Sakamoto, Iceland, and Ren document substantial socioeconomic variation across non-Hispanic White ethnic groups and conclude this variation is “largely inconsistent with critical race theory.” The inference fails on three independent grounds. First, operationalizing race as five mutually exclusive nominal categories imposes a categorical instrument too coarse to capture racialization that operates through perceptual cues, subcategories, and gradients of typicality—a misspecification formalized in the Infracategorical Model of Inequality. Second, conditioning on education, region, and family structure partials out mediators of race, yielding direct effects misread as total effects. Third, low population-wide R 2 in race-only specifications does not adjudicate the causal weight of racialized mechanisms. The deeper failure is the erasure of Black sociology. Within-group disaggregation has been the analytic move of Black sociologists and allied scholars from W.E.B. Du Bois through William Julius Wilson to the contemporary colorism literature, all of which conclude that within-group heterogeneity refines the structural account of ethnoracial stratification rather than refutes it. In short, this is old wine in new bottles, and the wine came from the (predominantly) Black sociologists who appear in SIR’s bibliography and nowhere in their argument.
How do Black Americans construct narratives about the meaning and boundaries of Blackness in America today? We leverage an original, nationally representative survey experiment among U.S.-born Black Americans ( n = 3,100) to examine (1) justifications used to validate or reject another’s racial self-identification as Black and (2) how situational cues shape these narratives. Using a vignette experiment and structural topic modeling, we find that both the social context (e.g., a census form vs. scholarship application) and the prior self-identification of the vignette individual affect the topics invoked by respondents, while genetic ancestry test information has no meaningful treatment effects. All told, we demonstrate that racial schemas—including frameworks emphasizing race as a personal choice or invoking the one-drop rule—are situationally deployed rather than fixed. We also highlight the limits of standard quantitative measures of racial classification, which do not entirely capture the nuanced ways that underlying narratives about race and belonging develop in contemporary Americans’ minds.
Despite being legally classified as White, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) people in the United States have long been racialized as non-White, producing an invisibility/hypervisibility paradox. In other racially minoritized communities, this paradox has been linked to harmful effects across multiple social, political, and economic domains, including higher education. Integrating literature on the racialization of MENA Americans with scholarship on hypervisibility and invisibility among faculty of color within academia, this study examines MENA American faculty perceptions of campus climate and belonging. We address two questions: (1) How do MENA faculty at a predominantly White institution experience this paradox? (2) What possibilities exist for resisting it? Using novel qualitative data collected from a series of focus groups with 24 self-identified MENA faculty across academic programs, we examined their sense of belonging in relation to campus climate. Our findings indicate that MENA identity occupied a paradoxical position, as faculty reported being invisibilized (through confusion, stereotyping, essentialization, lack of support, and silencing), while simultaneously being hypervisibilized (through tokenization, cultural taxation, heightened scrutiny, and hostility). We theorize that transcendence of hypervisibility/invisibility emerges through relational experiences of being truly seen . Such moments enable MENA faculty to cultivate validation and agency, thereby reshaping the terms of belonging under conditions of racialized constraint. Ultimately, our findings contribute to broader conversations about inclusion by highlighting MENA Americans’ conditional belonging, wherein racial politics shape the terms of their visibility.
Latina women are increasingly subject to community supervision through probation and parole, and they face distinct exposures to overlapping systems of surveillance. Yet few population-based studies have examined the health of Latina women under community supervision, despite a large body of research focused on the health consequences of criminal legal contact. Drawing on data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), this study examines whether and how supervised Latina women differ from their nonsupervised counterparts in health outcomes—and the extent to which these patterns compare to those observed among White and Black women. Findings show that supervised Latina women are more socioeconomically disadvantaged and more likely to be custodial parents than their nonsupervised peers, yet they exhibit broadly similar health profiles. These comparatively small differences—especially relative to larger gaps observed among White and Black women—may reflect a range of underlying processes, including shared structural conditions or unmeasured forms of institutional contact, but should not be interpreted causally. Rather than treating this absence of disparities as evidence that community supervision has no health consequences for Latina women, we interpret these patterns as consistent with processes of selection into supervision and broader structural disadvantage that shape the health of both supervised and nonsupervised Latina populations. More broadly, these findings underscore the importance of examining both differences and similarities in health outcomes across criminal legal statuses, and of situating community supervision within a wider set of social and institutional exposures that may influence population health.
