scholarly essays on race

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Tools and Resources
Customer Services
Conflict Studies
Development
Environment
Foreign Policy
Human Rights
International Law
Organization
International Relations Theory
Political Communication
Political Economy
Political Geography
Political Sociology
Politics and Sexuality and Gender
Qualitative Political Methodology
Quantitative Political Methodology
Security Studies
Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Race, ethnicity, and nation.

Polly Rizova Polly Rizova Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Willamette University
and John Stone John Stone Department of Sociology, Boston University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.470
Published in print: 01 March 2010
Published online: 11 January 2018
This version: 26 April 2021
Previous version

The term “race” refers to groups of people who have differences and similarities in biological traits deemed by society to be socially significant, meaning that people treat other people differently because of them. Meanwhile, ethnicity refers to shared cultural practices, perspectives, and distinctions that set apart one group of people from another. Ethnic differences are not inherited; they are learned. When racial or ethnic groups merge in a political movement as a form of establishing a distinct political unit, then such groups can be termed nations that may be seen as representing beliefs in nationalism. Race and ethnicity are linked with nationality particularly in cases involving transnational migration or colonial expansion. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system. This culminated in the rise of “nation-states,” in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided with state borders. Thus, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. Theories about the relation between race, ethnicity, and nationality are also linked to more general ideas concerning globalization and populist nationalism.

nationalism
transnational migration
colonial expansion
globalization
populist nationalism

Updated in this version

Updated references, enhanced discussions of globalization and populist nationalism.

Introduction: Three Variations on a Theme

The three terms—race, ethnicity, and nation—represent forms of group identification that may be the result of internal choice, external categorization, or some combination of the two perspectives. “Race” is the most controversial term since it is based on a false biological premise that there are distinct groups of genetically similar human populations and that these “races” share unique social and cultural characteristics. This assumption was common among many thinkers during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries and still has a considerable following in folk theories and everyday discourse, but it has been completely discredited by scientific knowledge in biology and genetics. The popularity of such racist thinking is linked to its utility in justifying all types of group oppression and exploitation, exemplified by slavery, imperialism, genocide, apartheid, and other systems of stratification and segregation. Ethnicity, or the sense of belonging to a community based on a common history, language, religion, and other cultural characteristics, is a central concept that has been used to understand an important basis of identity in most societies around the world and throughout human history. When ethnic or “racial” groups combine in a political movement in order to create or maintain a distinct political unit, or state, then such groups can be termed nations and such movements may be seen as embodying ideologies or beliefs in nationalism.

In reality, there is a considerable overlap between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism. Extreme forms of nationalism often have a racial ideology associated with them, as was the case with German nationalism during the Nazi period ( 1933–1945 ) or Afrikaner nationalism in the era of apartheid ( 1948–1990 ). While some scholars use the term “ethnonationalism” (Connor, 1993 ) to merge the forces of ethnicity and nationalism, others draw a distinction between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism. The former comprises a sense of belonging based on common ancestry, while the latter focuses on membership in a shared political unit that can include citizens from diverse ethnic origins. However, the types of identity associated with these two variants of nationalism are rarely clear-cut and empirical cases usually consist of a mixture of features drawn from both phenomena (Brubaker, 2004 , pp. 132–146). Academic studies of racism, ethnicity, and nationalism reveal the same imprecise boundaries between them, which suggests they should be treated as variations on similar social and political themes.

Historians have argued at length concerning the legitimate application of the terms to different forms of social relationships and intergroup attitudes. While slavery has existed in many societies throughout human history, a question remains as to whether it is reasonable to regard the position of Greek slaves in the Roman Empire as on a par with that of African slaves in North America, the Caribbean, or Latin America. If the specific form of “racism” in the United States was a product of a particularly vicious system of chattel slavery, to what extent then can we make generalizations about this term m to cover other historical cases of group domination? Many of the same problems arise in the case of nationalism, but here the arguments have centered on the issue of the origins of the phenomenon. When can we say that a sense of national identity first arose: in the Ancient World, during the 16th century in England (Greenfeld, 1992 ), or as an outcome of the American and French revolutions? Was nationalism a deeply rooted and continuous force in human history, or a relatively recent “invention” that acts as a convenient cover for other, more fundamental changes (Gellner, 1983 ; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ; Smith, 1986 , 2008 )? Volumes have been written attempting to date the origins of nationalism and the types of forces that can be seen as central to its emergence as a major factor in the modern world. Like so many academic debates, much depends on one’s definition of nationalism—whether, for example, it is viewed as a mass or an elite phenomenon—and what combination of causal variables one chooses to include in its formation.

