To characterize U.S. politics today as polarized is to state the obvious. Nevertheless, Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth and first African American president of the United States in 2008 had an air of inevitability to it. The presidency of George W. Bush was at that point widely regarded as a profound failure. His administration had mishandled two on-going wars, brought us the nationally humbling debacle of hurricane Katrina, and took us to the brink of economic collapse. And thus the Democratic party nominee for president, who happened to be Black, was handily elected with 53% of the popular vote, carrying twenty-eight states and with some 365 electoral college votes.

Notions of race and the full-blown ideologies of racism that often accompany such social distinctions are not now nor have they ever been entirely static phenomena. Much, and arguably too much, social scientific research proceeds as if race and racism were relatively transparent, discrete, and static phenomena. Furthermore, such a perspective implies that lacking such transparency and fixity, race and racism have lost force and salience in social life. Such phenomena need not be fixed or simplex in order to profoundly affect how individuals in a society live or in order to be made the focus of important systematic social research. Yet, the complexity, pliability, and historical specificity of notions of race and of racism do perforce raise for us challenges of conceptual clarity and theoretical logic, and demand of us clear standards for the collection, deployment, and interpretation of evidence.

As a result of the increasing number of biracials and multiracials, and White reconstructions of previously non-White skin colors, the Whitening of selected immigrants and especially their children appears to be proceeding. Although there are many studies on the racial identity of biracials, too little research exists on how Whites identify them and light-skinned monoracials, which of these they Whiten, how, and why. Enough is known to suggest that if current trends continue, our picture of the country's racial hierarchy has to be revised. While Whites will likely remain on top and poor African Americans and other Blacks at the bottom, what happens in the middle cannot now even be guessed at with any hope of accuracy. For that reason alone, empirical and policy-oriented research on White identification patterns is badly needed.

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.”

Race statistics and race policy have been intertwined in American history since its founding, starting with the infamous three-fifths clause, continuing with policies based on nineteenth-century race science, the restrictionist immigration at the turn of the century, the Jim Crow regime, and carrying into the civil rights era through such policy concepts as institutional racism, statistical proportionality, disparate impact, and affirmative action. Across this history, the policies and the statistics were about “race,” whether they punished or benefited, were racist or antiracist. But can there be policy that misuses race statistics, that is presented as about race when it should not be? Race statistics are a powerful policy hammer in American history, but not everything is, in fact, a nail. Today the census undercount is argued over as if it is about race; it isn't really. Posing far greater danger, census race categories have worked their way into genomic medicine. The nineteenth-century belief that “race is biological” lingers in the American mind. The use of census categories in genomic medicine risks re-biologizing race. Maybe we should not leave the hammer lying around.

Racism reproduces through children. Racial bias is acquired early, and like many early-acquired predilections it is tenaciously resistant to counterevidence. Much of the institutional struggle against racism focuses on children, working to change their attitudes and judgments by addressing what children supposedly have come to know and believe about race. Yet much of what lay folk and educators alike imagine about children's knowledge of race and how they have come to acquire it is inaccurate. This essay is concerned to identify these inaccuracies, present evidence that challenges them, and briefly consider why they—like racialist thinking itself—are so tenaciously held and resistant to counterevidence.

It is particularly fitting that Du Bois Review would publish a special feature titled “Varieties of Responses to Stigmatization: Macro, Meso, and Micro Dimensions.” In many ways, we can consider the management of stigma to be a quintessentially Du Bois topic. In his classical writings on double consciousness, this pioneering social theorist (2007) captured the complex psychological experience of managing a life where one feels divided within oneself. He focused specifically on African American identity defined by the tension of being two at once (American and Black): “The Negro ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 3).

This conversation, hosted by the Harvard Book Store and moderated by Rev. Eugene Rivers, took place in conjunction with the Boston Review's (2012) forum on the power and potential of black movements. Featuring a lead article by Michael C. Dawson, the Future of Black Politics forum included responses from William Julius Wilson, Andra Gillespie, Tommie Shelby, Rev. Patrick H. O'Connor, Jennifer L. Hochschild, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, Dorian T. Warren, and Robin D. G. Kelley, with a reply by Michael C. Dawson. Here, the conversation continues.

