Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

How have sociologists engaged the late philosopher Charles Mills’ landmark The Racial Contract (1997) in the twenty-five years since its publication? I first synthesize and periodize the corpus of sociological research citing The Racial Contract into two chronological and epistemological waves. The first wave (1997-2009) is distinguished by the scholarship of a vanguard who drew on the text, and direct engagement with Mills himself, in a paradigmatic shift away from the sociological study of race relations to the study of racism. The second wave (2010-present) is characterized by a fivefold increase in the text’s citation, tied to a resurgence of Du Boisian sociology and the early-career projects of a new generation of sociologists, as the text diffused from the sociology of race into other subfields of the discipline. I then go on to describe the influence of The Racial Contract on theory, data, and method in my own scholarship on racialization, first during my graduate studies in the United States, and later, as Sociology faculty in Canada at the University of Toronto, Mills’ alma mater. I end the essay with proposals for how a third wave of sociological engagement with The Racial Contract can more rigorously engage the text’s originating relationship to feminist political theory, as well as more actively be in dialogue with a new generation of critical philosophers who are already speaking back to us by centrally drawing on the work of sociologists.

Critical race scholars lost a true comrade with the passing of renowned philosopher, Charles Wade Mills, on September 20, 2021. Along with his larger corpus, Mills’ landmark text, The Racial Contract, remains a beacon to scholar-activists across many disciplines, sociology included. Here, I reflect personally and sociologically on our inheritance from Mills’ incredible legacy. Beyond core concepts that will (and should) live on in sociologists’ work, Mills’ life and practice impart invaluable lessons. These include attuning to one’s embodiment and pleasure, using mainstream tools for radical ends, and recognizing the need for transdisciplinarity in ongoing resistance to white supremacy.

In The Racial Contract Charles Mills argues that the social contract is an epistemological theory that is steeped in white supremacy. I do two things in this essay. First, I use my personal experiences in graduate school to show how gate keeping in academia is still perpetuated via promoting scholarship that was created for white experiences by white scholars. I use Mills’ work to highlight how scholars of color who study communities of color are still struggling with theoretical frameworks that do not adequately explain or represent the lived experiences of the populations they are studying. In the second portion of the essay, I call on race scholars in the United States to think more broadly about colonialism and global racism, something that Charles Mills advocates for in The Racial Contract.

At the nexus of legislation and education lies a vigorous debate regarding teaching about racial and ethnic relations in U.S. schools. Applying critical race structuralism (CRS), a new contribution to the field, this research explores Charles Mills’ Racial Contract as a pedagogical tool to help meet the needs of twenty-first-century learners. The article examines the following question: How can teaching Charles Mills’ Racial Contract from a CRS perspective expand pedagogical practices for educators? The findings suggest that applying CRS can help prepare educators to engage learners in diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and beyond. This work has implications for teachers, students, policy makers, and global citizens interested in mediating the effects of racism in schools and society.

Much research documents the systems of racism that undergird the rise of school choice policies and charter schools, racialized organizations that reproduce racial logics. While school choice policy gets enacted at the structural level to enable the formation of charter schools, policy also interacts with a localized neighborhood context where space must be allocated to the charter school. As race scholars show, space is itself racialized. How does this localized allocation of racial space shape intra-group dynamics in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood? Evidence for this study comes from two years of ethnographic participant-observation and informal conversations with parents in a traditional public school and a charter school in a large Northeastern city. Findings show how threats to the material boundaries of school space activate symbolic boundaries between parents from each school, drawing from racialized organizational identities of traditional public schools as representing neighborhood loyalty and anti-gentrification resistance positioned against charter schools as representing dominant whiteness, superiority, and social mobility. I conclude with a discussion of implications for broader studies of racialized space and organizations, culture, and collective action.

