Beyond Ethnic Relations: Racial Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State in Republican France

To explain racial fissures in France today, one must revisit the structural and ideological failings in the origin of key Republican institutions. This article analyzes how the symbolic and material significance of labor structures imposed on black French citizens in the Third Republic produced differentiation in the value of labor to the nation. The production of social patterns and belief systems based on racial inequality were integrated into the structure of the French welfare state. The experience of black political actors, Hégésippe Légitimus, Blaise Diange, Lamine Senghor, and the state illustrates how the welfare state, as an engine of assimilation, defined a differential and racialized status for blacks during the process of crucial institution building. Although the majority of blacks in the French Empire were subjects during the Third Republic, the experience of those who were citizens indicates contradictions related to incorporation and race.     

Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit: Reducing Racial Inequality by Rethinking School Safety Efforts

In this essay, I examine the problem of excessive and racially disproportionate school discipline. I begin by considering how each of the four most popular Democratic candidates in the presidential primary race as of January 2020 addresses this issue. Excessive and racially disproportionate school discipline harms students, schools, and communities, and it deepens existing racial inequalities. Each candidate promises some remedy, and all represent a step in the right direction. However, all of their proposals are shallow. To fruitfully address these issues, policymakers must consider the cultural embeddedness of school discipline, how it is implemented within complex school bureaucracies, and the underlying racial inequality that shapes school discipline. Policymakers must also draw attention to the fact that schools are, overall, safe and do not require the massive investments in security personnel and technology that draw funds away from more effective supports for students.     

The Racial Dialectic: President Barack Obama and the White Racial Frame

This paper introduces the concept of the ??racial dialectic?? to describe the ways racial dialogues and policies have transformed in the wake of Barack Obama??s historic election to the presidency of the United States of America. Using public statements and behaviors from elected officials, pundits, and Obama himself as case study data, we examine the tension between what we term the hard racial frame, the soft racial frame, and the racial counterframe in the public discourses. We conclude that these competing frames produce a dialectic that has transformed the way racial issues are discussed and interpreted in the wake of Obama??s election.     

Theorizing the US Racial State: Sociology Since Racial Formation

This article reviews theoretical developments in the sociology of the US racial state since the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's groundbreaking Racial Formation in the United States. After briefly outlining their theory, it surveys the still diminutive literature and concludes by pointing to promising future directions, drawing on insights from other disciplines and incipient stirrings from within sociology. Destabilizing the unquestioned assumption that the United States is and has been a nation‐state, the article reconceptualizes it as an empire‐state. This turn establishes a firmer footing for the claim that the United States is intrinsically a racial state and yields a generative framework for reconsidering and stimulating scholarship toward more effective analysis and critique.     

Beyond the Classroom:

No abstract available for this article.     

Attachment and Racial Identity Issues:

Court battles are being wages and state laws are being challenged to enable white foster families to be considered as viable adoptive placements for black infants and young children. This article examines the issues associated with transracial adoption decision making and provides recommendations for agency practice and policy.     

Racial Salience and the Consequences of Making White People Uncomfortable: Intra‐Racial Discrimination,Racial Screening,and the Maintenance of White Supremacy

Most sociological research on racial discrimination has had an “inter‐racial” focus. That is, researchers have been principally concerned with the disparate treatment that people of color receive relative to Whites in different social contexts. However, recent theoretical work emerging from legal studies suggests that an alternative conception of “intra‐racial” discrimination exists that extends beyond colorism. This theory of intra‐racial discrimination stipulates that many organizations in the “post‐racial” era desire some measure of racial diversity. Yet, in their efforts to achieve this racial diversity they screen people of color based on their degree of racial salience. Whether a given person of color is hired, promoted, or in the case of college admissions, accepted, is a function of whether or not Whites within the organization consider them racially palatable, or not overly concerned with race. This creates an incentive for people of color to work their identity to allay any concerns among Whites that they may be too racially salient. In this paper I critically review this work and attempt to further buttress its claims by highlighting how this process has clear historical precedent. I conclude by showing how the audit method can be used to empirically examine this practice contemporarily.     