It is partly the association with difficult-to-change biological properties that has made racism so controversial and yet so attractive for dominant groups. In the middle of the 19th century , Gobineau’s ( 1853–1855 ) Essay on the Inequality of Human Races set out an analysis of human society and history using a racist model, and its popularity and widespread adoption by other thinkers served to reinforce the political realities of group domination for almost a century. It was cited approvingly by several influential American sociologists and historians in order to justify Southern slavery in the United States and acted as a precursor to the influential theory of an “Aryan” master race destined to rule or exterminate “inferior” racial groups, which underpinned the cultural and political thinking of such figures as Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler. Similar conclusions developed along parallel tracks in Anglo-American intellectual circles that employed a distortion of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection introduced by an influential group of thinkers, the Social Darwinists. Perhaps the best refutation of Gobineau’s assumptions was found in the critique by his friend and colleague Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America ( 1835–1840 ) and The Ancien Regime and the Revolution ( 1856 ). Tocqueville pointed to the historical tendency of all-powerful groups to assume the permanent nature of their superiority over those whom they had conquered and continued to dominate. A simple understanding of the rise and fall of empires and nations showed how improbable the assumption was that any particular system of group domination would last indefinitely. This implicit power model of race relations, while by no means the only system of thought designed to account for racial hierarchies in nonracial terms found among scholars, nevertheless recurred in the writings of social scientists and historians during the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries . Despite their often less than progressive ideas on many issues affecting the society of their day, prominent thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Vilfredo Pareto understood the political basis of imperialism and colonialism and were very much opposed to both of them. Thus, the former referred to European imperialist policies as “social cannibalism,” and the latter attacked the hypocrisy of the so-called civilizing mission of the colonial powers as nothing more than an excuse for exploiting their superior force (Stone & Rizova, 2014 ).

One of the clearest developments of this type of explanation of race, ethnicity, and nation can be seen in the writings of the influential German sociologist Max Weber (see Stone & Dennis, 2003 ). In keeping with his general framework that stressed the analogies between economic and social life, Weber conceived of these three types of group formation as another manifestation of the general tendency toward monopolization frequently found in economic life as well as in society as a whole. Such a formulation helped to explain the variety and often quite arbitrary nature of group boundaries—in one situation it would be religion, in another it would be language, or in a third it could be “race”—which happened to be used as the markers defining membership or exclusion from the group. Sometimes all three factors might be superimposed on each other to create the boundaries separating the dominant from the subordinate groups; on other occasions these characteristics appeared to cut across group membership in one or another combination. Nevertheless, the defining feature of this historical process was to establish increasingly strict criteria for membership and exclusion that, once set in motion, became a self-reinforcing process. Just as economic competition in the long run often results in monopolies under market capitalism, so too do groups seek to monopolize the life chances and other benefits of social hierarchy within multiethnic and multiracial states, or between states in the international arena.

In the middle of the 20th century , the defeat of the Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and the unraveling of colonialism, combined with powerful protest movements such as the civil rights struggle in the United States and the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa, were some of the forces diminishing the crude divisions between racially defined groups on a global scale. That said, the importance of ethnicity and the persistence of nationalism have proved to be surprisingly resilient. Premature declarations that modernity and globalization would inevitably undermine peoples’ allegiance to ethnic attachments, or spell the end of national sentiment, have turned out to be unfounded. This is not to claim that in certain spheres the influence of ethnicity and nationalism has become relatively less powerful, or indeed that racism has been abolished, but rather to point to the protean character of these basic types of identity and their ability to adapt, mutate, and reemerge as historical conditions unfold. Thus, the end of the Cold War reduced the ability of ideological rivalries to mask and submerge all manner of ethnic and national divisions in a wider global struggle. As a result, toward the final decades of the 20th century , a Pandora’s box of previously muted national sentiments burst open in the Balkans (Rizova, 2007 ) to provide a counterexample to the surprisingly peaceful transition from apartheid to nonracial democracy in South Africa.

Race: Biology as Destiny

In spite of the intellectual demolition of the genetic basis of racial theorizing since the second half of the 20th century , the legacy of racism lives on. This is hardly surprising given the coalescence of European colonialism, the slave trade, and the imbalances of global power over the past 500 years. All of this began to unravel during the 20th century in a way that first questioned and then started to undermine the customary hierarchies of half a millennium. The intellectual evolution of human biology initially provided what appeared to be a simple explanation for the apparent correlation between power and race. In the 19th century , biology rivaled theology as the perfect way to legitimize group domination. Subordinate groups no longer had to be damned by the Almighty to perpetual inferiority when they could be damned by their genes. In some ways the utility of biological excommunication was rather less than that justified by faith since the former was always subject to empirical refutation. As knowledge in the biological sciences progressed, greater evidence supported the view that all human population groups shared an overwhelmingly common genetic heritage and what was even more compelling was the fact that variations within so-called races were far more significant than any variations between these categories. As biological explanations seemed harder to sustain, a new consensus started to emerge in academic circles that races were social constructions and therefore that differences were the product of cultural traditions and historical circumstance that could, and no doubt would, change with time. The biological explanations of racial differences were thus false and so other factors needed to be used to explain the social reality behind group differences.

