Abstract
Introduction
“Here we are.” This is how David Brunsma, David Embrick, and Megan Nanney concluded the introductory editorial in the inaugural issue of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (SRE). Their words were meant to introduce themselves—respectively, SRE’s two founding co-editors and managing editor—and to announce the arrival of a journal both years in the making and long overdue. That was back in 2015, when the primary outlets for scholarly work on racism, race, ethnicity, and their derivatives seemed beyond the purview of mainstream sociology. A lot has happened since then. In an environment of increased contentiousness around the themes, questions, and thought paradigms that our work engages, SRE has emerged as an important and generative place for that work to go.
And, oh how far it has gone. Since SRE’s inception, the number of people who submit to, read, and cite work from the journal has grown, year over year, by leaps and bounds. Depending on the metrics you give weight to—even thorny ones like impact factor—this growth has made SRE not just the most significant outlet for scholarship on race and ethnicity within the discipline, but one with demonstrable import across disciplines and around the world.
The time is ripe to grow that growth. As the incoming co-editors, that is our task, mission, and commitment.
In these our first on-the-record remarks from our new post, we start where the journal’s inaugural introductory editorial ended: here we are. And here, the “we” is not just the two of us, or our larger editorial team (which includes Dr. Felicia Arriaga, Dr. Freeden Blume Oeur, and Don Guillory). “We” is all of us, the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities (SREM). Since day one, SREM has been SRE’s home and governing body. More importantly, we think, SREM has also been the journal’s soul—a collective through which we recognize ourselves, our relationship to one another, and our task and duty in the world. That recognition, too, has defined SRE since its inception.
Past issues of the journal have been careful to acknowledge the contributions of previous generations of scholars and scholarship while rightly charting its own course in the development and advancement of the field. Journal issues have highlighted the vision of Charles Smith and Loretta Williams—respectively, SREM’s founder and chair elect—among others. The journal’s cover boasts portraits of the movers and shakers of our field, including W. E. B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Rod Bush. Likewise, the pages of the journal have published to date the very best our field has to offer—from Moon-Kie Jung’s (2019) boundary-pushing reexamination of Black Reconstruction, to Julian Go’s (2018) call to take seriously a postcolonial study of race, and from the incomparable Tressie McMillan Cottom’s (2020) analysis of the racial capitalist dynamics of the digital age, to Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (2015) delineation of the settler colonialist framework. Finally, SRE has from its very beginning provided space for pedagogical contributions to the study of race and ethnicity, a radical idea at the journal’s inception and still radical seven years later.
We take seriously the tradition we are stepping into, that Sankofian call to look backward while moving forward, to acknowledge and honor who and what has come before us while also envisioning a way onward. We also know that, as a matter of practicality, we must do more than “take seriously” and “envision.” We must also plan and do, and we have and we will. Our editorial vision will proceed along two fronts. The first front involves what SRE publishes.
Since 2015, SRE has helped grow both theoretical and lay understandings of several areas within the study of race and ethnicity: racial and ethnic identities; the contemporary dynamics of racism, including color-blind racism; and racial attitudes. While we expect that these areas will continue to populate the pages of the journal, we also want to invite broader engagement with two areas we believe are ripe for sociological inquiry: place and process. More specifically, we welcome work that (1) treats place as an active agent in the social world (rather than merely a benign backdrop on which more meaningful social processes play out), (2) engages place-based contexts beyond the United States, and (3) recognizes race, ethnicity, and racism as dynamic social, political, and historical processes. Here, we are answering the call, explicit and not, in recent work both in and beyond the discipline: Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’s Racecraft (2014); Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson’s Chocolate Cities (2018); Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido’s edited volume Racial Formation in the Twenty-first Century (2012); and Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested (2017).
