This paper shows how social structure shapes many behaviors of low-income Black peoples’ currently labeled “culture.” It refutes both culture of poverty arguments based in welfare dependency and deindustrialization explanations of the post-1960 increase in single-parent Black families. Historically, distinct discrimination experiences in urban versus rural Black enclaves structured distinct child socializations and Black family formations, North and South. Agrarian enclaves socialized conformity to two-parent-families and racist labor markets; urban enclaves socialized resistance to racially stratified labor markets to preserve self-worth, destabilizing families. Any census measure of pre-1960 Black family structure averages low mother-only rates among rural socialized Blacks and high rates among urban socialized Blacks. The 1960-1980 doubling (21% to 41%) of Black children in one-parent families emerged from urbanization converging Blacks toward urban socialized Blacks’ historically high rate. Post-1970 welfare liberalization and/or deindustrialization were exacerbating factors, not causes. Using a family head’s urban/rural residence at age sixteen to proxy socialization location, logistic regressions on 1960s census data confirm hypothesis.

This article makes a case for weak class reductionism. In particular, we advance a theoretical account that largely “reduces” a social construct called race to another social construct called class. Once you acknowledge that race is not itself a prime mover, but rather something to be explained, class as an explanans turns out to be a strong candidate. Before making this case, we distinguish our account from three alternative forms of class reductionism, which we reject: the notions that (1) class is a more fundamental form of identity than race; (2) class is of greater normative importance than race; and (3) race is an epiphenomenon of class, without independent effects. We then argue for one form of class reduction that establishes race as causally dependent on class. In particular, we provide a general defense of functional explanations, argue that capitalist class relations can functionally explain the persistence of race, and finally, delineate the limits of that explanation. Because the nature of functional explanation requires the explanandum to have important effects in the world, this argument puts race at the center of any discussion of capitalist class relations in racialized societies and explains it on the basis of its effects rather than its causes. Nonetheless, as we show in our conclusion, none of these arguments imply that race or racism is inherent to capitalist class relations. Racism may be explained by capitalism, even if it is not necessary for it.

Black family values and behavior have long been at the center of policy solutions to intergenerational poverty. But in the early twentieth century, the Black family took on paradoxical significance as a solution to child poverty and neglect through the foster family. This was part of a broad realignment in child protection that upheld the “Home” as the best place for children—yet the concept came to mean something different for White and Black youth. Using New York City as a case by which to study broad transformations in child protection ideology and local child welfare response, I find that in the 1930s substitute care underwent a dramatic transformation with many White children cared for in their own homes or in therapeutic institutions, while previously excluded Black youth gained disproportionate access through race-matched foster families. Though a seemingly progressive approach, I argue that the prioritization of the foster home over the biological home illuminates how the family was envisioned as a solution to poverty in the context of racial inequality. Child welfare workers imagined that patterns of placement in race-matched foster families could be manipulated to overcome segregation and exclusion from the emerging welfare state. But as more non-White children entered substitute care, the conditions of poverty and distress in segregated communities necessitated a return to congregate care for “hard-to-place” minority youth as Black families seemingly failed to take care of their own. This case is important because it highlights the way in which official foster care systems emerged not as an extension of Black kinship care strategies, but as an experimental solution to dependency and neglect that mobilized the Black family to resolve the many consequences of state abandonment.

We examined the influence of racial and ethnic identity of residents and housing market economic conditions on redlining. Data were extracted from archival area description forms from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation for 568 Ohio neighborhoods from 1934–1940. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the relationships between neighborhood characteristics and redlining. Bivariate results indicated a strong association between the presence of African American residents and neighborhood redlining (OR = 40.9, 95% CI 22.9-72.8). Multivariable analysis demonstrated that some neighborhood characteristics were contributors to the decision to redline, including homes in poor condition (OR = 4.3, 95% CI 1.2-15.1), home vacancy (OR = 1.4, 95% CI 1.1-1.6), and housing prices (per thousand dollars) (OR = 0.7, 95% CI 0.4-1.2). Adjusting for these and other factors, the presence of African American residents remained a powerful predictor of redlining (OR = 13.8, 95% CI 4.4-42.8). Racial discrimination was the overriding factor in decisions to redline neighborhoods.

