What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a “living political thinker,” Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, engaging Du Bois as a political theorist enables contemporary scholars to reflect on the political challenges of our own time, even when Du Bois offers answers we would not own for ourselves. Perhaps most crucially, taking Du Bois's work seriously requires a rigorous engagement with the past and an active refutation of declarations of a “postracial” age that belie yawning racial inequalities, the continuing devaluation of non-White lives, and the unredressed injuries—to American citizens, to the polity itself, and to women and men well beyond U.S. borders—of White supremacy. All of the participants in this symposium would, I think, endorse this view in its broadest strokes. But to inherit Du Bois as a political thinker is also to participate in an ongoing and often contentious conversation about race, democracy, and Du Bois himself. Accordingly, my comments will focus on two clusters of issues. The first is raised by Rogers Smith's and Tommie Shelby's vigorous disagreement with the idea of Black reparations that I explore in the second chapter of Democracy's Reconstruction. The second involves a set of unresolved tensions bequeathed by Du Bois and addressed in Gooding-Williams' extraordinary book and Cristina Beltrán's meditations on the Afro-modern political tradition and Latino politics today.

This commentary discusses advances in the conceptual understanding of racism and selected research findings in the social neurosciences. The traditional stress and coping model holds that racism constitutes a source of aversive experiences that, when perceived by the individual, eventually lead to poor health outcomes. Current evidence points to additional psychophysiological pathways linking facets of racist environments with physiological reactions that contribute to disease. The alternative pathways emphasize prenatal experiences, subcortical emotional neural circuits, conscious and preconscious emotion regulation, perseverative cognitions, and negative affective states stemming from racist cognitive schemata. Recognition of these pathways challenges change agents to use an array of cognitive and self-controlling interventions in mitigating racism's impact. Additionally, it charges policy makers to develop strategies that eliminate deep-seated structural aspects of racism in society.

While it is clear that self-reported racial/ethnic discrimination is related to illness, there are challenges in measuring self-reported discrimination or unfair treatment. In the present study, we evaluate the psychometric properties of a self-reported instrument across racial/ethnic groups in a population-based sample, and we test and interpret findings from applying two different widely-used approaches to asking about discrimination and unfair treatment. Even though we found that the subset of items we tested tap into a single underlying concept, we also found that different groups are more likely to report on different aspects of discrimination. Whether race is mentioned in the survey question affects both frequency and mean scores of reports of racial/ethnic discrimination. Our findings suggest caution to researchers when comparing studies that have used different approaches to measure racial/ethnic discrimination and allow us to suggest practical empirical guidelines for measuring and analyzing racial/ethnic discrimination. No less important, we have developed a self-reported measure of recent racial/ethnic discrimination that functions well in a range of different racial/ethnic groups and makes it possible to compare how racial/ethnic discrimination is associated with health disparities among multiple racial/ethnic groups.

This article argues that African American hair is a political matter by examining the little-known role of state occupational licensing of African American hair care. By focusing on recent legal challenges and legislative battles over state regulation of hair-care provision for African Americans, the article traces state authorities' responses to struggles over market share between licensed, and often native-born, African American beauticians, and typically unlicensed, and often recent African immigrant, hair braiders. Hair braiders challenged state regulatory oversight by invoking racial deference claims, in which they argued that braiding was a “cultural practice” that should be exempt from state regulation. A statistical analysis of state regulatory decision making revealed that states varied widely in addressing the issue of African American hair care. While racial deference claims, in the form of legal cases, put pressure on states to exempt hair braiders from regulatory oversight, by and large, most states did not choose this path. For states that did choose to address the demands for market protection or market relief, the choices were mostly in the direction of enacting new regulations or actively incorporating hair braiders under existing regulations. Despite the invocation of racial deference claims, African American hair care was not freed from state oversight—state regulators became more flexible in their oversight of Black hair care rooted in their concerns over public safety as well as the demands from a variety of interest groups. The analysis reveals that when race/gender and state regulation intersect, traditional economic theories of occupational licensing are not sufficient; an intersectional approach can better explain policy outcomes.

