Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

Rezoning public school attendance boundaries offers important possibilities for promoting school integration; however, it tends to generate contentious debates, often with white, middle-class parents furiously opposing school reassignments. In this paper, we ask: what logics and discourses do race and class-privileged parents draw on to justify educational inequities, and how are such discourses employed? To explore these questions we analyze a high school rezoning controversy in the Williamsburg-James City County School Division in Eastern Virginia. We conducted a content analysis of public commentary collected from school board meetings, two district-administered surveys, and social media and local news outlets. We bring together Critical Race and Settler Colonial theoretical perspectives to argue that white, middle-class parents and residents mobilized the intertwined logics of private property and whiteness to claim entitlement to the highly ranked Jamestown High School. They did so by combining well-worn colorblind, deficiency frameworks with argumentative logics that leveraged their position as property owners in affluent neighborhoods. First, they linked home ownership in expensive, residential subdivisions to “responsible parenting,” “freedom,” and “choice.” Second, they constructed the social bonds and “community” forged in overwhelmingly white, high-cost, residential sub-divisions as valuable to schools, making residents deserving of assignment to “the best school.” This analysis sheds crucial light on the discursive linkages between color-blind racism and white private property and how white, class-privileged parents mobilize these deeply intertwined logics to defend entitlement to educational resources.

While a large body of literature examines Black parents’ racial socialization, few studies have employed a sociological lens to explore parents’ own racial learning and how it relates to the implicit and explicit messages they send their children. Based on an ethnographic study of Black parents’ experiences and educational engagement in a predominantly white Midwestern suburb, this article uses a racial learning framework to examine how Black parents’ own racialized, place-based experiences relate to the lessons they attempt to teach their children about race and racism. The research reveals that parents’ racial socialization practices were influenced by their own racial learning and experiences in the predominantly white suburban context, their children’s experiences in the local schools, and for some parents, the things they learned with and from other Black families in school and community organizational spaces. The research findings illustrate the importance of understanding Black parents’ own place-based racial learning and how it shapes and informs their efforts to support their children’s wellbeing and academic success, particularly in predominantly white school districts and communities.

This study focuses on the gendered racial microaggressions that Black undergraduate women experience while attending a historically predominately white university. Expanding from the racial microaggression literature, gendered racial microaggressions demonstrate how race is gendered and how gender is racialized for Black women. Because Black women experience dual oppression, the microaggressions they receive should be examined from an intersectional perspective. My study helps fill in the gaps of literature by taking an intersectional perspective to explore and center Black college women’s experiences with gendered racism by examining the gendered racial microaggressions they experience within the classroom and in general areas on campus. This study took a qualitative approach to uncover Black women’s experiences with microaggressions at a white university. I interviewed 25 Black undergraduate women who attended a flagship university in the Midwest. Gendered racial microaggressions showed up in themes of hypervisibility within classroom settings and invisibility in general spaces on campus. Within classroom settings, Black undergraduate women’s race and gender were seen as hypervisible and were microaggressed by white classmates and white faculty. On the contrary, in general spaces on campus, Black women were ignored or excluded from conversations with white students. Both invisibility and hypervisibility speak of Black women’s marginalization. Their experiences demonstrate the ways that both sexist and racist ideas about Black women and their abilities contribute to their marginalization, invalidation, and erasure on campus.

Racial disparities in gynecological health have persisted over time. Interestingly, there is a dearth of research that centers Black women’s experiences with gynecologists and even less research that uses Black feminist theory and methods. We use semi-structured interviews (N = 39) to understand the sexual health care related experiences of Black women at a Predominately White Institution (PWI) and a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). We found that the following themes captured Black women’s experiences: (1) Feeling Ignored, (2) Having Their Intelligence Insulted, (3) Receiving Proper Help and Education, (4) Benefits of Concordance across Race and Sex Categories, (5) Discomfort Due to Sexual Taboos, (6) Perceived Medical Racism, (7) Impact of other Intersectional Identities, and (8) No Impact. Implications for enhancing experiences with sexual health care appointments and improving patient provider relationships are discussed.

Sociological research has documented the various strategies employed by members of stigmatized populations to mitigate the negative social effects of these identities in everyday life. Furthermore, social and political campaigns have called for efforts toward destigmatizing identities. However, we know much less about how these groups come to aim for destigmatization and how individuals navigate multiple stigmas simultaneously or intersectional stigmas. Drawing on four years of ethnographic data, I use the case of Black gay men to articulate a form of stigma response that prioritizes the “stigmatized” rather than attending to the smoothness of interactions with a potential stigmatizer. I illustrate how the confines of multiple forms of stigma can make existing stigma response techniques, like passing and covering, untenable. I offer the term, “unspoiling” to account for the ways that some members of stigmatized populations reject the Goffmanian notion that these identities would be perpetual marks of inferiority. In so doing, I articulate an intersectional understanding of (de)stigmatization processes by attending to groups that are overlooked in mainstream efforts to focus solely on either race or sexuality. These findings add to the growing literature of stigma management response techniques and challenge the conversation of larger group destigmatization processes. This work reveals the contested process of stigma negotiation as young Black gay men debate the appropriate strategies to combat stigma in their local communities. Ultimately, unspoiling is a strategy borne out of tense discussions about the (un)acceptability of passing or covering one’s sexual identity.

The Great Migration of African Americans and La Gran Migración of Puerto Ricans enabled socio-political affinities and tensions to develop in reaction to racial formations in spaces that became Black and Puerto Rican dominant. I link these racial formations to Muñoz’s nomenclature “Brownness,” which describes a shared experience of marginalization from existing outside of White and sexual normativity. I show how affective solidarity and tensions are operationalized within the exotic dance setting, “Divine Dancers.” Divine Dancers are a Black and Puerto Rican collective of women who convene to perform in exotic dance shows for other women. I analyze the disciplining of Puerto Rican masculine-presenting women through a racialized lens. As the most prized gendered sexuality among Divine Dancers, dom identity reflects racialized, gendered, and sexualized discourses that participants draw upon to position themselves as “authentically” masculine.

This qualitative study examined how inclusion or exclusion from the boundaries of “Asian-ness” shaped how young adults of Asian origin experienced and navigated police encounters. Respondents’ accounts suggest that being racialized as Asian guarded against aggression and disrespectful tone and behaviors from the police, attributing neutral police treatment to generalizations about Asians as docile, law-abiding, and non-threatening. However, those who described being racialized as something other than Asian reported more negative police treatment. I argue that the differential racialization of these young adults led to divergent policing experiences via status construction. How individuals interact with each other is partly shaped by their perceived racial-ethnic status. However, how others classify one’s racial-ethnic status does not necessarily follow the ethno-racial pentagon. Thus, these findings elucidate how racialization processes reproduce inequality within—not merely between—existing monolithic racial-ethnic categories.