Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

The interplay between race and technology has captured the attention of scholars in sociology, communication, media studies, and beyond. Previous research has focused on a range of topics including the centrality of race to the structure and function of the Internet, critiques of digital divide studies, and the phenomenon of Black Twitter. Although a robust history of critical race and digital studies exists, there has yet to be a definitive overview that traces the development of this important field. In this review, I fill this gap by delineating a genealogy of critical race and digital studies by mapping the intellectual terrain of the field. To do this, I begin with a broad overview of the history of Internet studies before reviewing key areas in the field of critical race and digital studies, including colorblind studies of the web, digital divide studies, and Black Twitter. I conclude with a focus on the ways that this body of literature can be brought forth to critically understand the implications of emerging areas of academic debate on studies of race and technology.

In his landmark work, Richard Alba predicted that white ethnicity would fade into its twilight in the twenty-first century. Where direct inquiries into American white ethnicity have been scant since the millennium’s turn, the authors use recently collected (2014), nationally representative survey data to systematically assess “postmillennial” white ethnic identification. In particular, the authors explore the prevalence of whites identifying with ethnicity today, how this compares with other groups, and how drivers of white ethnic affiliation may have shifted in recent years. The data show that all ethnic claims have declined in the twenty-first-century United States, but the retreat from ethnicity has been accelerated among whites. By the authors’ estimates, only 8.4 percent of whites still claim ethnicity. The authors also find that white ethnic affiliation is now most substantively driven by racial ideology, experience, and perceived victimhood, though some demographic markers remain important. Further analyses show that remaining American white ethnic claimants now perceive white cultural advantages while simultaneously seeing themselves as victims of racial discrimination at rates that rival reports of nonwhites. In sum, these data suggest that white ethnicity has declined but not disappeared as a socially intelligible boundary claim in the postmillennial era and that it has developed as a racialized expression that holds implications for understandings of contemporary white identities, racisms, and resentments.

The author explores how white youth interpret and produce racial ideologies in the United States from middle childhood (ages 10–13) to adolescence (ages 14–17). In Wave 1, interviews and ethnographic observations were conducted with 36 child participants living in three distinct “racial contexts of childhood” or racialized social environments. Four years later, in Wave 2, interviews were conducted with a subset of the initial youth participants. Findings show that as these young people became older, they became more confident and committed to their ideological positions on race. Furthermore, their views became more polarized from one another. This research extends existing theories claiming that white childhood is a key period of the life course during which racial ideological positions are established and solidified. This study also helps bridge the gap between research focused on how very young children begin to think about race and research focused on how young adults defend and maintain their ideological positions on race. Overall, this work suggests theoretically that white racial socialization processes in childhood play a powerful role in shaping whites’ racial ideological positions throughout the rest of their lives.

Research elucidates the gendered and racialized assumptions and practices embedded within occupational organizations but has considered less how race and gender mutually constitute the structure of the organization. The research that does interrogate how both race and gender structure organizational life for Black workers tends to focus on predominately White professional workplaces in the United States, where a White masculine or White feminine worker norm pervades. Drawing on interviews with Black African home care workers in Portugal, the author theorizes from the vantage point of Black women’s experience of work and elucidates how their narratives point to the several layers by which race and gender are embedded in organizational structures and practices that privilege White femininity in a non-U.S. work setting in which Black women make up the majority of the workforce. Black women reveal how White women colleagues’ scrutinize their labor performance unfairly, thwarting their opportunities for advancement and achieving respectful treatment within workplaces. Along with these interpersonal interactions, antiracial ideologies about the nature of the work also aid in racializing a gendered workplace that in turn makes invisible the racial tensions on the job. This research suggests that the Whiteness of an organization persists despite the “types” of workers that occupy the organizational space.

Racial inequality persists despite major advances in formal, legal equality. Scholars and policymakers argue that individual biases (both explicit and implicit) combine with subjective organizational decision-making practices to perpetuate racial inequality. The standardization of decision making offers a potential solution, promising to eliminate the subjectivity that biases consequential decisions. We ask, under what conditions may standardization reduce racial inequality? Drawing on research in science studies and law and society, we argue that standardization must be understood as a heterogeneous practice capable of producing very different outcomes depending on the details of the standard and the organizational infrastructure surrounding its use. We compare selection devices—simple quantified tools for making allocation decisions—in undergraduate admissions and child welfare to highlight the complex relationships between race and standardization. Child welfare agencies adopted a colorblind actuarial device that attempted to predict which children were most at risk and then make decisions based on those predictions. In contrast, the University of Michigan’s points system explicitly considered and valued race, with the goal of increasing minority student enrollments in the context of promoting student body diversity. Comparing these cases demonstrates how actuarial standardization practices, including those adopted with the intention of reducing racial inequality, tend to reinforce an unequal status quo by ideologically reconfiguring mutable social structures into immutable individual risk factors. In contrast, nonactuarial practices that explicitly promote racial equality are vulnerable to political challenges as they violate norms of colorblindness and cannot be defended in terms of their predictive validity.