Increasingly, understanding how the role of historical events and context affect present-day health inequities has become a dominant narrative among Native American communities. Historical trauma, which consists of traumatic events targeting a community (e.g., forced relocation) that cause catastrophic upheaval, has been posited by Native communities and some researchers to have pernicious effects that persist across generations through a myriad of mechanisms from biological to behavioral. Consistent with contemporary societal determinants of health approaches, the impact of historical trauma calls upon researchers to explicitly examine theoretically and empirically how historical processes and contexts become embodied. Scholarship that theoretically engages how historically traumatic events become embodied and affect the magnitude and distribution of health inequities is clearly needed. However, the scholarship on historical trauma is limited. Some scholars have focused on these events as etiological agents to social and psychological distress; others have focused on events as an outcome (e.g., historical trauma response); others still have focused on these events as mechanisms or pathways by which historical trauma is transmitted; and others have focused on historical trauma-related factors (e.g., collective loss) that interact with proximal stressors. These varied conceptualizations of historical trauma have hindered the ability to cogently theorize it and its impact on Native health. The purpose of this article is to explicate the link between historical trauma and the concept of embodiment. After an interdisciplinary review of the “state of the discipline,” we utilize ecosocial theory and the indigenist stress-coping model to argue that contemporary physical health reflects, in part, the embodiment of historical trauma. Future research directions are discussed.

Racial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed the Fair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

Deeply embedded in everyday discourse, social interactions, and institutional practices, racism negatively affects the health and well-being of Black people in the United States. Theory and empirical research on the impact of racism on health have focused on stressful events and individual perceptions of racism, although racism is not expressed only as racist acts. Racism subordinates people and diminishes their importance; stereotyping is one of the most insidious forms of such subordination. The stereotypes that underlie social discourse about race influence how others perceive Black people and, to some extent, how Black people perceive themselves. Thus stereotypes help maintain and promote racism. Despite the importance of stereotypes in understanding racism and its effects on Black people, little attention has been paid to the impact of stereotypes on health. This paper explores the adverse effects of stereotypes on African American health, focusing on the psychological and structural pathways through which stereotyping operates. Psychological pathways are salient for these reasons: stereotyping constitutes a form of racism that may be experienced vicariously; stereotypes induce vigilance and rumination as people caricatured by them anticipate their use and spend time trying to disconfirm them; stereotypes may be internalized. Structural pathways occur because stereotypes that portray Black people as deviant, undeserving, and ultimately less human negatively affect opportunity structures and physical environments.

Over the past two decades, thousands of studies have demonstrated that Blacks receive lower quality medical care than Whites, independent of disease status, setting, insurance, and other clinically relevant factors. Despite this, there has been little progress towards eradicating these inequities. Almost a decade ago we proposed a conceptual model identifying mechanisms through which clinicians' behavior, cognition, and decision making might be influenced by implicit racial biases and explicit racial stereotypes, and thereby contribute to racial inequities in care. Empirical evidence has supported many of these hypothesized mechanisms, demonstrating that White medical care clinicians: (1) hold negative implicit racial biases and explicit racial stereotypes, (2) have implicit racial biases that persist independently of and in contrast to their explicit (conscious) racial attitudes, and (3) can be influenced by racial bias in their clinical decision making and behavior during encounters with Black patients. This paper applies evidence from several disciplines to further specify our original model and elaborate on the ways racism can interact with cognitive biases to affect clinicians' behavior and decisions and in turn, patient behavior and decisions. We then highlight avenues for intervention and make specific recommendations to medical care and grant-making organizations.

From “reefer madness” to “crack babies,” American drug scares demonstrate that race shapes the construction of epidemics and diagnoses. This research brief reexamines the racial construction of drug scares in light of the recent methamphetamine (meth) scare, a drug “epidemic” constructed as White and accompanied by a new diagnosis: “meth mouth.” Through examination of survey data and dental research, I challenge the evidence for both the “epidemic” upsurge in meth use and the “meth mouth” diagnosis. Given the weak evidentiary basis for epidemic and diagnosis, I offer a preliminary interpretation that the meth epidemic is constructed as symptom and cause of White status decline, with dental decay the vehicle for anxieties about descent into “White trash” status.

