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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern states decreed that one drop of African American blood made a multiracial individual Black, and even today, multiracial Blacks are typically perceived as being Black only, underscoring the enduring legacy and entrenchment of the one-drop rule of hypodescent. But how are Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry perceived? Based on analyses of census data and in-depth interviews with interracial couples with children and multiracial adults, I find that the children of Asian-White and Latino-White couples are much less constrained by strict racial categories. Racial identification often shifts according to situation, and individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines, as White, or as American. Like their Irish and Italian immigrant forerunners, the Asian and Latino ethnicities of these multiracial Americans are adopting the symbolic character of European, White ethnicity. We appear to be entering a new era of race relations in which the boundaries of Whiteness are beginning to expand to include new non-White groups such as Asians and Latinos, with multiracial Asians and Latinos at the head of the queue. However, even amidst the new racial and ethnic diversity, these processes continue to shut out African Americans, illustrating a pattern of “Black exceptionalism” and the emergence of a Black–non-Black divide in the twenty-first century.

Until 2008, only White candidates represented either of the two major parties as presidential nominees. Hence, little is known about how race appeals are framed by or against non-White presidential candidates. Barack Obama's election as the Democratic Party nominee allows us to investigate this issue. In this article, we conduct a content analysis of over 160 advertisements from the 2008 U.S. presidential election to examine how race appeals were framed (or countered) by each campaign. We find that the Republican campaign employed implicit racial appeals that played upon stereotypes of non-Whites as “un-American” and “other” and Blacks as “dangerous,” “criminal,” “incompetent,” and “uppity.” In contrast, the Democratic campaign de-emphasized race, portrayed “other” as positive, reinforced American identity, and spoke out against negative advertisements.

This essay charts the development of the American state during the era when Southern lynchings prevailed. Contrary to the standard interpretation that depicts the American state as having lacked the administrative and legal capacity to protect the lives of Southern Blacks, it is a more pluralist conception of state weakness for which I argue, one that characterizes the American state's behavior regarding racial violence as the deliberate, calculated act of an active state choosing not to act. The state had always possessed legal authority to prosecute lynch mobs, but the key determinant was garnering the political will to enforce the law. Examples gleaned from the Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) administrations illustrate the American government's political vacillation between acting and not acting. Examinations of two Supreme Court cases in 1966 highlight the political nature of federal rights enforcement. In light of the 1966 Supreme Court decisions in United States v. Price and United States v. Guest, the Court appears never to have repudiated or stripped the federal government of all of its authority to engage in combating racial violence. Even though the Court clearly signaled during Reconstruction that it was not going to uphold claims of rights violations of Blacks in the South, it did so without ever making a substantive decision on whether it could. Sections 241 and 242 of Title 18 of the United States Code were, in effect, placed into suspended animation; it was only when there was a political will to reengage with federal rights enforcement that the Court resuscitated these laws. In the parlance of the weak state thesis, the American state did not lose its capacity to combat racial violence; rather it simply chose not to engage.