The second component of our editorial vision entails who SRE engages, be that SREM membership, colleagues across the discipline, or scholars, writer, practitioners in the larger world. In particular, we see opportunities to continue to grow the journal’s dedicated readership, decrease time spent under peer review so that important scholarship reaches that growing readership more rapidly, and diversify the avenues by which the journal disseminates key findings and novel ideas. To accomplish this, we will work toward (1) making moderate adjustments to the peer-review process and reviewer selection process, (2) developing a new section within the journal where scholars discuss and debate issues or topics relevant to the sociology of race and ethnicity, and (3) revamping the journal’s public engagement infrastructure, including its social media footprint.
Our Vision: Bring Place and Process into Focus
Place
In a 2000 review essay, Thomas Gieryn commented on sociology’s apparent unwillingness to treat “place” as a theoretically important and materially consequential unit of analysis. “Could it be that place doesn’t matter anymore?” (Gieryn 2000:463), he asked. It was perhaps a rhetorical question, but he answered anyway: “I think it does.” Other scholars, working before and since, have said and suggested the same thing—Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) “Black lives are necessarily geographic”; W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1978) “We must . . . school ourselves to the minute study of limited fields of human action” (p. 54); Zora Neale Hurston’s trek to Eatonville; and Torkwase Dyson and Danielle Purifoy’s (2017) exhibit In Conditions of Fresh Water.
With them, we agree: place matters.
Yet, to our eye, some parts of the discipline have given short shrift to the social importance of place (for more discussion, see Agnew and Duncan 1989; Bell 1997; Morris 2012). As Gieryn and others have noted, the prevailing belief seems to be that place is either a confounding factor that should be controlled away or a benign backdrop on which decidedly more important social processes play out. Each paradigm has translated to an imbalance in the discipline. The first paradigm has meant a dearth of work on “place” as a theoretical construct (for comparison, think about the proliferation of recent work theorizing race, class, and gender). The second paradigm has meant a glut of work set in urban centers such as Chicago and New York (at the expense of nonurban places and locales in the American South) and, more broadly, a bias toward U.S. social problems, movements, and patterns of inequality.
There are of course instances in which it is useful to control for place, and we recognize one of the defining pillars of sociological research is its generalizability, in which we seek patterns and truths that transcend place. Yet, we believe that place is itself a social force, with unique implications for lived experience and social outcomes. More attention toward the importance of place in sociological analysis is more likely to yield theoretically invigorating research by foregoing the taken-for-grantedness of large, U.S.-based urban centers and their populations as sites that speak for people, everywhere. Again, place matters, and a part of our editorial vision is to highlight, or perhaps complicate, that. We see this manifesting in two ways: emphasizing work that treats place as a socially meaningful unit of analysis and shifting beyond U.S.-centric approaches to sociological inquiry.
Process
For the past several years, SRE has served as a premier outlet for research on how racialized identities interact with other markers of identity, and how racialized persons and groups respond to or consider a variety of social phenomena. We believe that research that centers racial identity is deeply important, as is research that examines how various racialized persons and groups think about a variety of social phenomena. At the same time, we believe there is room to take more seriously what appears to us as taken for granted: race as process (see, for example, Byng 2013). Research that examines how racial categories manifest, under what kinds of conditions racial categories are made salient, and how those who understand themselves as members of a particular racial or ethnic group come to understand themselves in that way remain areas ripe for new growth.
To be clear, we do not see this turn to process as an attempt to address questions SRE has neglected. Past issues of SRE include important theoretical and empirical contributions: from Hana Brown and Jennifer Jones’s (2015) reconsideration of panethnicity within group formation process and Celeste Curington’s (2016) multiracial formation framework, to Whitney Pirtle’s (2021) analysis of racial formation in postapartheid South Africa. Yet, few questions remain as pertinent for this new century as the continued significance of the color line. And few scholarly needs are as urgent as the need for sociological analysis that centers how race and racism materialize and transmogrify today, across space and place.
In particular, we believe one area ripe for significant growth is that which examines how race and ethnicity are, to borrow from the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall, articulated across different contexts and within specific conjunctures: those moments of crisis, political or otherwise, in which the meanings attributed to and embedded within race, ethnicity, racism, and ethnocentrism shift and are given new directions, filled with new meanings, and made salient through different practices (see Hall 1985).