Maternal mortality rates in the United States continue to be disproportionately higher than those in other high-income countries, and Black women face a maternal mortality rate nearly three times that of White women. We examine public discourse of maternal mortality through a thematic analysis of 497 online news articles across six major media outlets from 2009 to 2023 and find the following: (1) framings of racial disparities in maternal mortality from the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico often centered the “spectacular character” of Black maternal suffering, while Ebony, ESSENCE, and Mother Jones centered more nuanced discussions of maternal mortality as a social problem; (2) Jennifer Nash’s analysis of the political and historical construction of “Black maternal politics” was evident in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico; and (3) Ebony, ESSENCE, and Mother Jones articles presented maternal mortality through a lens of reproductive justice (addressing both community-level action and structural transformation), while New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico articles used the language of individual rights and policy reforms.
Microaggressions are subtle, discriminatory actions that occur in everyday interactions and play a significant role in the maintenance of racial hierarchies. Previous research has often focused on identifying these experiences among specific racial groups in distinct environments, such as schools or workplaces. Yet, there has been limited comparison of these experiences across various social domains, racial groups, and socioeconomic backgrounds. This study examines microaggression experiences among Black, Latinx, and White adults in the United States, highlighting how education influences these experiences. Building on prior research, we formulate and assess three plausible expectations for the intersectional relationship between education and microaggressions: race as a master status (education has no effect), education as a status protector (education reduces experiences), and differential exposure in White spaces (education increases experiences for people of color). Our results show no initial relationship between education and microaggressions. However, strikingly different findings emerge when examining the effect of education by race. For Black and Latinx people, consistent with predictions about White spaces, higher educational attainment increases their encounters with microaggressions. In contrast, for Whites, education reduces these experiences, acting as a status protector. Thus, education does not alleviate racial inequality in microaggression experiences; rather, it magnifies it.
The news media shapes public perceptions of race and society. Existing research shows that negative portrayals of Black people reinforce and activate existing stereotypes among White readers. Media portrayals of racial issues also influence readers’ willingness to support antiracist policies. This article considers another way that the media influences race and society—by fostering White racial ignorance. Theorists define racial ignorance as the strategic unknowing of systemic racism and indifference to racial matters among White Americans that contribute to the reproduction of White supremacy. This article focuses on how one newspaper portrayed a historically Black area as it transitioned to a White space. I use qualitative media framing analysis to examine how the newspaper created a reality for its audience by choosing what information to emphasize and what to omit. I find that the newspaper presents a racial and spatial reality that rendered the mechanisms of racial inequality and oppression largely invisible. This “collective forgetting” of systemic racism encourages racial ignorance.
Racially inequitable policing has been widely documented in the criminological literature. Recently, scholars have expanded this line of research by exploring the role of colorism in determining who is stopped or arrested by police. I build on the existing literature by incorporating tri-racial stratification theory to understand the relationships between complexion, race, and the likelihood of being frisked during a police stop. Binary logistic regression models were used to analyze eight years of police stop data from a large U.S. city, controlling for individual characteristics, as well as legal and extra-legal stop characteristics. Findings indicate that skin tone does matter in this context, but its effects are not uniform. These results underscore the importance of viewing frisking not only as an outcome of individual-level bias but also as a reflection of systemic inequality. In addition, they compel researchers and practitioners to consider how racial subjugation operates both within and beyond conventional racial categories.
We argue that anti-“DEI” legislation constitutes a form of state-sanctioned epistemic oppression that reproduces racial hierarchies by restructuring the boundaries of knowledge in U.S. higher education. Through a critical case study of Texas Senate Bill 17 at a public university in the state, we examine how this law operates as a racial project, invalidating intellectual and situated knowledge tied to racial justice, constraining equity-oriented labor, and producing an epistemic double-bind for faculty members and former administrators whose work interrogates race and racism. Through analysis of interviews, observations, and documents, we show how participants navigate dissonance and constrained agency within racialized hostile institutional environments, some enacting strategic refusals and adaptive practices aligned with the third university and the undercommons to refuse racialized knowledge erasure and reimagine liberatory futures. We contend that while anti-“DEI” laws accelerate racial harm, they also clarify the stakes of epistemic and racial justice, inviting renewed commitments to abolitionist inquiry, collective study, and the transformation of higher education as a site of racial equity.
