are formed, sustained, and/or erased in interaction with institutional politics in media discourse.
On March 25, 1994, the Boston Police Department executed a "no-knock" raid that ended in the death of Reverend Accelyne Williams, a seventy-five-year-old retired Black Caribbean minister. Acting on a faulty tip, a thirteen-member SWAT team stormed into the wrong Dorchester apartment, wrestled Williams to the ground, and triggered a fatal stress-induced heart attack. His death became a defining tragedy in Boston's history of police violence and raised urgent questions about accountability. This article situates the Williams case within the broader history of Black Boston's freedom struggle against police civil rights violations from the early twentieth century to the 1990s. Through a controlled case comparison of four major incidents, we analyze how moments of police brutality became catalysts for Black political mobilization, ministerial activism, and community resistance. The study addresses three central questions: How does the Williams case fit within the trajectory of Boston's racial justice struggles? How do such incidents illuminate the city's persistent racial inequality and segregation? And what can these histories teach us about the broader U.S. movement to "police the police"? Drawing on original archival research, we demonstrate that police abuses have consistently spurred waves of organized resistance in Boston, shaping both local and national debates on civil rights. We identify key historical breaks, continuities, and paradoxes in the struggle for accountability, showing how the demand to "police the police" has long been central to Black political life.
The Bah & aacute;'& iacute; Faith was founded in 1863 in Persia and first publicly mentioned in the United States at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions. Growing throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, the germinal American Bah & aacute;'& iacute; communities established different periodicals with varied foci. The first American Bah & aacute;'& iacute; periodical to fall under the full aegis of American Bah & aacute;'& iacute; administrative control was the magazine, World Order (1935-1949). Bah & aacute;'& iacute;s and non-Bah & aacute;'& iacute;s published within it and, while not the explicit focus, made many attempts to merge, reconcile, debate, and apply Bah & aacute;'& iacute; scriptural imperatives and Bah & aacute;'& iacute;-informed perspectives to the social and spiritual problems of racial prejudice, inequality, segregation, and disunity. But their vast heterogeneity, and sometimes strange, divergent, and contradictory stances on the very definition of "race" together gesture toward the need to understand how, why, and which strategies and logics functioned to mutually constrain and enable the American Bah & aacute;'& iacute; discursive articulation of the "race" concept. Toward that end, I map the landscape of such discourse with attention to how race was simultaneously understood as both a "cultural" marker and a category like "caste". I thus explore these discursive uses as they developed against the backdrop of the Great Depression, eugenic race science and its backlash, Aryanism in World War II, and the continued debate over Jim Crow, racial equality, and the scientific and religious connotations of the category of "race" itself.
This paper compares Harry Haywood's, James S. Allen's, and W. E. B. Du Bois's interpretations of Reconstruction and its relationship to their political and social projects. By comparing their approaches, we gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between race and democracy, the political significance of Reconstruction, and reading Black history. The difference between their readings of Reconstruction was in Allen and Haywood's belief in a Marxist, stagist teleology and Du Bois's belief in a more open, contingent temporality. Allen's and Haywood's stagist approach attempted to complete Reconstruction's unfinished revolution by establishing the right to self-determination. Skeptical of the revolution needed for self-determination, Du Bois instead proposed that Black people should follow Reconstruction through economic cooperation. Black people would create a consumer cooperative movement that would help them secure democratic control within the confines of segregation. However, Haywood's and Allen's approach critiques the faulty non-violent presupposition within Du Bois's program.
