Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

More scholars are examining the diverse ways Black men are participating in family life outside of the conventional White middle and upper middle-class ideal of primary economic providership. Research findings reveal that Black men often replace the primary economic earner family participation practice, with family participation practices steeped in expressive forms of emotional care and support for their children. However, this practice has largely been examined among poor Black fathers, resulting in a dearth of sociological and gender scholarship on Black middle-class men’s gender perspectives of providership and masculinity. An analysis of interviews with 20 married and single heterosexual Black middle-class men shows that heterosexual Black middle-class men stand behind economically co-providing with Black women as well as enact head of household and moral backbone gender displays. These gender displays express decision-making power (head of household), and emotional care and support of romantic partners and children (moral backbone), but in masculine essentialist ways. This article argues that economic co-providership and the enactment of head of household and moral backbone gender displays are outgrowths of a Black patriarchal culture of family egalitarianism. These outcomes observed show the complicated relationship between egalitarianism and the persistence of patriarchy among Black middle-class men as it relates to their social position in the household.

Much of the urban research on the daily experiences of Black men in American society has focused on Black men as perpetrators, as victims of street and gang violence, or with some carceral connection. These earlier studies highlight how racist tropes of Black men as dangerous and thus to be feared situate Black men for continuous, targeted, and aggressive actions by the state and other social actors. This places a social tax on Black men who are then bound to exercises of embodied negotiations in public social spaces where they navigate both being shunned and “disappeared” while also hyper-visible. Drawing on ethnographic data collected across several years, this article examines how Black men are targeted for aggression in mobile public spaces in Chicago, Illinois. We use public transportation as a space of interrogation because of the uniqueness of mobile places where riders and transit personnel are temporarily confined while mobile and with limited options to escape the dangers of racism and racial aggression. In these spaces, we find that (1) Black men are threatened with harm, (2) their bodies are treated as sites of fear, and (3) their well-being is risked through an institutional breach of duty to provide safety for them as passengers and transit personnel.

Sociodemographic inequalities in student achievement are a persistent concern for education systems and are increasingly recognized to be intersectional. Intersectionality considers the multidimensional nature of disadvantage, appreciating the interlocking social determinants which shape individual experience. Intersectional multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA) is a new approach developed in population health but new to educational research. In this study, we introduce and apply this approach to study sociodemographic inequalities in student achievement across two cohorts of students in London, England. We define 144 intersectional strata arising from combinations of student age, gender, free school meal status, special educational needs, and ethnicity. We find substantial stratum-level variation in achievement composed primarily by additive rather than interactive effects with results stubbornly consistent across the two cohorts. We conclude that policymakers should pay greater attention to multiply marginalized students and intersectional MAIHDA provides a useful approach to study their experiences.

Teacher perceptions of and decisions about students’ academic ability and behavior are key to the micro-level production and maintenance of inequality at the intersection of gender, race, and disability in schools, yet we know little about how these micro-level processes relate to meso-level features. Using an experimental survey design of 369 factorial vignettes, I tested for racial and gender differences in 276 teachers’ ratings of referral to begin disability evaluations—what I call the deployment of disability—across 115 Wisconsin schools with varying racial compositions. Findings show that teachers in schools with low proportions of White students were less likely to deploy disability for White girls than all other students; these disparities closed or reversed as teachers’ schools increased in proportion White. Results also suggest that White boys with academic difficulties were perceived as more likely disabled than their male peers of color—only in schools with more Black students. These results provide mixed evidence that “racial distinctiveness” triggers teachers’ racialized and gendered deployment of disability. School composition effects provide empirical evidence of the social construction of disability, its intersection with race and gender, and that this construction emerges as an aspect of context as well as through individual teachers’ behaviors.

Though racial integration of non-White minorities was initially considered unlikely, Asian Americans’ high rates of intermarriage with Whites suggest a new possibility. Recent research, however, reveals that Asian American intermarriage occurs in ethnically heterogeneous manners and further varies by spousal race and ethnicity. This study delves into the varied patterns of marital racial integration among Asian Americans, examining intermarriage data from the American Community Survey (ACS). In examining both interethnic and Asian-White interracial marriages, I find that Asian Americans continue to experience segmented assimilation in intermarriage, where their paths diverge by spousal race. Yet, ethnically heterogeneous understandings and experiences of one’s social position as “Asian” situate Asian Americans at varying distances from the mainstream White society, leading some Asian Americans to intermarry without having achieved acculturation or middle-class attributes. These findings challenge the presumed linear trajectory of minority incorporation, underscoring the pivotal role of race and racialization. This complexity further carries significant implications for broader American race relations

The construction of Latines as a racially homogenous group in the U.S. obscures the various contestations and negotiations that differently racialized Latines undergo as a result of the racial dynamics in place within Latinidad. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Latine students at Overton University, I show the kinds of ethnoracial contestations that occur among Latines as they negotiate what it means to take on that panethnic identity. I find that Latines construct Latine ethnoracial legitimacy around notions of racial “Brownness” and cultural “Mexicanness,” and argue that these constructions, which are rooted in anti-Blackness, lead to the exclusion of those on the racial margins of Latinidad. I also argue that the existence of these dynamics in settings that are meant to foster inclusivity and community building demonstrates the limitations of framing Latines as a panethnic and racially homogenous group and highlights the need to understand the hierarchies in place among Latines in the U.S.

Following a long sociological tradition examining the intersection between social institutions and race, we analyze how South Carolina’s historical state legislation constructed and used racial categories during a period of considerable social upheaval. We identify over 500 statutes between 1850 and 1920 pertaining to Black-White relations, examine the usage of racial labels in these statutes—their content, frequency, and context—and assess how labeling practices responded to changes in state-level power dynamics, demographics, and economic structures. We find that changes in labeling schemes evolved in response to an increasingly complex division of labor in a way that reflects legislators’ efforts to shape race relations in their own interests. Rather than racial classifications eroding, they became more general and flexible over this period, preserving a White-other boundary.