In the history of Québec, the 1960s are known as the time of the Quiet Revolution. That decade is commonly referred to as a major watershed since it marked the onset of a spectacular economic, social, and cultural recovery of the Francophone (“French Canadian”) population. Previously, and for two centuries, Francophone Québec had been dominated by the British Empire and English Canada. Throughout the period, as a cultural minority, it had borne the brunt of ethnoracial stereotypes and had suffered from discrimination in the workplace. I seek to investigate one dimension of the destigmatizing process that unfolded in the 1960s by focusing on the discursive strategies devised by a group of young leftist intellectuals who argued that Francophone Québec needed a new national language as a condition of its full emancipation. My research focuses on major contradictions that this radical group had to confront: 1) they could have rejected the vernacular, stigmatized language (known as joual) emblematic of the English domination, to adopt the Parisian French and thus become fully part of a great civilization, but by doing so they would have lapsed into another form of colonization since this superior language was considered as foreign and imposed at the expense of “authenticity”; and 2) they could have promoted joual as the authentic language of the nation and worked to free it from stigma, but this would have come at the price of a “parochialization” of Québec culture. I show that these intellectuals failed to invent the collective myths that would have transcended this double bind and other contradictions. Finally, the paper compares Québec to other societies in the New World in order to better highlight the distinctiveness of this case.

This special section of the Du Bois Review had its origin in a conference on “Race and Immigration in the American City: New Perspectives on Twenty-First Century Intergroup Relations,” which the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture convened at the University of Chicago on May 27, 2011. The conference explored the nature of intergroup dynamics within multiracial and multiethnic contexts since 1964, when cities across the land were gradually transformed by the arrival of large numbers of new immigrants hailing from Asia and Latin America. Of particular interest were relations between African Americans and Latinos, two highly racialized groups who are often deemed in fierce competition with each other for poorly paid, unskilled jobs. The essays gathered here are the fruits of that conference.

In this paper, we apply Omi and Winant's theory of racial formation to understand how a new racial category of “Latino” is being created within Atlanta, a city firmly entrenched in a Black/White binary of race. Comparing Dominicans and Guatemalans in the Atlanta metro area, we show how two processes are “racializing” Latinos: 1) the homogenization of Latinos into a single “race” through state laws and policies and 2) the diversified understandings of and responses to race and racial categorization among Latinos based on their national origin and ethnicity and the specific Atlanta context. We argue that in moving beyond the Black/White binary, state laws that racialize Latinos create a two-dimensional category, with a homogenized “Latino” category as one axis and an illegal/legal distinction as the second axis. The meanings attached to “race” and the consequences that Latinos experience from racialization depend upon their perceived or actual legal status.

Concern over intergenerational ethnic continuity, with members of minority groups seeking to ensure that youth become invested in and committed to religious, cultural, or ethnic identities, is long-standing and inherent to group boundary formation. In recent years, this concern has been particularly pronounced in the North American Jewish community, with socialization and retention of Jewish young adults emerging as one of its central preoccupations. This emphasis on Jewish continuity emerged as a central concern following the legacy of experiences with anti-Semitism and discrimination. The most significant program to emerge from this agenda is Taglit-Birthright Israel, a program that has provided over 250,000 free ten-day trips to Israel for Jewish young adults from over fifty countries. Homeland tours of this sort are increasingly common across diasporic groups, and this paper attends to the emotional work that underlies collective identity formation in these tours. Through focus groups with Taglit-Birthright participants, we find that these tours engage and mobilize competing sets of emotions, and that tour members experience dimensions of closeness and distance at once. The result is that participants are engaged in a form of identity labor: they grapple with the questions of how they should affiliate as Jews, and how they can forge an identity that carves a role for themselves in the diaspora. Drawing on the sociological concept of ambivalence, we find that collective identity is successfully forged in these trips by interrupting the notion of effortless ethnic belonging, and providing participants with a deeper understanding of the commitment required for intra-ethnic group identification and attachments.

