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This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.

Research suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a marginalized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup. This evidence has primarily focused on Asian Americans, Latinos, and Middle Eastern people, who are systematically discriminated against as foreigners . Yet evidence remains absent on Black people, who are systematically discriminated against as inferior , but not as foreign . Using a pair of pre-registered experiments with Black and Latino adults (N = 2060), we manipulated a shared sense of discrimination as inferior (“second class citizenship”). This treatment measurably increased Black solidarity with PoC, which then significantly boosted their support for pro-Latino policies (e.g., less Border Patrol agents along US-Mexico border). This pattern was reciprocated by Latinos, whose heightened solidarity with PoC increased their support for pro-Black initiatives (e.g., endorsing #BlackLivesMatter). Sensitivity analyses further establish this pathway’s viability. We discuss the implications for more effective coalition-building among racially minoritized groups in US politics.

This text brings into analytical focus the workings of whiteness within the politics regarding Ukrainian refugees in two neighboring countries, Austria and Czechia. Th is comparison aims to contextualize various racial hierarchies in which Ukrainian refugees are embedded, and to connect public discourses translated by mass media and critically accepted by scholars and experts with the personal experience of refugees and those recruited to help them in reception centers. We follow the layering and conversion of racial hierarchies through examining three interrelated realms of public policy: (1) the confl ation of illiberal and liberal populisms concerning the Russian invasion and the subsequent refugee movements in the discursive practices of leading politicians and those responsible for refugee politics; (2) the intersectionality of gender, class, and race as a locus of control over Ukrainian women, who comprise the majority of those fleeing the country; and (3) elaborating an extreme case of forging whiteness, within the overt and covert racist practices concerning Ukrainian Romani refugees. To conclude, we discuss possible directions for future research that apply critical whiteness studies for understanding how racial hierarchies design public politics concerning refugees, and what can be done to minimize the injustices determined by whiteness.

Racial boundaries are hard to measure but consequential for understanding larger processes of racial inequality. Some argue that the racial hierarchy is expanding to include a third category for non-black minority identities while others believe that a binary racial hierarchy will persist as many non-black minorities will come to be seen as white. I use the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 to investigate how racial identities that vary (either because racial identities changed across survey waves or because racial identities are incongruent with interviewer perceptions) speak to each of these theories. I assess the frequency of different racial variations and how different patterns of racial variations are associated with individuals’ perceived level of happiness. When racial identities vary across time, context, or the perception of others, the work required to negotiate a racial identity can take a psychological toll and may decrease happiness. I find support for the whitening hypothesis; the most common type of racial variation includes respondents classified as non-black minorities by a household member later claiming a white identity. And, for those individuals, claiming a white identity is congruent with how they are perceived by interviewers. In addition, only for individuals who crossed black boundaries is racial variability consequential to perceived happiness, evidencing a strong racial boundary between black and anything else and more permeability in the boundary between non-black minorities and whites.

As a result of the increasing number of biracials and multiracials, and White reconstructions of previously non-White skin colors, the Whitening of selected immigrants and especially their children appears to be proceeding. Although there are many studies on the racial identity of biracials, too little research exists on how Whites identify them and light-skinned monoracials, which of these they Whiten, how, and why. Enough is known to suggest that if current trends continue, our picture of the country's racial hierarchy has to be revised. While Whites will likely remain on top and poor African Americans and other Blacks at the bottom, what happens in the middle cannot now even be guessed at with any hope of accuracy. For that reason alone, empirical and policy-oriented research on White identification patterns is badly needed.

Recently, there has been a growing discussion concerning the way historians should approach the study of Indian revolutionaries both within and outside the subcontinent. Described as ‘the revolutionary turn’, this area of research has not only explored the porosity and ambiguity in defining individuals as revolutionaries but has also questioned the way such revolutionaries sought to write themselves into history as a political act. Continuing this line of interrogation, this article examines the retrospective political claims of heroic revolutionary belonging by analysing the autobiographical notes left by Pandurang Khankhoje, a peripatetic Indian who left his country pursuing dreams of revolution. While in the last decade Khankhoje has become an iconic character in writing histories about global solidarities and anti-colonial resistance, this article asks to what extent can historians believe self-described revolutionary narratives. As this article shows, these narratives privilege what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘biographical illusion’, the organisation of life as a history that unfolds coherently and chronologically from beginning to end. Political or ideological differences and inconsistencies are flattened in the name of global ideologies or solidarities. As an attempt to disrupt these narratives, this article will focus on the silences, absences and ‘unreliability’ of the experiences and sources used to understand the work and lives of Indian revolutionaries abroad, such as Khankhoje, Lala Har Dayal and M. N. Roy. This article argues that the story of revolutionaries reveals important details about how they understood the racial, political and gender structures of different societies in the early twentieth century.

