The year 2008 has provided many opportunities to look back and take stock of what has and has not changed along the color line. Perhaps of greatest salience is that this year marks four decades of uneven progress since the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It also marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of what became known as the Kerner Commission report (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968). The great sadness following those tragic deaths, and the somber tone set by the “two nations” declaration at the heart of the Kerner Report, call to mind an era of acute racial division, but also of steady struggle for change.

There is a lively debate about the causes of racial residential segregation. Counter to the racial-proxy hypothesis (Harris 1999, 2001), we argue that race, per se, continues to be influential when Whites make housing decisions. Using a survey-based experiment, we ask: Does information about neighborhood racial composition influence how Whites judge the quality of that neighborhood, quite apart from the actual characteristics of the homes located in it? A random sample of adults aged twenty-one and older in the Chicago and Detroit metropolitan areas watched videos embedded in a face-to-face interview. These videos portrayed neighborhoods ranging from lower working class to upper class. All respondents saw the same neighborhoods but were randomly assigned to see either (1) White residents, (2) Black residents, or (3) a mix of both White and Black residents. Respondents then evaluated the neighborhoods in terms of housing cost, property upkeep, safety, trajectory of housing values, and quality of the schools. Results show that Whites who saw White residents rated the neighborhood more positively on four of five dimensions than did Whites who saw the identical neighborhood with Black residents; racially mixed neighborhoods fell in between. In addition, Whites who endorsed negative stereotypes about Blacks were more likely to give low evaluations to neighborhoods with Black residents than were Whites who did not endorse stereotypes.

A basic tenet of public health is that there is a robust relationship between socioeconomic status and health. Researchers widely accept that persons at average or median levels of socioeconomic status have better health compared to those at lower levels—with a detectable, if diminishing, gradient at even higher levels of socioeconomic status. The research on which this tenet is based, however, focuses largely on Whites, especially on White men. Yet according to the full range of extant findings, the magnitude and in some cases the direction of this relationship vary considerably for other demographic groups.

I argue that the failure to clearly qualify study conclusions when they are restricted to the study of Whites impedes our understanding of the varying relationship between socioeconomic status and health for different demographic groups. Such an impediment is particularly harmful when considering health inequalities among populations defined by race and ethnicity. Frameworks and models based on traditional socioeconomic measures may mask heterogeneity, overestimate the benefits of material resources, underestimate psychosocial and physical health costs of resource acquisition for some groups, and overlook the value of alternative sociocultural orientations. These missed opportunities have grave consequences: large racial/ethnic health disparities persist while the health disadvantages of Black Americans continue to grow in key aspects. A new knowledge base is needed if racial/ethnic health disparities are to be eliminated, including new guiding theoretical frameworks, reinterpretations of existing research, and new empirical research. This article aims to initiate discussion on all three dimensions.

This article focuses on the construction and reconfiguration of race in the U.S. South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much literature on race is designed to show that race is socially constructed, with the inference that race is merely a social construction. Thus, talk about race, which is not demonstrably grounded in human biology, must be akin to talk about unicorns. But so what? Does race being a social construction make any difference to the historical accounts we give of how racial practices work? This article suggests that it can if we focus on the process of construction itself, in a particular time and place, and ask how race was socially constructed. I trace how race was made, unmade, and remade in the years between 1865 and 1920. During the postemancipation era, Southern White elites constructed race as and through naturalized relations of dependence and independence. This construction was held in place and then undermined by the prevailing social order. I offer an account of the sharp increase in racist practices at the turn of the century, focused on the notion of mobility. I show how, in the decades since the war, mobility undermined race as it had been socially constructed.

This paper examines the role of racial ideology in shaping U.S. colonial policy in the Philippines during the early years of American rule in the islands c. 1898–1905. The first section of the essay focuses on congressional debates between pro- and anti-imperialist lawmakers regarding the annexation and governance of the Philippines. The imperialist lobby advocated a paternalistic racial ideology to advance their case for American annexation, citing “the White man's burden” to civilize Filipinos as their rationale for colonizing the islands. The anti-imperialists, on the other hand, employed an ideology of aversive racism to oppose the incorporation of the Philippines, suggesting that annexation would unleash a flood of Filipino immigrants into the United States, thus creating a “race problem” for White citizens. Frequent unfavorable comparisons with Blacks, Chinese, and “Indians” were employed to produce racial knowledge about Filipinos who were unfamiliar to most Americans. This knowledge served as the basis for excluding Filipinos from American citizenship on racial grounds. The second section of the article traces the implementation of an institutionalized racial order in the Philippines, examining a series of population surveys conducted by colonial officials during the first years of American rule. These surveys employed American-style racial classifications that ranked and evaluated the various races and “tribes” that were identified in the islands. This project culminated in the first official census of the islands in 1905, which formally institutionalized racial categories as an organizing principle of Philippine society.

Employing postcolonial critical international relations theory as its theoretical bedrock, this article uses the U.N.-U.S.-French-led humanitarian intervention in Haiti in 2004 to examine top-tier states' claims to universal human rights and bottom-tier states' claims to sovereign national democratic rights. This article critically interrogates both the theoretical and policy assumptions of an emergent interventionism by the North into the South, and examines Haitian social forces and their pan-African allies (CARICOM, the AU, and CBC), who are opposed to the universalist appropriation and imposition of a rights domain that curtails freedom in the international arena.

In this paper we approach, from a different angle than previous research, the question of whether gains in descriptive representation for African Americans result in losses in substantive representation. By looking at how the presence of African Americans has changed Congress over time, we assess the long-term impact of electing more African Americans to Congress on substantive representation. Specifically, we content analyze House floor debates on civil rights legislation, from 1957 to 1991, and find that Black members have influenced how White members talk about civil rights.

We explore the gender gap in college completion among Blacks and Whites. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we examine how early school achievement and educational expectations affect attainment by following a nationally representative sample of youths from 1988 (approximately age fourteen) to 2000 (approximately age twenty-six). The odds of attaining an associate's or a bachelor's degree among Black women are greater than the odds among White men after controlling for family socioeconomic status. However, the difference between Black men and White men is additionally dependent on differences in middle school and high school achievement and in high school sequencing.

Whether to provide reparations to African Americans for the atrocities of slavery and segregation is arguably the most controversial public matter concerning race in the United States today. This debate, a clash over the economics and ethics of equality, is nothing less than a struggle over the future of racial identity, race relations, and racial progress in the current post–civil rights movement era.

With the stakes for African Americans so high, and the prospects for affirmative action dim, public intellectuals have weighed in heavily on each side of the issue. Randall Robinson—author of the best-known work advocating for reparations, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000)—and David Horowitz—the reparationist movement's most reviled nemesis and author of Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery (2002)—have become the alpha and omega of almost any deliberation on Black reparations.

Not surprisingly, rancorous rhetoric has often overshadowed rigorous research on the veracity of antireparations and proreparations claims. This essay aims to correct this problem with an extensive analysis of David Horowitz's (2002) arguments, providing a synthesis of data, concepts, theories, and methodologies from the disciplines of sociology, history, economics, and anthropology. This essay finds that Horowitz's use of academic scholarship to discredit African American reparations fails to meet the “scientific” standards he demands of his opponents.