Over the last two decades decision makers have sought to address problems with large concentrations of poverty and minority ethnoracial groups in the cities of Western Europe and the Anglo-American world that are the direct result of the manner in which public housing was built in the early postwar era. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia have developed programs that introduce “social mix” into such public housing developments. These initiatives are designed to alter the social dynamics of places with high levels of concentrated poverty and ethnoracial minority groups that are believed to magnify the disadvantages of poverty and marginalization. In this paper, I argue that this is a destigmatization strategy, but not the same kind of destigmatization strategy that has been described in the literature. Using the example of Toronto's Regent Park, a large public housing development near downtown, I develop a research agenda for understanding the gap between a quasi-state agency's efforts to destigmatize public housing sites (“place destigmatization”) and the everyday destigmatization practices and experiences of residents (“personal destigmatization”). The paper begins with a review of the putative mechanisms linking socially mixed public housing redevelopment and outcomes for residents, including social capital, social control, role modelling, and changes to the political economy of place. This review finds little evidence of these effects in the literature. Consequently, I argue for an inductive approach to the study of the outcomes of social mix, rather than the common practice of judging such outcomes against the benchmark of close, intimate relationships between new, middle-class residents and existing public housing residents. I further argue that the “normalization” of the built form that is a major part of socially mixed redevelopment is a form of place destigmatization, and may alter both material practices and representational practices related to stigma, which have very real effects on the everyday experience of residents.

Over the past four decades, increasingly punitive and enforcement-oriented U.S. immigration policies have been legitimized by a rhetoric of criminality that stigmatizes Latino immigrant workers and intensifies their exploitation. Simultaneously, there has been a sevenfold increase in the prison population in the United States, in which African Americans are eight times more likely to be jailed than Whites (Western 2006, p. 3). In this paper, I draw on scholarship in history and sociology, as well as my own anthropological research, to develop the argument that criminal justice policies and immigration policies together disempower low-wage U.S. labor and maintain categorical racial inequalities in a “postracial” United States. First, I review the historical role of race in U.S. immigration policy, and I consider the evidence for systemic racism in immigration enforcement in the contemporary period. Second, I discuss criminal legislation in the neoliberal era and examine the ways in which criminal legislation and immigration policies together disempower large segments of the U.S. workforce, satisfying employer demands for low cost and pliant labor. Finally, I argue that a political focus on immigrant workers' “illegality” masks the role of the state in (re)defining the legal status of low-wage workers and veils the ways in which punitive policies maintain historical racial and class inequalities.

Does elite rhetoric influence how Latinos view their relationship with African Americans? In this paper, we provide a systematic empirical assessment of the impact that elite messages have on Latino perceptions of economic and political commonality by drawing on two unique data sources: the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS) and a survey experiment embedded in the September 2010 Latino Decisions Tracking Poll (LDS). Our analysis reveals that the attitudinal effects of exposure to elite messages are strongly conditioned by one's political partisanship. To be more precise, we find that although exposure to elite messages leads Democrats to express more in common politically with African Americans, it fails to exert any significant influence among other groups and on different dependent variables. Specifically, the evidence presented here shows that reception of persuasive messages from like-minded political leaders contributes nothing to our understanding of how attitudes on economic commonality are formed and very little to our understanding of the source from which perceptions of political commonality arise among Republicans and Independents. In addition to making significant contributions to the literatures on commonality, multiracial coalitions and public opinion, these findings also make a strong case for further evaluating the role of political leadership in forging bonds of cooperation across racial lines.

