In this paper I develop a race-centered, intersectional critique of concerted cultivation. First developed by Annette Lareau in Unequal Childhoods to describe the dominant middle-class cultural style of parenting, this powerful concept continues to shape scholarship on parenting and the social reproduction of social inequality through culture and class. I critique and reconstruct this concept based upon: 1) Existing research on racial identity and racial socialization, and racialized parenting techniques, and 2) Alternative readings of selected ethnographic material presented in Unequal Childhoods. First, I argue that concerted cultivation is a racialized parenting practice and that families negotiate and navigate a complex race- and-class-based social context of childrearing. Second, I present a re-reading of excerpts from Unequal Childhoods to show how families of color, and in particular Black families, cultivate racial knowledge and skills in their children. Third, I make a case for the larger sociological usefulness of a layered race and class analysis of parenting culture, and argue that such a framework adds more depth to core arguments made by Lareau. In the last section, I discuss the social tensions that exist within concerted cultivation and intensive parenting culture. I reflect on possible implications for normative parenting culture that matches well with neoliberal market rationality, exists within racial capitalism, but at the same time connects to anti-racist socialization and rejection of hegemonic cultural ideologies.

The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped Northern electorates. Millions of Black voters, who had been unable to vote in the South, became eligible to vote through their resettlement in the North. In many instances, parties and politicians believed that Black voters were the balance of power in elections. This belief led them to change their approaches and make specific appeals to Black voters in an effort to win their support. Although scholars of American politics have revised the dominant narrative about the development of the Democratic Party on issues related to race, they fail to account for the role of Black voters in contributing to the Party’s change. The goal of this work is to describe how the Great Migration influenced Democratic Party interactions with Black voters in presidential elections from 1948–1960. I argue that increasing competition between the Democratic and Republican Parties, coupled with Black migrants’ location in electorally important states, made Black voters an important target of presidential campaign strategy in the post-war era.

U.S. federal agencies should treat Latinos as a racial or quasi-racial group in demographic data collection, rather than an ethnic or pan-ethnic group, as they do currently. Survey data must rely on self-reported racial and ethnic identification. But people often identify their own race differently from how others perceive them. In order for self-reported survey data to be useful for the enforcement of antidiscrimination law, it is important that it tracks how others perceive the respondents’ race and ethnicity, not just how they see themselves. To capture racial perceptions of Latinos, government surveys need to balance three subsidiary criteria: the promotion of self-reported racial identifications that are useful as a proxy for the perceptions of others; the ability to measure intra-group differences in how Latinos are racially perceived; and the extent to which Latinos are collectively perceived as a race. A survey format that treated Latinos as a racial group would likely be more amenable to these goals than the current format, but there are some areas, which this paper identifies, where further empirical research is needed in order to be sure.

Many White Americans believe that individual rather than structural factors explain racial inequality, yet there is substantial variation in Whites’ perceptions. Using data from the Portraits of American Life Study, we exploit this variation to provide insight into the processes driving Whites’ perceptions of the causes of racial inequality. Specifically, we assess how social boundaries inform Whites’ explanations for the disadvantage of two racial groups: Blacks and Asians. First, we examine how each group’s position in the racial hierarchy relates to the types of explanations employed by Whites and find that Whites use individual explanations more often for Blacks than Asians. Second, we assess the extent to which the importance given to race in one’s overall identity affects how Whites explain racial disadvantage. Whites who see their Whiteness as being important to their identity are more likely to use individual rather than structural explanations to explain Black disadvantage. Together, these findings provide insight into the social psychological processes that contribute to Whites’ perceptions of racial inequality and suggest increased attention to how perceptions of out-group boundaries shape individual perceptions of inequality. Addressing this dimension of how individuals view inequality will be critical to future efforts to reduce it.