What Alexis de Tocqueville understood as a result of his historical perspective, and Max Weber appreciated by his comparative research, was increasingly supported by the scientific advances in the field of human biology. Not that this was a smooth transition from a paradigm of racial theorizing to an understanding of human difference in terms of resources and power. The elegance of justifying inequality as a consequence of scientific inevitability continually reoccurred in one form after another. Often the proponents were not “racist” in a direct sense of the term, and some had strongly antiracist credentials, but the result of this form of theorizing was almost indistinguishable from earlier biological arguments. Thus sociobiology, based on the twin concepts of kin selection and inclusive fitness, might be seen as entirely divorced from vulgar racial thinking. However, by elevating the “selfish gene” to the master explanation of all human activity and creation, this argument had the potential to offer an approach uncomfortably close in its implications to the theory that Gobineau had proposed a hundred years earlier. It is no surprise that the experience of biological theorizing and its consequences throughout the 20th century have subjected such ideas to a far more skeptical appraisal and caused their proponents to be rather more cautious in linking genetic characteristics to cultural and social outcomes.

Nevertheless, racism has been a persistent and powerful influence on social life for much of the 20th century . The frequently quoted prediction of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1903 ) in The Souls of Black Folk , that the color line would be a defining division in human society for the following hundred years and that it would be not merely an American conflict but global in its reach, has been more than fulfilled by the passage of time. Against the backdrop of the history of the 20th century , which witnessed the decline of European domination over much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the struggle for civil rights in the United States and South Africa, and a succession of genocidal massacres that stretched from the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the killing fields of Rwanda and Darfur, it is often hard to imagine why racist ideas have not been totally discredited. Although some people, perhaps those coming from societies less conscious of the civil rights and liberation struggles of the 20th century , may still believe in the fallacy of racial difference, among the educated populations of the world these beliefs appear to be of diminishing significance. That said, it would be completely wrong to regard racism, and antagonism based on racial divisions, to be no longer a significant element in the conflicts that continue to tear apart much of the fabric of contemporary global society. This paradox, of greater understanding of the nature of “racial” conflict on the one hand, and yet the continuing persistence of race on the other hand, requires a careful dissection of the meaning of “race” in contemporary society. The complexity of the topic and the manner in which such thinking has subtly shifted has led some social scientists to write about “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ) and still others to devote much scrutiny to a related, counterintuitive phenomenon, “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker, 2004 ) and the “slippery nature” of contemporary racisms (Solomos, 2020 ).

It is already generally accepted that race is a social construct, an idea—in this case a scientifically erroneous one—that is in the minds of people. The enormous variability of racial systems from one society to another, and in different historical periods, demonstrates that racial background has little intrinsic importance, and that racial identity is rather a powerful legacy of cultural tradition and social inertia. Nevertheless, the changes that still need to take place in order for all white Americans to accept their black fellow citizens not only as governors, leading officials, and even as their President, but also as residential neighbors, remain to be realized. Despite the two-term Obama presidency ( 2008–2016 ) and the premature use of the term “post-racialism” to describe it, such unexpected progress has been quickly put to rest by the arrival of the explicitly racist language and actions of the Trump administration (Stone & Rizova, 2020 ). The Black Lives Matter movement (Dennis & Dennis, 2020 ), along with the rise of white nationalism, part of a global trend toward populist nationalism, provide widespread evidence of the continuing significance of race throughout the world.

The long-term difficulty in overcoming this legacy can be explained in part by what Charles Tilly and Thomas Shapiro have termed “opportunity hoarding,” the passing on of assets between generations that favors whites over blacks at a ratio of 10 to one (Shapiro, 2004 ; Tilly, 1998 ). Another historical perspective that helps to explain the entrenchment of racial privilege is the manner in which the discussion about “affirmative action” has been framed. Increasingly, scholars are linking dominant “affirmative action” to the New Deal and to those policies designed to assist white veterans, notably the GI Bill, after World War II (Katznelson, 2006 ). A parallel discussion is to view the implementation of apartheid in South Africa, between 1948 and 1990 , as another type of affirmative action for the benefit of the dominant (white) political group. Its demonstrated effectiveness in raising the lower class of Afrikaners—the bywoners —out of poverty helps to explain some of the subsequent levels of racial inequality in postapartheid South Africa.

