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Why have American policies failed to reduce the racial inequalities still pervasive throughout the nation? Has President Barack Obama defined new political approaches to race that might spur unity and progress? Still a House Divided examines the enduring divisions of American racial politics and how these conflicts have been shaped by distinct political alliances and their competing race policies. Combining deep historical knowledge with a detailed exploration of such issues as housing, employment, criminal justice, multiracial census categories, immigration, voting in majority-minority districts, and school vouchers, Desmond King and Rogers Smith assess the significance of President Obama's election to the White House and the prospects for achieving constructive racial policies for America's future.

This study presents new measures of opinion about progress toward racial equality and provides a multifaceted rationale for preferring the new measures to the old ones. To reduce several sources of measurement error and improve analytic bite by breaking progress into its constituent elements, surveys should ask about past, present, and ideal conditions, not \"progress.\" These questions reveal racially polarized opinions: Black and White Americans agree on the goal of equality and agree that conditions were worse in the past, but Blacks think conditions were much worse than Whites do. They especially differ in opinions on current conditions and thus in how much change is required to achieve the goal of equality. Blacks see much more current inequality than Whites do. These opinions help explain preferences for affirmative action (AA). Contrary to previously published findings, reactions to AA do not depend on opinions on progress but depend strongly on something related but distinct: how much current racial conditions differ from the ideal. Implications for theories of policy preferences, racial attitudes, progress, and equality are discussed.

In this article, I examine how political and media discourses of multiraciality are deployed to justify guilt and innocence. I trace the deployment of multiraciality to determine who is deserving of life or death in media coverage, political rhetoric, and court records during Obama’s presidency, in George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal, and in the 2021 killing of Daunte Wright. I examine the weaponization of discourses of multiracial identities as tools of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Through such weaponization, the construction of the multiracial man as an index of racial progress and post-racism evident in the Barack Obama era enabled the violence and miscarriages of justice in the killings of Trayvon Martin and Daunte Wright. I consider how transnational and U.S. narratives of multiraciality, joined with anti-Blackness and white supremacy, enabled the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Furthermore, I examine how white womanhood and fears of Black masculinity facilitated the sympathy garnered towards Kim Potter. In considering the killing of Daunte Wright, this paper shows how multiraciality and racial malleability are valuable only when utilized for preserving racial hierarchies.

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the \"N-word.\" This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers. Cinema Civil Rightspresents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards. Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched,Cinema Civil Rightspresents us with an in-depth look at the film industry's role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

This chapter focuses on Edward Blyden, Islam and the Gold Coast press to elaborate on religious routes and racial progress in West Africa. During the twentieth century, Islam found a powerful advocate in Edward Wilmot Blyden, whose work triggered a debate over whether Islam offered an alternative to Christianity and a more appropriate path to racial progress for Gold Coasters. The chapter looks into further debates on the matter as printed in the colony's leading African-owned newspapers, Gold Coast Leader and the Gold Coast Nation. It cites the power of the Gold Coast press to challenge colonial rule and to carve out alternative spheres of power and influence. After World War I was over, debates about the racial and cultural appropriateness of Christianity for Africans emerged once again, but rarely did they consider Islam as an alternative.

During the last several decades, the ethnic and racial composition of the American elite has changed to include some ethnic minorities and women. This study examines changes in the composition of one segment of the American elite: those who have obtained eminence in their occupations. Lieberson and Carter's study of the ethnic composition of eminent Americans, using Who's Who in America, is replicated with data from the 1990s (Lieberson and Carter, 1979, American Sociological Review 44:347-366). In addition, comparisons between blacks listed in Who's Who in America and blacks listed only in Who's Who among Black Americans are made. During the 20 years since Lieberson and Carter's study, Jews have made remarkable gains in eminent membership, while the rate of black representation has increased only moderately. Women are a small percentage of the eminent regardless of ethnicity, although black women are better represented than their counterparts in white ethnic groups.

This chapter focuses on the Harlem Globetrotters as Cold Warriors between 1947 and 1954. This is an important moment because prior to the passage of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the State Department was in the unenviable position of trying to defend segregation while stressing racial progress. Moreover, the politics of symbolism associated with the Globetrotters' tours was designed to give legitimacy to existing racial inequalities in American society by stressing “progress” during the early Cold War era, despite the social, political, and legal barriers that hindered African American advancement. The symbol of the successful yet segregated athlete allowed the government to argue that segregation was not an impediment to the advancement of individual African Americans.

How can Americans achieve further progress in their long national struggle to reduce enduring material race inequalities? To aid reflection on this question, we have advanced in the preceding chapters a distinctive narrative of the past and present of American racial politics. That narrative has significant implications for understanding how politics has contributed to the construction of racial statuses and identities in America, and for thinking about how Americans might conduct their politics differently, in ways that offer better prospects for addressing inherited racial inequalities. We have defended two chief empirical claims about how we should understand racial politics in

In 1899, the front page of the Topeka, Kansas, black newspaper the Plaindealer reported on the tenth anniversary of a women’s literary group called the Ladies’ Coterie. Made up of eleven black women, including founding members the artist Fanny Clinkscale and prominent society woman Mrs. Robert Buckner, the group was described as “the nucleus around which modern Topeka society was formed.”¹ The Coterie hosted a lecture by Ida Wells Barnett titled “The Evils of Lynching’” in 1895 during her antilynching tour, as well as “church suppers, whist parties, literature selections, relief work.” It centered its literary work on “the best

Objective:This article analyzes how some multiracial people—the \"products \" of interracial relationships—conceptualize what counts as an interracial relationship and how they discuss the circumstances that influence these definitions. Background: Scholars have argued that the added complexity expanding multiracial populations contribute to dating and marriage-market conditions requires additional study; this article expands on the limited research regarding how multiracial people perceive interraciality. Method: The article uses in-depth interviews with self-identified multiracial women (N = 30) who used online dating platforms to facilitate their dating lives in the following three cities in Texas: Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Results: In framing their relationships through lenses centered around skin color, cultural difference, and \"familiarity\" in terms of seeing potential partners as similar to non-White male family members, multiracial women illustrate varied and overlapping means of describing their intimate relationships, providing additional nuance to sociological understandings of shifts in preferences and norms around partner choice across racial/ethnic lines and opening up opportunities to continue the exploration of the impact of racial inequality on partner choice. Conclusion: Multiracial people internalize racial, gendered, and fetishistic framings about potential partners similarly to monoracial people, demonstrating how racial boundaries and degrees of intimacy are (re)Constructed for this growing demographic in the United States.