Since the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Stand Your Ground law has come to emblematize contemporary racial injustice. Yet, the legitimacy of the statute endures, as more than thirty-three states maintain and enforce some version of Stand Your Ground. This article probes the legitimacy basis for Stand Your Ground by excavating and reconstructing its formative logic. Drawing on archival records of the Florida state legislature’s 2005 pioneering of the statute, I examine how lawmakers justified its introduction, design, and enactment. I find that proponents of Stand Your Ground framed it as a response to the cost impositions of criminal prosecution and civil action. In introducing Stand Your Ground, they sought to protect self-defensive actors against the burdens of administrative and judicial proceedings by granting them civil immunity. During the mark-up process, legislators held an extensive debate over the intended beneficiaries and victims of Stand Your Ground. Racial codes animated this debate: “drug dealers,” “gangs,” and “cop killers” represented the types of criminal subjects whom the legal protections of Stand Your Ground should exclude, while “violent criminals” in the “bad part of town” represented the intended objects of the statute’s authorization of deadly force. Ultimately, legislators translated the concerns raised during this debate into statutory design choices that baked race into Stand Your Ground.

Both African American and LGBT voters can prove pivotal in electoral outcomes, but we know little about civic participation among Black LGBT people. Although decades of research on political participation has made it almost an article of faith that members of dominant groups (such as White people and individuals of higher socioeconomic status) vote at higher rates than their less privileged counterparts, recent work has suggested that there are circumstances under which members of marginalized groups might participate at higher rates. Some of this research suggests that political participation might also increase when groups perceive elections as particularly threatening. We argue that when such threats are faced by marginalized groups, the concern to protect hard-earned rights can activate a sense of what we call “political hypervigilance,” and that such effects may be particularly pronounced among members of intersectionally-marginalized groups such as LGBT African Americans. To test this theory, we use original data from the 2016 National Survey on HIV in the Black Community, a nationally-representative survey of Black Americans, to explore the relationship among same-sex sexual behavior, attitudes toward LGBT people, and respondent voting intentions in the 2016 presidential election. We find that respondents who reported having engaged in same-sex sexual behavior were strongly and significantly more likely to say they “definitely will vote” compared to respondents who reported no same-sex sexual behavior. More favorable views of LGBT individuals and issues (marriage equality) were also associated with greater intention to vote. We argue that these high rates provide preliminary evidence that political hypervigilance can, in fact, lead to increased political engagement among members of marginalized groups.

How does gerrymandering affect intraparty and interparty electoral competition in state legislatures? Research has shown that electoral competition produces better representation and that descriptive representation positively affects substantive representation or policy outcomes. However, other studies have found an ever increasing incumbency advantage. I argue that the incumbency advantage within Majority Minority Districts is significant and distinct from that of majority White Democrat and Republican districts. I estimate levels of intraparty and interparty competition among Majority Minority Districts, majority White Democrat districts, and majority White Republican districts in the state legislature of Alabama. I use majority White Democrat districts as an intraparty comparison group because of African American’s statistically high support for the Democrat Party. Using three separate measures of competitiveness, I find racial gerrymandering in Alabama has a significant and sui generis negative effect on competition within Majority Minority Districts, compared to majority White districts.

How do you come to trust a person you perceive to be your enemy? Such challenges face communities grappling with troubled racial histories. This paper introduces how two sites of historic conflict have begun to address their complicated and painful pasts in order to heal history’s wounds and create a more just and inclusive future. Ordinary residents in Philadelphia, MS, and Birmingham, AL, are making their communities better at building trust in order to tell the truth about their pasts. Both communities are notorious for their racist histories and especially for the collusion of law enforcement in imposing White supremacy through violence. But through a facilitated process of storytelling and historical dialogue, a group in each community cultivated a space of trust and healing that are expanding the possibilities for belonging and equity. Drawing on a first-hand account of my role in community building and race relations as well as placing that work within a larger framework of social movement organizing, I show that telling the truth about the past through stories can transform and uplift distressed and inequitable communities.