Africa-West migration is on the increase. For many young Nigerians, emigration is a goal that must be achieved by any means possible, regardless of the realities in receiving countries. With exposure to new environments, migrants can identify with their home culture, assimilate the lifestyles of the host country, or find a middle ground. This study examined the patterns of self-identification among Nigerian migrants and their understanding of the complex concept of "immigrant integration." The study explores the (dis)connections between migrants' self-identification and their viewpoint of immigrant integration. The study analyzed thirty qualitative interviews with sixteen Nigerian migrants in the United States (US) and fourteen in the United Kingdom (UK). The study employed a thematic analysis approach and utilized NVivo (version 14) to manage the data, finding that most participants reported a stronger allegiance to Nigerian culture than to the host country, with their justifications primarily revolving around food, social life, and citizenship. Others identified fully with the host country, primarily because of unpleasant experiences in their country of origin. Using W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness," the study reveals that, despite an overwhelming identification with their country of origin, most participants conceived of immigrant integration as assimilation-a process of "sinking," "learning," "assimilating," and "adopting" the culture of the host country. The study suggests that migrants' identity and identification are inherently fluid. The disconnect between self-identification and the understanding of integration is attributed to the framing of immigrant integration by host governments and migrants' urge for a positive migration experience in the host country.
The racial segregation of schools is commonly cited as the foundational injustice of the U.S. education system and an ongoing impediment to educational equality. For liberal experts and reformers, school segregation is defined as a pattern of racially separate schools serving either White students or students of color. This paper argues that this prevailing understanding of the school segregation issue is intellectually inadequate and politically limiting. Drawing on a case study of Chicago's movement for racial educational justice in the 1960s, I show that this simple framing of the issue initially gained prominence as an alternative to the more radical and contextualized critique of urban school segregation articulated by local Black grassroots activists. In contrast with official liberal discourse and reform proposals, Black urban activists in the early 1960s challenged school segregation as a set of educational policies and practices that render schools both separate and unequal, locking Black students out of more privileged White schools and contributing to the uneven development of schools across the racial divide. By recovering this suppressed grassroots critique of urban school segregation, this paper calls for a broader theorization of contemporary school segregation as dynamic and relational rather than a static statistical pattern that simply compounds the existing concentration of disadvantage within segregated neighborhoods.
This article explores the theory of racial whitening's role in the political attempt to reshape the national collective in the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930) to explain the theory's origins and characteristics and suggest its international relevance. It is argued that this theory-which proposed that Brazil could modernize through interracial marriage and mass European immigration-was not a Brazilian or Latin American peculiarity but was aligned with a transformist strand of previous scientific racialism. The main novelty came from wide political resonance, not intellectual newness. In addition, the article demonstrates that racial whitening oriented the First Republic to construct ambiguous, yet effective, structures of discrimination, aimed at molding the national collective. These structures seem to have anticipated the transformation of racial relations elsewhere, preceding the global shift in the justification of institutional racism from biological to cultural bases after 1945. The article then underscores the importance of understanding historical dependencies and subtle mechanisms through which racism can be perpetuated, especially in societies that claim to be racially progressive.
This essay argues that understanding Black philanthropic histories recasts Black people from being mere recipients to donors. This recasting demonstrates how and where Black people resisted racism, sought transformation of themselves and society, and took approaches that were not always liberatory and transformational in their giving. This essay fills a gap in the literature on the politics of philanthropy which, to date, has omitted a direct focus on Black philanthropists. By focusing on the philanthropic traditions of Black people, the myth of Black people being only recipients is dismantled. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I provide a definition of Black philanthropy. This definition reveals that Black philanthropy historically has been viewed as expansive and shaped by the conditions Black people faced. Second, I examine select examples of Black philanthropy through the framework offered by the expansive definition. Third, I review current Black philanthropists and offer pathways for a future research agenda.
In what ways, if any, do justice-involved Black women make political demands? How do they understand their role and rights as citizens? Previous work has focused on identifying forms of political behavior, both formal and deviant (i.e., resistance, subversive acts), and the degree to which different groups participate in these behaviors. Few studies have focused on the sensemaking and ideologies likely motivating the behavior of justice-involved Black women both within and outside the formal political realm (e.g., elections). Drawing on the responses of Black women residents of an urban prison reentry facility, this article illustrates how this group engages in what we describe as "political claimsmaking," a type of deviant discourse in which participants negotiate the power dynamics informing their social reality to make political demands. Further, we argue that while this political claimsmaking acts as a form of resistance and assertion of citizenship, it is simultaneously a form of inequitable political labor. Understanding Black women's political claims, and the labor involved in making them, has serious implications for imagining more liberatory futures in which the benefits associated with citizenship are more freely accessed.
