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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.

White supremacy shaped both the formation of the South African racial state and the formation of racial groups, including the creation of the Coloured category as mixed and liminal between White and Black. There are, however, debates about the continuing legacy of white supremacy in post-apartheid, contemporary South Africa. This paper joins others in the important task of delineating racial hierarchies within contemporary South African society to help reveal the form of oppression, and the accompanying underlying assumptions and ideologies, such as white supremacy, that allows racial difference and deprivation to remain. In this paper, I analyze semi-structured interview data from 50 “Coloured” adults in order to explore their understanding of white supremacy, the racial hierarchy, and contemporary racism. I find that white supremacy negatively impacts Coloureds’ lived experiences through shaping their experiences of structural and interpersonal discrimination from White South Africans. In addition, Coloured South Africans understand the legacy of white supremacy in shaping contemporary racial hierarchies such that White South Africans “still come out on top.” However, I argue that, at the same time, white supremacy also “colours” or hinders some Coloured respondents’ perceptions of their remaining relative privilege in post-apartheid South Africa. This project contributes by revealing a more complete story about the pervasiveness of contemporary hegemonic, global white supremacy that impacts all aspects of the racial hierarchy, including those mixed or in the middle.

We live in a world that desperately wishes to ignore centuries of racial divisions and hierarchies by positioning multiracial people as a declaration of a post-racial society. The latest U.S. 2020 Census results show that the U.S. population has grown in racial and ethnic diversity in the last ten years, with the white population decreasing. Our U.S. systems of policies, economy, and well-being are based upon “scientific” constructions of racial difference, hierarchy, Blackness, and fearmongering around miscegenation (racial mixing) that condemn proximity to Blackness. Driven by our respective multiracial Latinx and Asian experiences and entry points to anti-Blackness, this project explores the history of Latinx and Asian racialization and engagement with anti-Blackness. Racial hierarchy positions our communities as honorary whites and employs tactics to complicate solidarity and coalition. This project invites engagement in consciousness-raising in borderlands as sites of transformation as possible methods of addressing structural anti-Blackness.

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.

How the growing Latino population fits into the U.S. racial structure is a subject of considerable debate. Are Latinos developing into a separate racial group, becoming part of the dominant group, or creating a pan-minority group with nonwhites? Extending beyond existing research that uses intermarriage or survey data to assess racial boundaries, this study examines Latinos' stated racial preferences for dates among a sample of over 4,000 Internet daters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta. We find that few Latinos prefer to only date other Latinos. Latinos are much more likely to prefer to date whites than blacks, and are much more likely than blacks to prefer whites, suggesting that the Latino-white boundary is less rigid than Latino-black or black-white boundaries. However, Latinos are also much more likely to prefer blacks than whites are. Further analyses highlight differences in racial preferences among Latinos by metropolitan area, educational level, language, and religion. Greater proximity to blacks in New York and Atlanta promotes greater acceptance. In these locales, we see some indications of a panminority group of blacks and a small set of Latinos developing. While the majority of Latinos accept racial hierarchies that privilege whites, providing evidence that many are assimilating into the dominant group, assimilation patterns vary for different segments of the diverse Latino population. Adapted from the source document.

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.

As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an overview of the unique racial history of Asians in the United States and analyzes the implications of dynamic racialization and status for Asian Americans. In particular, we examine the dynamism of Asian Americans' racial positionality relative to historical shifts in economic-based conceptions of their desirability as workers in American capitalism. Taking history, power, and institutions of white supremacy into account, we analyze where Asian Americans fit in contemporary U.S. politics, presenting a better understanding of the persistent structures underlying racial inequality and developing a foundation from which Asian Americans can work to enhance equality.