This exploratory study makes a contribution to the literature on antiracism by analyzing how first-generation French Blacks of sub-Saharan African descent practice everyday antiracism. In doing so, it expands the demographic terrain of this research to highlight some particularities in the experience of everyday racism and antiracism for ethnoracial minorities of immigrant origins. In addition to experiencing forms of racism encountered by both immigrants and other native ethnoracial minorities, first-generation French Blacks (like other non-White first-generation Europeans), face symbolic exclusion from the national community and delegitimization of their claims to Europeanness. Examining their experiences sheds light on how race, immigration, and national identity intersect to generate unique experiences of racism and antiracism. This paper also contributes to our understanding of how social context shapes the range of everyday antiracist strategies at a person's disposal. Specifically, integrating Kasinitz et al.'s (2008) framework for categorizing incidents of racial discrimination and prejudice with Fleming et al.'s (2010) categorization of responses to stigmatization, I present an analysis of antiracist responses that takes into account both the nature of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator of racism (i.e., impersonal vs. personal) and the social context in which the encounter occurs (e.g., school, work, public space, etc). In doing so, I highlight how the conditions of a given incident of racism or discrimination set constraints on the range of antiracist responses an individual can practically (or feasibly) employ.

Historical studies of the War on Poverty have overwhelmingly focused on its consequences in African American communities. Many studies have grappled with how War on Poverty innovations co-opted a thriving African American social movement. This paper explores the impact of War on Poverty programs on the development of a political cadre of Mexican American grassroots leaders in Oakland, California. It investigates how coordinated 1960s protests by Mexican American organizations reveal Oakland's changing racial/ethnic conditions and shifting trends in the state's relationship to the urban poor. It demonstrates how a national shift to place-based solutions to poverty devolved the “problem of poverty” from the national to the local level and empowered a new set of actors—community-based organizations—in the fight against poverty. This essay argues that the devolution of federal responsibility for welfare provided the political and institutional opening for the rise of powerful Mexican American organizations whose goal was the recognition of a “Mexican American community” meriting government intervention. This essay also demonstrates how Mexican American organizations mobilized in relation to African American social movements and to geographies of poverty that were deemed exclusively Black.

While many sociological studies analyze the causes, conditions, and mechanisms perpetuating American racial inequality, the literature on how African Americans understand and explain these inequalities is less developed. Drawing on 150 interviews with middle-class and working-class African American men and women, this paper analyzes inductively how respondents define and conceptualize the most pressing obstacles facing their group when probed on this question. We find that middle- and working-class respondents alike identify the problem of racism as the most salient obstacle facing African Americans. Class differences appear with respect to what other obstacles are singled out as salient: while middle-class respondents focus on lack of racial solidarity among Blacks and economic problems (in this order), working-class respondents are more concerned with the fragility of the Black family followed by the lack of racial solidarity. This analysis discusses the relevance of considering how groups make sense of obstacles, and of racism and discrimination in particular, for the study of destigmatization and antiracist strategies of stigmatized minorities.

The more that devalued group members experience stigmatization, the worse their physical and mental health, well-being, and performance will be. However, the effects of stigmatization are often mixed, weak, and conditional. We should expect such variability in how devalued group members respond to stigmatization because resilience in the face of challenges is possible, depending on how stressful stigmatization is for people. Using the transactional model of stress (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984) as an organizing framework, I provide evidence that people will have different reactions to stigmatization depending on primary appraisals—that is, how harmful and self-relevant they appraise it to be—and on secondary appraisals—that is, whether or not they believe that they have the resources to cope with it. My review of the literature suggests that a stronger ingroup identification, stronger identification with a negatively stereotyped domain, chronic beliefs about stigmatization, and beliefs about meritocracy create vulnerabilities to stigmatization because they lead people to appraise stigmatization as more harmful and self-relevant. Furthermore, psychological optimism, a sense of control, self-esteem, as well as high socioeconomic status, a stronger identification with one's ingroup, and positive evaluations of the ingroup create resilience to discrimination because they allow people to perceive themselves as having the resources needed to cope with stigmatization. In conclusion, people will respond to the same potential stressor in different ways, depending on how self-relevant and harmful they perceive it to be and whether or not they perceive themselves as having the resources to cope. Thus, attention should be directed to developing families, communities, institutions, and societies that can provide people with the resources that they need to be resilient.

Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.