In this study, we hypothesize that positive, explicit racial appeals to Black voters from White politicians will be seen as pandering if not accompanied by an endorsement from a Black elite, which would increase credibility of the appeal. To test this, we use a preregistered survey experiment with approximately 400 Black Americans. Contrary to our expectations, we find that pro-Black appeals can function to increase support for the politician, even without an endorsement. In the full sample, the candidate enjoyed increased support when only using a positive appeal, when only receiving an endorsement, and when making an appeal and receiving an endorsement-relative to the control condition. Qualitative analyses of open-ended responses reveal that respondents saw the politician as pandering in all conditions-an appeal was not necessary to evoke pandering. We conclude that campaign strategies like appeals and endorsements can function to boost support even when the candidate is perceived as pandering.
This study examined how immigrant status and socioeconomic status influence racial self-classification among U.S. Latinx adults aged eighteen and older across multiple nationalities. Using data from the 2010–2018 National Health Interview Survey, we analyzed a nationally representative sample of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Central/South American adults (N = 41,133) who identified as White, Black, or Another race. Socioeconomic status was measured using a composite index of income-to-poverty ratio, education, employment status, and homeownership. Multinomial logistic regressions and average marginal effects revealed significant heterogeneity in examined predictors of racial identity. U.S.-born Latinx adults, particularly Puerto Ricans and Central/South Americans, had higher probability of identifying as Black compared to recent immigrants. Latinx adults with low and middle socioeconomic status backgrounds were more likely to identify as Black or Another race across most nationality groups. Findings highlight the complexity of Latinx racial identity, whereby Latinxs may experience racialization differently depending on indicators of acculturation and socioeconomic status. The inclusion of multidimensional measures of race, such as skin color and street race, in future research is needed to better understand Latinx racial identity formation. Findings inform interventions to address race-related stress and anti-Blackness, particularly among AfroLatinx populations, and provide considerations for improving race data collection practices, such as those impacted by recent federal policy changes to the U.S. Census.
Scholars have paid minimal attention to the political and practical objectives that guided Tuskegee Institute’s sociological program and institutional interventions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leveraging a multi-modal, historical sociological approach grounded in primary and secondary analyses of biographical data, narratives, and archival data, I show that Tuskegee’s institutional interventions illustrate three abolitionist tactics: (1) building consciousness through research dissemination and place-based investment, (2) galvanizing Southern Whites and political elites to abolish lynching locally, and (3) countering the propaganda used to justify lynching to inspire divestment from lynching and carceral punishment. Booker T. Washington’s commitment to eradicating structural racism and resource deprivation in the aftermath of slavery led to Tuskegee Institute’s formation of the first department of applied rural sociology in the United States, and the Negro Farmers’ conference and Movable School interventions supported a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. Likewise, the research activism of Monroe Work, disseminated via The Negro Year Book and individual publications, sought to galvanize the abolition of lynching and carceral punishment. In the wake of re-emerged visibility of White supremacist terrorism and commitments to practicing Du Boisian sociology across the United States, I argue that reviving the memory of Tuskegee’s institutional practices makes a case for reconsidering the place of abolition in academic sociology in the twenty-first century.
Contemporary racial theorization about American society assumes the universality of White dominance as its point of departure. We argue here that Hawai‘i is an exception, where White supremacy has given way to a multiracial mainstream, shared by the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites. This was a surprising development in a state founded in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, which was moreover a racially hierarchical plantation society until the middle of the twentieth century. The pivot, in Hawai‘i as on the mainland, occurred during the post-World War II period, when the economy underwent a transformation requiring a more educated workforce. On the mainland, this socioeconomic shift opened up the mainstream to the so-called White ethnics. But these were few in number in Hawai‘i, and so the Chinese and Japanese ascended socioeconomically and socially instead. The ethnoracial hierarchy created in this period is still in evidence, as shown by pronounced inequalities among Hawaiian groups. However, the end of White supremacy has been associated with very widespread ethnoracial mixing in families. We discuss some ways in which Hawai‘i may offer a preview of twenty-first-century changes in the U.S. as a whole.