With concepts like structural racism and social determinants of health currently trending in both academic and public discourse, examining the health consequences of legacies of racism in the built environment is increasingly timely. Resource scarcity in neighborhoods and the emergence of resource deserts in urban cities are critical sources of urban social inequality. As research shows how the sociodemographic makeup of neighborhoods can predict resident access to important material resources like grocery stores, pharmacies, and parks, exploring how this lack of access might impact health is imperative. Employing an environmental justice framework, this study brings together scholarship on environmental racism and stress theory to explore the impacts of spatial inequality on health at the neighborhood level. Using public-use data from the American Community Survey (ACS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry, and local and state government sources, the author examines the influence of co-occurring resource scarcity (i.e., multiply-deserted areas [MDAs]) on health in neighborhoods across urban cities in the American South. Results indicate that MDAs have higher prevalence of physical inactivity, asthma, diabetes, and obesity compared to neighborhoods with low or no resource scarcity. In addition, across MDAs, neighborhoods that are predominantly Black have higher prevalence of physical inactivity, asthma, diabetes, and obesity relative to nonpredominantly Black neighborhoods. Results also suggest that higher income MDAs have lower obesity prevalence compared with low-income MDAs. Findings contribute to a growing area of literature connecting and examining the structural racism-health connection.

An underappreciated aspect of critical race theory (CRT) is its analysis of the intersection of race, law, religion, and spirituality. These topics are of concern to critical race theorists because a complete critique of U.S. law must account for how religion is embedded in the nation’s founding documents and subsequent jurisprudence. Recently, leading scholars have called for a theory that accounts for the codefining quality of race, racism, and religion. I argue that CRT is an appropriate answer to these calls. I demonstrate CRT’s utility by renewing the religion and spirituality-based critique of race law that undergirds early CRT. Then, I discuss the spirituality of CRT, noting its founders’ reliance on Christian tradition and the spiritual claims in its tenets. Finally, I suggest future lines for research and show how CRT speaks to several debates among religious practitioners and academic researchers.

In this article, we identify and develop the specific anti-Indigenous subframe of the long dominant larger white racial frame. Using sociological concepts of systemic racial oppression, we show how the anti-Indigenous subframe co-naturalizes race concepts and specific racist language, embedding a deep and lasting negative framing of Native Americans in the U.S. society. We utilize the Google Ngram Viewer for digitized document identification and retrieval, an important social science tool for finding major historical documents for analysis. Using important documents, we identify a very specific language of Indigenous oppression and examine its central role in anti-Indigenous racial framing, past and present. We demonstrate how powerful and influential political, religious, and scholarly figures and major institutions have developed this racist framing over centuries of systemic Indigenous oppression in the United States. Our analysis adds to the body of social science knowledge by explicating how Indigenous oppression on a systemic level has been perpetuated, rationalized, and legitimated by means of a broad white racial frame and its powerful anti-Indigenous subframe.

Scholars seeking to understand the consequences of historical regimes of violence and social control frequently turn their attention to lynching and its legacy. More recently, however, a small but growing body of scholarship across the social sciences has expanded the scope of this work by additionally focusing on slavery and, most notably, its enduring negative consequences for African-Americans in the U.S. South. Despite providing a more robust understanding of slavery’s effects across numerous spheres, slavery’s legacy of social control—in particular, its link to modern law enforcement—remains a frontier in need of further investigation. Moreover, a central theoretical weakness of this historical racial violence and social control literature has been the absence of attention given to the mechanisms that are a part of slavery’s legacy. This article addresses these issues by using quantitative techniques to examine the relationship between prior slave dependence and contemporary Black-White disparities in arrest rates. In Southern counties where slave dependence was greater in the past, today there exists greater disparities in the Black-White arrest rate for drug and violent crime related offenses. While slavery exerts direct effects, its legacy also persists indirectly by shaping population distributions and local levels of interracial threat and structural disadvantages facing minority communities. This article establishes empirically the extent to which dehumanizing institutions like slavery continue to blight state-run social control apparatuses in the South—notably law enforcement—and develops theoretical explanations of the mechanisms that are a part of slavery’s legacy.