This article posits that the response to the AIDS epidemic among Blacks in the United States must acknowledge structural and institutional realities that render poor Black urban neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to high HIV infection rates. The controversial film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, inspires our analysis, revealing the spatial context of HIV risk and suggesting new potential avenues through which to address the epidemic at the neighborhood level. In the film, we find opportunities for institutions to serve as intermediaries among neighborhoods, families, and individuals, not only to reduce the transmission of HIV, but also to improve health management for HIV-positive inner-city residents. The film points to three potential location-based sites of intervention: (1) mental health services that treat childhood sexual trauma; (2) HIV-related health messaging and services within urban street-level bureaucracies; and (3) neighborhood access to food and dietary resources that mitigate HIV disease progression.

The Siphithemba Choir, an HIV/AIDS support group at the McCord Mission Hospital in Durban, South Africa, uses songs that conflate “Africa” and “Black Race” (abantu abamnyama) or “Black Nation” (Umnyama yezwe) to perform their experience of HIV/AIDS, thus signaling global ethnic/racial consciousness in the context of the HIV/AIDS discourse. This paper argues that the musical referencing of race and ethnicity by this group of HIV-positive South Africans could be explained as a function of related factors: the nature of the AIDS virus, the history and lingering effects of apartheid, the continuing interracial acrimony in the post-apartheid environment, and the global politics of AIDS. A combination of these factors has inevitably impacted how HIV/AIDS is perceived and interpreted through the lens of race. Hence the Siphithemba Choir's musical performance is analyzed in this paper as an expressive articulation of an African and Black experience of AIDS, and a performance of Black identity in the context of the global AIDS pandemic.

Although thriving in many respects, racial health disparities research suffers from a lack of historical analysis and may be in danger of reaching a saturation point. This article examines how renewed attention to history can enhance the explanatory power of such research. First, it surveys a body of writing on what history can contribute to contemporary social science and policy debates. Next, it compares current racial health disparities research to the analytical impasse encountered by urban poverty researchers of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It contrasts that work with two classic post-Second World War urban histories, and identifies qualities of the latter lacking in conventional social science. The essay then surveys historically oriented works on race and health, pointing out their usefulness to racial health disparities research while discussing promising future research directions. It concludes with a brief reflection on changes in the academic institutional context necessary for fruitful synergy between public health researchers and historians.

One of the most controversial figures in Black intellectual history is psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. Prominently identified as the main proponent of the idea that racial segregation led to psychological damage in Black children, Clark's work heavily influenced the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Almost immediately afterwards, his research methods and conclusions were challenged as incomplete and biased. Scholars now argue that Clark and other racial liberals became solely wedded to the idea of racial psychological damage in order to secure victory in Brown. Yet a closer analysis of his thought reveals a more complex picture. During the early 1940s, he developed a new psychological concept which he called the “zoot effect.” He defined the zoot effect as the attempt by a person to gain psychological security in a society which mandated that individual's inferiority. The zoot effect or zoot personality reflected the larger society's pathology, which manifested itself internally in individuals. This concept was heavily shaped by ideas about race, class, and in particular the work of Alfred Adler, which he first learned as a student at Howard University. Using archival and secondary sources, I argue for a reconceptualization of Clark within the broader context of his social thought, suggesting that the zoot-effect concept grounded his research on Black children and set the stage for his later views on desegregation, civil rights, and American society.

In 2004, the United States elaborately “celebrated” the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The country's mass media acclaimed May 17 as the date of a great national achievement while paying scant attention to the present racial scene in education. Yet those who believed in and fought for the racial desegregation of the nation's public schools found the widespread “celebration” grossly overstated and at best premature. With effective opposition to school desegregation unrelenting during the entire past half century, with the U.S. Supreme Court continually narrowing Brown's scope, and with African American and Hispanic American children still largely attending segregated schools, the nation's unmitigated self-congratulatory stance seemed unwarranted.