Perceived Racial Discrimination and Self-Esteem in African American Youth: Racial Socialization as a Protective Factor

Racial socialization was examined as a protective factor that might buffer African American youth from the negative effects of perceived racial discrimination. Two types of racial socialization were examined: messages about race pride and preparation for bias. One hundred twenty-eight eighth-grade African American students participated in the study. As anticipated, both types of socialization moderated the relationship between discrimination and self-esteem. The negative relationship between perceived discrimination and self-esteem was mitigated for youth who reported more messages about race pride and a moderate amount of preparation for bias from their parents. In contrast, low race pride socialization and both high and low preparation for bias were associated with a negative relationship between perceived discrimination and self-esteem.     

Middle Passages and Forced Migrations: Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century US Camps and Ships

Between 1858 and 1860, Africans liberated by the US Navy from four slave ships near the Cuban coast were detained in Federal custody before being transported for resettlement in Liberia. This article draws on the concept of ‘middle passage’ and ‘forced migration’ to explore the conditions under which the US government seized, detained, and transported Africans rescued from illegal trafficking. Looking at slave trade suppression through the lens of forced migration rather than legal process not only illuminates the traumatic aftermath of the original Middle Passage but also connects the voyages of liberated African shipmates to a broader history of coerced global movement.     

Racial Identity Matters: The Relationship between Racial Discrimination and Psychological Functioning in African American Adolescents

This study examines the interrelationships among racial discrimination, racial identity, and psychological functioning in a sample of 314 African American adolescents. Racial discrimination was associated with lower levels of psychological functioning as measured by perceived stress, depressive symptomatology, and psychological well‐being. Although individuals who believe that other groups hold more negative attitudes toward African Americans (low public regard) were at greater risk for experiencing racial discrimination, low public regard beliefs also buffered the impact of racial discrimination on psychological functioning. More positive attitudes about African Americans were also associated with more positive psychological functioning. The results further illustrate the utility of a multidimensional framework for understanding the role of racial identity in the relationship between racial discrimination and psychological outcomes among African American adolescents.     

Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption,Racial Reparation,and Racial Transitional Objects

Transnational adoption involves the intersection of two powerful origin myths—the return to mother and to motherland. In this case history of a Korean transnational adoptee, Mina, problems relating to Asian immigration, assimilation, and racialization are central to her psychic predicaments. Mina mourns the loss of Korea and her Korean birth mother as a profoundly intrasubjective and unconscious affair. Her losses trigger a series of psychical responses that reconfigure Freud's notions of melancholia not as pathological but an everyday (racial) structure of feeling and Klein's theories of good and bad objects as good and bad racialized objects, as good and bad racialized mothers. Mina's case also draws attention to the analyst as a raced subject. The “public” fact of the analyst's and the patient's shared racial difference, and the “public” nature of the analyst's pregnancy during the course of the patient's treatment, constitutes the analyst, to reformulate Winnicott, as a “racial transitional object” for Mina. As such, Mina “uses” the analyst to manage her envy and to transition into a reparative position for race, one allowing her to create space in her psyche for two “good-enough” mothers-the Korean birth mother as well as the white adoptive mother.     

The Importance of Racial Socialization: School‐Based Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity Among African American Adolescent Boys and Girls

This study examined various parental racial socialization messages as mediators between school‐based racial discrimination and racial identity formation over 4 years for African American boys (N = 639) and African American girls (N = 711). Findings indicated that school‐based racial discrimination was associated with racial identity beliefs. For African American boys, behavioral racial socialization messages mediated the relation between school‐based racial discrimination and racial centrality over time. Mediation also resulted for African American girls, but for a different set of race‐related messages (negative messages and racial barriers) and racial identity beliefs. The developmental significance of the findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