This article builds on settler and domestic colonial histories and theories to advance our understanding of urban changes in segregated, disinvested, U.S. Rust Belt cities. While many major cities have rebounded in population and experienced gentrification since the mid-twentieth century, many Rust Belt cities have continued to decline. The resulting conditions call for new theories to describe their changes, trajectories, and the impacts for majority poor Black populations. We construct a Binocular Colonial Lens: an analytic framework that superimposes shared conceptual descriptions and theoretical explanations of settler and domestic colonialisms. With this lens, we can elucidate the practices of erasure that are deployed throughout colonized communities and focus them on phenomena associated with urban decline and revitalization. While some urban scholarship has used metaphors and language of settler colonialism to describe gentrification, most of these works at best reflect the salience of settler ideology, and at worst reinforce Indigenous erasure. Foregrounding shared conditions of colonization and conquest in the United States, we train this Binocular Colonial Lens on Detroit, which reveals myriad urban processes like ghettoization, urban renewal, suburbanization, and gentrification as ongoing colonization, wherein domestically colonized populations are subject to numerous forms of erasure at the behest of the settler state and toward the advancement of settler society. This lens advances urban theory by expanding the depth of our analyses of urban changes, and scaffolds connections with other axes of racialized inequality by revealing shared tools of erasure operative in, for example, mass incarceration and environmental injustices.

The current popularity of “racial capitalism” in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti- and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself.

Small businesses employ more than half of the entire workforce, account for more than sixty percent of new jobs created in the United States, and are responsible for about fifty percent of private domestic gross product. It is noteworthy, however, that small business owners in credit markets, in particular minority owners, have difficulty in securing sources of capital for their business operation. The literature on credit market discrimination shows consistent results that can be interpreted as evidence that minority owners are discriminated against compared to their counterparts (i.e., White owners) in obtaining loans, which may be caused by lenders’ discrimination, although such behavior is prohibited under current fair-lending laws. This paper uses pooled cross-sectional data from the Survey of Small Business Finances (1993, 1998, and 2003) and a bivariate probit model based on James J. Heckman’s approach to deal with sample selection bias for those choosing to apply for loans. Those who didn’t apply for loans have been ignored in analyses of credit markets for small business owners. This paper adds to the small business lending market literature by 1) combining cross sectional data from the Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF) for 1993, 1998, and 2003 to get more precise estimates and test statistics with more power; 2) conducting regression analyses with different model specifications to show the robustness of the empirical results; and 3) dealing directly with problems of sample selection based on Heckman’s approach with particular attention to the assumptions required to justify the identification of the effect (i.e., exclusion restrictions).

The analysis confirms previous results, suggesting that minority owners are discriminated against in credit markets. These conclusions are supported in a variety of model specifications.

In this article, we reflect on the pernicious nature of rhetoric aimed at soliciting Black community support for predatory urban development schemes. Highlighting recent examples of Urban One Casino + Resort’s development campaign in Richmond, Virginia, and the messaging leveraged by political leaders on behalf of SoFi stadium and the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, we find that discursive moves made by public and private stakeholders reflect what we call the “predatory rhetorics of urban development.” We argue that these rhetorics intend to enlist divested Black communities as supporters of development projects that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of economic and political elites. They do so by playing on Black desires for social and economic inclusion into American middle-class community life. Four common threads of predatory rhetoric appear across both contexts. They are 1) seizing the real needs and concerns of stigmatized places, 2) relying on representational politics to mitigate issues of trust, 3) the neoliberal framing of American internal colonization as a problem that requires extractive private development solutions and, finally, 4) dissimulating intra-community class interests to consolidate “Black needs.” We reflect on the outcomes supported by these rhetorics across both development projects and raise several points of further consideration as we hope for more organized responses to such rhetorics in the future.

This study examines the racialized and gendered experiences of Black men (N = 20) from elementary school through graduate school. The Black men featured in this article are current STEM doctoral students and were asked to reflect on their K-12 and undergraduate STEM experiences as well as their current experiences as graduate students. Findings conclude that Black men, as children and teens, experienced gendered racism in their STEM courses, which included a severe lack of racial representation of Black scientists, leading them to believe that they could not become scientists in their respective disciplines. At the undergraduate level, Black men encountered racial stereotyping and were self-conscious of their gender and race due to being underrepresented in their STEM courses. And at the doctoral level, Black men deal with psychological health issues due to the racism-related stressors they experience on campus, along with feeling compelled to be the spokesperson for Black students at their respective college campuses.