This article examines the historical evolution of policing in America with a focus on race. Specifically, it is argued that racial bias has deep roots in American policing, and reforms in policing and American society have not eliminated the detrimental experiences of Blacks who encounter the police. Historical information and contemporary empirical research indicate that, even when legal and other factors are equal, Blacks continue to experience the coercive and lethal aspects of policing relative to their non-Black counterparts.

This article sets forth four modalities of the relationship between members of marginalized communities and the criminal justice system: subordination, consumption, resistance, and transformation. These modalities attempt to break out of traditional ways of thinking about community members’ formal roles in the system—defendants, witnesses, victims, judges, prosecutors, police officers, correctional officers, and the indeterminate but oft-invoked “community.” Instead, these modalities are fluid and situational. This article also calls for new research, scholarship, and advocacy that takes seriously how members of communities that the criminal legal system most deeply and directly affects engage in these fluid and situational modalities. Attention to the complexity of “community” is essential to creating lasting change in social systems of blame and punishment.

The United States today has the highest incarceration rate, as well as the largest number of people living under correctional control more broadly (including probation and parole), than any other country on the globe. The size of the American criminal justice system is not only internationally unparalleled, but it is also historically unprecedented. This apparatus is also deeply racialized. African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous populations (Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Native American), are all represented in U. S. jails and prisons in numbers dramatically disproportionate to their representation in the population as a whole, and every non-White population is incarcerated at a rate far surpassing that of Whites. Notably, however, while the scale of today’s criminal justice system is unsurpassed and unprecedented, its severe racial disproportionality has always been a defining feature. Only by taking a close look at the long and deeply racialized history of the American criminal justice system, and more specifically at the regularly discriminatory application of the law as well as the consistent lack of equal justice under the law over time, can we fully understand not only why the American criminal justice system remains so unjust, but also why prison populations rose so dramatically when they did.

The emergence of an African American and Latino-dominated coalition with the potential to reconfigure American government and politics at the national, state, and local levels is one of the most noteworthy developments in U.S. politics over the past two decades. Racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement are impediments to this coalition’s political power. Social scientists, legal scholars, and activists have long paid attention to how devices like poll taxes, English competency tests, voter intimidation, racial gerrymandering, and voter identification laws restrict participation and diluted the political influence of racial and ethnic minorities. This essay seeks to direct renewed scholarly attention to racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement as similar devices for suppressing and containing minority group political power.

The U.S. criminal justice system is defined and fueled by foundations and principles that uphold harmful power dynamics such as white supremacy, further destabilizing communities that face intersecting structural barriers. This paternalistic system is characterized by the imposition of punishments—including fees, fines, penalties, and deprivation of freedom and even life—that are meted out disproportionally to people of color and people living in poverty. More often than not, policymakers and justice practitioners fail to solicit the views, experiences, and expertise of community members and justice system-involved individuals, leading to policies and practices crafted under the auspices of promoting safety that undermine community stability instead. Consistent with Square One ’s charge to “reimagine how we create justice,” this paper describes approaches that communities around the country employ to craft, lead, and participate in their own public safety strategies. The paper will offer examples of crime prevention work, investment and divestment efforts, and policy reform initiatives developed and guided by people most likely to experience crime and the heavy hammer of the traditional justice system. This paper will explore the promises, strengths, and challenges associated with each approach, presenting a range of creative strategies for residents—in partnership with the broader community of advocates, activists, and researchers—to adapt, own, and implement.

This paper offers a broad overview of Black citizenship within the United States, concentrating on the major shifts in Black life that have transpired since the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We examine several critical aspects of Black citizenship including economic status, education, criminal justice and mass incarceration, and political participation. Our report reveals that Black progress toward equal citizenship is inconsistent at best; at worst, it is stagnant and at times, regressive. As such, we conclude that dramatic solutions beyond traditional reformist approaches are needed in order to realize genuine citizenship and equal rights for Black people within the United States. In closing, we briefly highlight a specific example of a strategic approach to advancing substantive social and political change.