Translating culture: missionaries and linguists in contemporary Yunnan Province

In an attempt to emulate early modern missionaries to Yunnan who engaged in the invention of writing systems for various ethnic groups, contemporary evangelical missionaries in Yunnan have become heavily involved in the realm of linguistics, focused on the preservation of endangered languages. While such activity may potentially be perceived as a challenge to the state-Chinese linguistic hegemony, I argue that the presence of missionary linguists is acceptable to the Chinese authorities as it does not threaten the paramount position of Putonghua but rather serves to integrate minority people into the state system. In addition, based on interviews conducted with a missionary working to produce texts for Kunming’s Buoyi population in their language, I aim to demonstrate how missionary linguists attempt to remold local culture by attempting to reconstruct ethnic identity around a language core. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Yunnan in 2009–2010 and 2012.     

Genomics: the clinical encounter and parallels across complementary and personalized medicine

Genomics is progressing from “bench to bedside,” especially in cancer care. Referred to as precision and personalized medicine, this article casts sociological scholarship on genomic medicine into three interconnected realms: laboratory, family, and clinic. Thought to be solely and objectively discovered in the laboratory, sociological research illustrates the messiness of genetic research. The self in (late) modern times is popularly conceptualized as unique and discrete; precision medicine highlights boundedness and the molecular material shared across families. Within the clinic, sociological research has focused on the geneticization debate over the extent to which genetic ways of understanding disease have subsumed other approaches to conceptualizing and treating illness and the impact of genomics on medicine's dominance. How else is genomic medicine affecting the clinical encounter? We ask if personalized medicine unexpectedly reflects practices found in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), raising questions about what this means for modern medicine and the patient‐consumer.     

Translating Nations: Actor-Network Theory in/and Canada*

Dans l'examen des problématiques de l«identité nationale» au Canada, la sociologie critique est de plus en plus tournée vers l'analyse discursive, aboutissant à des conclusions nuancées et complexes. Or, une telle approche risque d'escamoter d'autres analyses, tout aussi utiles, qui attribuent à la technologie un rôle central dans le processus de «nation-building» au Canada. Cet article explore la sociologie de la traduction, aussi appelée théorie d'acteur-réseau, et suggère que l'emprunt d'une telle approche se prêterait à une analyse plus complète des «questions nationales» du Canada et du Québec - analyse qui intégrerait les catégories du social et de la technique. Canadian critical sociology draws increasingly from discourse analysis to work out questions of national identity in Canada, yielding complex and nuanced results, but not sufficiently engaging with other work privileging technology as a central question in Canadian nation-building. This paper explores the sociology of translation, also known as actor-network theory, and suggests that such an approach might usefully be taken up in order to provide a more complete analysis of the “national questions” of Canada and Québec that integrates both social and technological categories.     

Immobility in Moldova: Beyond the migration paradigm

This paper explores the motivations and barriers behind the decision of economically disadvantaged Moldovans to refrain from migrating for better economic prospects. Drawing on 30 qualitative interviews with voluntary stayers, it uncovers a range of individual-level characteristics that impede migration aspirations. These findings highlight the heightened sensitivity of lower-wage stayers to their perceived social status abroad, their limited adaptability to new cultures and environments and their lower willpower to endure the challenges of long-term gains. Moreover, this paper sheds light on their contentment with modest material gains and their aversion to migration risks. At the structural level, it emphasizes how social inequalities act as barriers for specific social groups, particularly the economically disadvantaged. These empirical insights challenge prevailing assumptions about the dominance of economic costs and network abroad in migration decision-making, offering a fresh perspective on the social factors and costs shaping stayers' choices.     

Translating Bourdieu: cultural capital and the English middle class in historical perspective

This article examines the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's work on culture and cultural capital can be applied to the study of the English middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide historical literature, the article argues for the significance of culture as a constitutive element of middle-class identities in England since 1800. It goes on to examine Bourdieu's ideas of 'objectivated', 'instutionalized' and 'incorporated' cultural capital, in the context of family, inheritance, education and the body. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which cultural capital has taken and emphasizes the importance of analysing family processes of intergenerational transmission.