Multi-racial (mixed-race) people constitute a growing percentage of the United States (US) population. The study reported in this paper used residential segregation measures as a proxy for social distance, to examine whether segregation levels of multi-racial groups differ from those of mono-racial groups in the US in 2010. First, we find that all multi-racial groups considered in the study experience lower levels of segregation at county level than their mono-racial counterparts. However, black-whites and Hispanic-whites experience higher levels of segregation than other multi-racial groups. Second, we find region and minority composition of counties are associated significantly with segregation levels for multi-racial groups, but relative income is not.

Using data from the 2008–2016 American Community Survey, we compare the racial identification responses of the Mexican-origin population residing in California to their counterparts in Texas, the two states with the largest and most established Mexican-origin populations. We draw on existing theory and research in order to derive a theoretical account of state-level historical mechanisms that are likely to lead to varying patterns of racial identification within the two states and a set of propositions predicting the nature of this variation. Results indicate that the Mexican-origin population in Texas is substantially more likely to claim White racial identification than their counterparts in California, even after accounting for factors related to racial identity formation. Further analysis indicates that this result is robust and buffets the notion that the historical development of the racial context in Texas has engendered a present-day context in which “Whiteness” carries a distinctive social value, relative to California’s ethnoracial context, and that this social value is reflected in the ways in which individuals of Mexican origin respond to race questions on U.S. Census surveys.

Scholars in critical race and the sociology of religion have independently drawn attention to the ways in which cultural ideologies drive beliefs about inequalities between groups. Critical race work on “abstract liberalism” highlights non-racially inflected language that tacitly reinforces White socioeconomic outcomes resulting from an allegedly fair social system. Sociologists of religion have noted that White Evangelical Christian theology promotes an individualist mindset that places blame for racial inequalities on the perceived failings of Blacks. Using data from the National Asian American Survey 2016, we return to this question and ask whether beliefs about the importance of equal opportunity reveal similarities or differences between religious Asian American and Latino Christians and Black and White Christians. The results confirm that White Christians are generally the least supportive of American society providing equal opportunity for all. At the other end, Black Christians were the most supportive. However, with the inclusion of Asian American Christian groups, we note that second generation Asian American and Latino Evangelicals hew closer to the White Christian mean, while most other Asian and Latino Christian groups adhere more closely to the Black Christian mean. This study provides further support for the recent claims of religion’s complex relationship with other stratifying identities. It suggests that cultural assimilation among second generation non-Black Evangelical Christians heads more toward the colorblind racist attitudes of many White Christians, whereas potential for new coalitions of Latino and Black Christians could emerge, given their shared perceptions of the persistent inequality in their communities.

Many White Americans believe that individual rather than structural factors explain racial inequality, yet there is substantial variation in Whites’ perceptions. Using data from the Portraits of American Life Study, we exploit this variation to provide insight into the processes driving Whites’ perceptions of the causes of racial inequality. Specifically, we assess how social boundaries inform Whites’ explanations for the disadvantage of two racial groups: Blacks and Asians. First, we examine how each group’s position in the racial hierarchy relates to the types of explanations employed by Whites and find that Whites use individual explanations more often for Blacks than Asians. Second, we assess the extent to which the importance given to race in one’s overall identity affects how Whites explain racial disadvantage. Whites who see their Whiteness as being important to their identity are more likely to use individual rather than structural explanations to explain Black disadvantage. Together, these findings provide insight into the social psychological processes that contribute to Whites’ perceptions of racial inequality and suggest increased attention to how perceptions of out-group boundaries shape individual perceptions of inequality. Addressing this dimension of how individuals view inequality will be critical to future efforts to reduce it.