Our Editorial Team
As SRE’s new editors, we have enormous shoes to fill. Thankfully, we have an entire team to help us with this monumental lift. Joining our team as SRE’s new managing editor is Donald R. Guillory. Don is a PhD student in History at the University of Mississippi, a nationally recognized pop culture expert, and co-host of the Necronomi.com podcast, where he provides social commentary on the horror genre. Don is also author of The Token Black Guide that discusses and examines experiences and perspectives (historical and personal) on race in America. Don is succeeding Kevin Zevallos as Managing Editor. We are especially thankful for all of Kevin’s hard work in helping to make this transition as easy and successful as possible. Along with Kevin, we have also been fortunate to have during this transition period the assistance of Manuel (Manny) Ramirez. Manny, a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Connecticut studying race, racism, and migration, has filled in as Assistant Managing Editor and we are thankful for his time and his efforts.
Joining us as the new book review editor is Dr. Freeden Blume Ouer. Freeden is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education at Tufts University, where he researches legacies of racial trauma, traces the genealogy of debates between Black feminism and Black masculinity studies, and reflects on prayers written for schoolchildren by W. E. B. Du Bois. Freeden’s own book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-male Schools (Blume Oeur 2018), was the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Sex and Gender, the 2019 Pierre Bourdieu Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Sociology of Education, and the 2019 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Freeden will be succeeding Steve Garner, who helmed SRE’s Book Review section since its founding. We are grateful for Steve’s hard work and commitment to the vibrancy of that section.
Joining us as the new pedagogy editor is Dr. Felicia Arriaga. Felicia is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the criminology concentration at Appalachian State University. She also serves as the North Carolina Statewide Police Accountability Network Coordinator and is currently a visiting research scholar in the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. Felicia’s research interests are in the areas of race and ethnicity, immigration, and crimmigration (i.e., criminalization of immigration policy and procedure). She considers herself a public sociologist and hopes that her scholarship and community work will contribute to more fruitful discussions about issues of criminal justice accountability, transparency, reform, and abolition. In addition to her scholarship and organizing work, Felicia has written extensively about effective strategies for teaching topics related to racism, race, and ethnicity, including “Latina Educators in Sociology: Combating Trumpism with Critical Pedagogy,” written with Karina Santellano and Kimberly Higuera, and appearing in Volume 7 of SRE. Felicia is succeeding Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl, the founding editor and visionary of SRE’s Pedagogy Section.
Here we are, in these Times
Here we are, six years after SRE’s inception, enlivened by and committed to growing the journal’s growth while also aware that the scholarship that fuels that growth is not only increasingly scrutinized, but, in an ever-growing number of places, also sanctioned or outright prohibited. For instance, many of us live and work in states that have passed legislation banning “critical race theory” (CRT). It seems apparent to us that what is being banned is not simply the critical legal framework developed by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, and others. Rather, politicians and media pundits have made CRT into an empty signifier and subsequently filled it with any and all unrelated phenomena that threaten the status quo: Marxism, intersectionality, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings and workshops, and even rudimentary U.S. history.
This emergent reality has literally made it dangerous for many of us to do the work that we do, to share it widely, and to publish it in journals like SRE. And the implications are not just for us, scholars whose work variably seeks to document, understand, and empower Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor, working class, and other marginalized communities. There are broader, equally dire, and oftentimes more violent implications for those communities themselves—dismay, displacement, dispossession, and death—communities that many of us belong to, empathize with, and work to hold space for. Yet, to this moment, these threats, and their derivatives, we say what we have said, and what SRE’s preceding editorial team has said, and what the founders, shapers, and makers of the field have said, lived, and known: here we are. As editors, we are wholly committed to publishing exceptional sociological analyses of race, ethnicity, racism, and White supremacy, no matter what hard truths those analyses lay bare. The times we live in, and within which we do this work, demand nothing less from us. All of us.