This article introduces strategic Occidentalism as the labor of pursuing, translating, and calibrating Western-coded forms of value under contexts where their recognition is uneven and contingent. Drawing on longitudinal multi-sited ethnographic research, it examines how lower-resourced South Korean youth engage in English study and/or work abroad as a pathway to acquire such markers, including standardized test scores, accents, and credentials. The analysis situates these practices within South Korea’s legacies of U.S. military occupation, developmental state-building, and state-led globalization, which together institutionalize Westernness as a structural benchmark. As overseas study expands to lower-cost hubs such as the Philippines, these youth access more attainable routes while confronting uncertainty over how their experiences will be read upon return. By bringing together postcolonial theory and critical race scholarship, this article offers a window into how migrants on the global margins labor within systems of recognition whose standards are defined elsewhere and whose returns were never guaranteed, a condition that extends beyond South Korea where postcolonial hierarchies and neoliberal restructuring converge.
How are the boundaries of Blackness negotiated in the mediated public sphere when new Black populations transform long-established Black neighborhoods? This article answers this question through an analysis of news media representations of Le Petit S & eacute;n & eacute;gal (Little Senegal), a hub of West African life within the historically Black neighborhood of Central Harlem. Comparing portrayals of Le Petit S & eacute;n & eacute;gal in several hundred news articles published between 1930 and 2025 in both mainstream newspapers and Black-owned media, I analyze how different media institutions describe the neighborhood and its residents and, in doing so, draw symbolic boundaries within the Black population. I find that mainstream outlets often frame the area as culturally vibrant yet foreign, emphasizing aesthetic difference and tension within a gentrifying Harlem. In contrast, Black-owned media foreground themes of diaspora and Black unity, positioning Le Petit S & eacute;n & eacute;gal within a longer history of struggle and belonging in Black New York. By comparing these narratives, I show how media institutions with different audiences and missions construct competing meanings of a Black immigrant area, shaping how Black immigrants and Black Americans relate to one another and redefining Blackness in the city.
Over the past several years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in schools have garnered increasing backlash from right-wing parents. In this article, I analyze these school board meetings, paying specific attention to how racial ideology works in this context. I ask: What racial ideologies are at play in parent debates over DEI efforts in suburban schools? How are these ideologies leveraged to political ends in school board meetings? Specifically, how do parents use their racial ideologies to argue against their school districts’ decision about DEIs? To answer these questions, I analyze data from school board meetings and parent Facebook groups from 2020 to 2022 at three school districts in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I find that while districts use diversity ideology to advocate for DEI efforts, critical parents weaponize color-evasiveness to oppose these efforts. I describe this weaponization, arguing that it occurs in three parts: moral claims, statements of harm, and demands for recompense. By analyzing how people use racial ideologies in conflict, I illustrate how dominant ideologies are dynamic tools that can be leveraged to achieve political goals.
Social capital encompasses investment, use, and reciprocation of resources gained from social relations and networks for expected returns. Social capital accessed through membership in voluntary social associations, groups, and organizations has been vital to Black Americans' struggle for equality and human rights. This study addresses whether racial capital (i.e., belief in the significance of systemic racism) associates with social capital among Black adults. It also asks whether the association between racial capital and social capital depends on educational attainment or exposure to institutional inequality. Analyses of a nationally representative sample of Black adults from the Outlook on Life Surveys, 2012, indicate racial capital predicts social capital directly but only among Black people with high levels of educational attainment. In addition, exposure to institutional inequality negatively moderated the association between racial capital and social capital. When racial capital and exposure to institutional inequality were high, respondents reported lower levels of social capital. Conversely, when racial capital was low and exposure to institutional inequality was high, respondents reported higher levels of social capital.