This research concerns the location and stability of highly racially diverse census tracts in the United States. Like some other scholars, the authors define such tracts conservatively, requiring the significant presence of at least three racialized groups. Of the approximately 65,000 tracts in the country, there were 197 highly diverse tracts in 1990 and 998 in 2010. Most were located in large metropolitan areas. Stably integrated highly diverse tracts were the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of highly diverse tracts transitioned to that state from being predominantly White. Those that transitioned from being highly racially diverse were most likely to transition to being majority Latino. Although the absolute level of metropolitan racial diversity has no effect on the stability of high-diversity tracts, change in both metropolitan-scale racial diversity and population raise the probability of a tract’s transitioning to high diversity. Metropolitan-scale racial diversity did not affect the stability of highly diverse tracts, but it did alter the patterns of succession from them. The authors also found that highly diverse tracts were unstable and less likely to form in metropolitan areas with high percentages of Blacks. Increased metropolitan-level diversity mutes this Black population share effect by reducing the probability of high-diversity tract succession to a Black majority.

Using 11 high-grossing post-9/11 Hollywood films on terrorism and the Middle East, the author analyzes how films racialize Muslim identities in service to Islamophobia. This research brings together racialization theory with analysis of political ideologies that illustrate visualized racialized meanings on Muslim identities. The racialized portrayals of Muslim bodies inscribed in the political rhetoric of the War on Terror follow a systemic process of ethnoracial cultural othering that objectifies, vilifies, and dehumanizes Muslim identities. The author demonstrates how films engage in the political processes of racial construction of Muslim identities by criminalizing their gendered identity, dehumanizing their body, and devaluing their territorial and physical space in the context of the War on Terror.

Beginning with President Trump’s speech against the national anthem protestors in September 2017, the authors consider how external sociopolitical events interacted with the network structure of the 2017 National Football League (NFL) to alter the salience of member identities and the resultant patterns of protest activity within the league. Using group membership data on the full population of 2,453 football players, the analysis tracks protest participation by membership in race and status groups and by the network variables of degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality. Black and elite players are both overrepresented among protesters throughout the season. The margins of overrepresentation narrowed during an increase in demonstrations after Trump’s first criticisms but had widened by the end of the season. The mean centralities of the protesting groups varied from week to week because of an increase in the salience of the NFL player identity and its interaction with racial identities. In general, protesters had lower mean degree and closeness centralities and a higher mean betweenness centrality than players who abstained from protest. Those who participated in high-risk forms of activism also tended to have lower mean degree and closeness centralities and a higher mean betweenness centrality than those who opted for low-risk demonstrations. These findings indicate that sociopolitical events can implicate different identities, changing their salience in the decision to join or abstain from a social movement.

The authors investigate how American and Dutch rock music consumers navigate the whiteness of rock music practice and discourse. In doing so, they address the complex connection between aesthetic categories (popular music) and ethnoracial categories and to what extent this relationship is open or resistant to structural change. Connecting literature on the racialization of cultural genres and on symbolic violence, the authors demonstrate how authentication through faithfulness to preestablished sociocultural configurations reinforces the whiteness of rock music consumption in both countries in very similar ways. The analysis of 27 in-depth interviews produces a threefold typology of positions that rock consumers take up vis-à-vis the sociocultural configuration of rock music authenticity: complying, amending, and replacing. From a position of complicity to this configuration, people of color are often a priori regarded as inauthentic participants, also by outsiders who consider them to “act white.” However, the analysis indicates that the shift toward a symbolic economy of authenticity enables actors to resist white hegemony as discursive authenticity at the expense of the more rigid dispositional and agentic variations underlying symbolic violence. This allows an active amending of the hegemonic configuration within the genre—authenticity maneuvering—by replacing the discourse, forging new spaces of consumption, and installing heavily policed inclusive practices.