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.

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.”

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines how meaning is made of White racial identity by comparing two White racial projects assumed antithetical—White nationalists and White antiracists. While clear differences abound, they make meaning of Whiteness and racial “others” in surprisingly similar ways. Racial identity formation is structured by understandings of Whiteness as dull, empty, lacking, and incomplete (“White debt”) coupled with a search to alleviate those feelings through the appropriation of objects, discourses, and people coded as non-White (“Color capital”). Drawing from in-depth semi-structured interviews, fourteen months of ethnographic observations, and content analysis, this article demonstrates how the prevailing meanings of Whiteness, not their antithetical political projects or material resources, enable racial identity management. By examining seemingly antithetical White formations, the article illuminates not only striking differences but how divergent White actors similarly negotiate the dominant expectations of Whiteness.

Over the last few decades social movements and race scholars have begun to uncover and critically examine the social, economic, and political linkages shared between Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Much of this literature has focused exclusively on the period of the Civil Rights Movement with particular emphasis on the Young Lords and Black Panthers. Despite this rich and informative literature, we know very little of the connective social histories and relationships between African Americans and Puerto Ricans that preceded these later social movements. This article traces the historically contingent and multifaceted ways in which African American journalists, between 1942 and 1951, found new political meanings in Puerto Rico as the island underwent a massive economic and social transformation, and how they used that knowledge to reconceptualize challenges to Black personhood in the United States. Examining the Black popular press in Puerto Rico during this period reveals that Black journalists took an active interest in the island because it represented a useful point of comparison for understanding the internal colonial model of social inequality hampering the U.S. African American community during the first half of the twentieth century. The racialized nature of U.S. colonialism experienced by the island, the sociopolitical and economic effects of its monocultural sugar economy, and the second-class citizenship of Puerto Ricans were among the most salient factors that led African American journalists to a broader anti-imperialist understanding of racism, illuminating the lack of civil and economic rights Blacks experienced within the United States.

Much has been written lately in both the popular and academic press about the “Browning” of America and the changing nature of race and ethnic relations in the United States. This has been largely the result of the precipitous increase in the Latino population and its profound change on the demographic landscape in the United States. For example, the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2010) has shown the Latino population grew from 35.3 million in 2000 to over 50 million in 2010 (p. 3). The Latino population now represents 16% of the total U.S. population and has surpassed African Americans as the largest racial-ethnic population at the turn of the century. Recent demographic projections calculate that by 2050 the Latino population will increase to an estimated 128 million or 29% of the national total. As Rumbaut (2009) writes, in that year it will exceed the combined total of all other racial minorities (primarily African American and Asian) in the United States (p. 17).

In March of 1969, a Black man from Detroit named Abdul-Rasheed Karim arrived at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, after spending two years locked up in prison and a psychiatric ward for a fight that started when he was assaulted by three White boys, then brutalized by the police who responded. Mr. Karim, who suffered two broken ribs, a cracked tooth, and a deep skull laceration, made the mistake of hitting one of the officers who were beating him with clubs. As Metzl quotes, the clinical evaluation that led to Mr. Karim's transfer to Ionia noted “cultural retardation is thus a significant factor in his schizophrenic disease” because he had been “socialized toward ghetto survival” (p. 143) as a child. The doctor interpreted Mr. Karim's Islamic beliefs as “religious delusions,” writing, “his identification with the Black Muslim group is a projection of his feelings of inadequacy” (p. 143). Once at Ionia, doctors treated Mr. Karim's hostility toward authority figures by confining him to a maximum supervision ward where he was injected daily with escalating doses of antipsychotic drugs.

In 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois warned of an approaching backlash of racialized crime control and the two-pronged threat this posed to Black civil society. These were not altogether new threats—American criminal law and crime control practices had always been mechanisms of racialized societal exclusion—but Du Bois anticipated unprecedented levels of Black criminalization and incarceration in the second half of the twentieth century, and some of the collateral damage that would ensue. Du Bois's (1930) warning focused on juvenile crime and justice, “a problem which one can easily see among the better colored people of New York and Philadelphia, of Indianapolis and Chicago, of Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and all of our major cities” (p. 352). Du Bois (1916) had long been concerned with issues of child development and youth justice, since the fate of the “immortal child” inevitably defined the prospects and conditions of the race (Diggs 1976).