While significant research has explored the progress and perils of multiracial organizations in their engagement with issues of race and racism, less research has analyzed class hierarchies in these settings. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of habitus, this article provides an ethnographic insight into how a multiracial church maintains social class boundaries in a racially inclusive space. Rather than examining habitus through a racial or social class lens alone, the article proposes a concept called diversity habitus that examines how organizations engage in class-based racialization. The theoretical framework shows how organizational practices of racial inclusion and social class exclusion are co-constructed through a case study of how diversity efforts create social closure for those who do not possess cultural capital.
In 2015, Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl introduced the concept of the White Supremacy Flower to teach students about the role of White supremacy in U.S. society across time-from the founding of our country, through its history, to present times. This model brings attention and focus to the social structure that produces White privilege, rather than focusing on the experiences of privilege and oppression. I have shared this model with students over the years, and we have all learned from it. While teaching about Indigenous women's health, I realized that the White Supremacy Flower was in need of a partner to illustrate resistance to White supremacy in this United States from the founding of our country, through its history, to present times. The Resistance Flower offers a perspective on the praxis of fighting White supremacy, refusing White supremacy, critical engagement with the social structure that has perpetuated and perpetrated racism for over five hundred years. Here I introduce the Resistance Flower, which offers students the opportunity to examine opposition to White supremacy and highlight the role of anti-racism across U.S. history.
Colorism, a form of racialized embodied capital, shapes structural opportunities and mobility within and across racial groups. In the Anglophone Caribbean, research on colorism has largely focused on Jamaica, which has precluded broader theoretical and empirical insights into the profound stratifying power of skin color. This study addresses this gap by analyzing data from the 2014 and 2016 AmericasBarometer social surveys to examine how skin color has impacted educational inequality among self-identified Black individuals across nine Anglophone Caribbean countries. The findings show that skin color significantly predicted educational attainment in all countries except St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Lucia; the strongest effects of colorism were observed in Jamaica and the weakest in the Bahamas. By expanding the geographic scope of existing research to the Anglophone Caribbean, this study reveals how colorism continues to shape mobility and opportunity. Specifically, it challenges the prevailing notion in the region that colorism is solely a colonial legacy by demonstrating substantial cross-national variation in its association with educational attainment. This suggests that contemporary institutional and policy contexts condition the reproduction of color hierarchies.
Scholars have shown that young children understand race and interpret messages about race from families and schools. In the United States, many children spend their early years in preschool classrooms, where preschool teachers contribute to constructing racialized environments for children. How do preschool teachers communicate ideas about race and racism in the classroom? Using interview data from 27 preschool teachers, we found that teachers used various classroom practices that tended to avoid addressing racism. Teachers largely avoided explicit mentions of categories such as Black or Asian and discussions of racism. Instead, preschool teachers minimized race by portraying race as an individual, visual attribute, or as an optional source of cultural novelty. In cases where anti-Black racism occurred between students, teachers excused white students' actions as innocent child's play. We argue that these approaches divorc race from power and uphold color evasiveness within classrooms. We contribute to scholarship on racial socialization by showing how preschool teachers' classroom practices may complement or contradict racial socialization in families.
This study makes both substantive and methodological contributions to understanding racial representation in children's literature. Methodologically, we develop a replicable framework that integrates Mills's Racial Contract theory with quantitative content analysis, translating the political, moral, and epistemological dimensions of institutional racism into measurable variables. This approach enables rigorous empirical examination of how cultural institutions reproduce racial hierarchies and offers a model adaptable to other contexts of representation and recognition. Substantively, the study analyzes racial representation in Caldecott Medal-winning children's books published between 1970 and 2020, examining how this prestigious award functions as a white space that perpetuates the Racial Contract-an ongoing agreement to sustain racial dominance through institutional practices. Drawing on a comparative sample of Caldecott Medal winners and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winners, we identify three interrelated patterns of exclusion that illustrate how the award operates as a gatekeeping mechanism within children's literature. First, findings reveal visual erasure, with markedly fewer depictions of Black characters in award-winning texts. Second, creator exclusion is evident in the limited recognition of Black illustrators within the most prestigious award category. Third, narrative restriction constrains Black characters' roles, particularly in relation to heroism and centrality. By moving beyond descriptive gaps to analyze institutional processes, this research demonstrates how award selection practices reinforce Mills's concept of the white polity. Prestigious literary awards function not as neutral markers of excellence but as cultural mechanisms that reproduce and legitimize racial hierarchy.