Returning to the American case, one only needs to drive through the heart of major, or for that matter minor, American cities, examine the student populations of so many of the worst American public schools, or simply consider the statistics describing the inmates of the American penal system (Alexander, 2010 ), and the reality of the continuing significance of race is hard to deny. Furthermore, the health disparities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 revealed the heavily disproportionate numbers of black and brown casualties among the infection and death rates in America. These figures, together with the often lethal police violence exposed, yet again, by the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, show how black and white lives are by no means subject to the same opportunities and risks in contemporary America.

To focus on the American case is to survey only part of the problem. However, because of its high ideals—crafted by the slave-owning proponents of democracy for a “civilized” elite that did not include either women or minorities—the United States has been at the center of a storm of ethical debates about who should be granted full membership of, and who should be excluded from, the rights and privileges of freedom. The problematic nature of this debate can be seen in the preference of so many black slaves to join and fight with the British colonial forces in the 1770s against the advocates of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Given the bias toward white property-owning males, this decision was based on a rational calculation that London was more likely to end the “peculiar institution” than the slave-owning “democrats” meeting in Philadelphia (Schama, 2006 ). This is not to glamorize the motives of the British who, no sooner had they lost the fight in North America, went on to pillage Africa, Asia, and other exploitable parts of the globe as they scrambled to “civilize” the rest of humanity.

But racism is certainly not confined to the Anglo-American world. The evolution of rather different patterns of racial hierarchy and group conflicts can be seen in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. As Edward Telles ( 2004 ) has argued in Race in Another America , Brazil has been plagued by powerful traditions of racial distinction, but the dynamics of race relations follow a different logic from that underlying the pattern found in the United States. Despite the ideology of “racial democracy,” formulated in its classical manner by Gilberto Freyre’s ( 1933 ) The Masters and the Slaves , few social scientists or historians would seriously deny that Brazilian society is permeated by considerations of color (Bailey, 2020 ; Fritz, 2011 ). The fundamental difference is, in some cruel paradox, that individuals, under the rules of the Brazilian system, can, so to speak, “change their race,” while blacks in America, conforming to the pressures of the one drop rule, cannot.

Individualism in the United States may be characterized the philosophy of social mobility, but it does not breach the color line. The very fluidity of the Brazilian system has made it in the past a more subtle and complex problem to solve, although the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 —the “Trump of the Tropics”—revealed a new, and hardly nuanced, slant on racial democracy. The Brazilian case can be seen as a cautionary tale concerning the strengths and weaknesses of a comparative perspective. On the one hand, viewing the patterns in one society in isolation from a wider lens invites a form of myopia that greatly diminishes the value of the exercise; on the other hand, embarking on elaborate comparative analyses without a close understanding of the complexities of each situation invites another type of bias. Nevertheless, trying to place rather different systems within a wider framework has become increasingly necessary as the forces of globalization continue to foster closer links between virtually all societies as they are bound together by the ties of an interlinked global system. The exercise becomes even more challenging when one recognizes that there are “many globalizations” (Berger & Huntington, 2003 ) and that no society is ever static as far as its intergroup relationships, or indeed most other aspects of its structure and culture, are concerned. In many of the classic attempts to formulate such broadly comparative models of racial conflict—Pierre van den Berghe ( 1967 ) and Anthony Marx ( 1998 ), for example—the United States, Brazil, and South Africa are often the key reference points. But the shifting nature of race relations in all three of these societies reveals how difficult it is to predict the future direction of multiracial societies.

From being the bastion of racial oppression under the apartheid regime, South Africa has been regenerated as a society where nonracial democracy is the dominant political consensus.

The full implications of this profound and, in many respects, surprising transformation of a rigid racial hierarchy raised enormous hopes for the future direction of the country. However, understanding the nature of social change and how far it has affected the lives of most citizens of the new South Africa is an important illustration of the dynamic nature of most racial systems over time. It is also an excellent way to develop insights into the generation of racial conflict by analyzing those situations where, despite the presence of so many of the characteristics that are often associated with violence, it simply did not take place on anything like the scale that most experts, politicians, and ordinary people predicted. Nevertheless, a quarter of a century later, we have a more realistic assessment of the degree to which “Mandela’s miracle” has transformed South African society or rather has replaced one elite, which was racially defined, with another system of privilege, but one less loosely linked to racial divisions. A succession of disastrous political leaders following Mandela, from Thabo Mbeki, with his tragic refusal to address the AIDS crisis, to the rampant corruption of Jacob Zuma, has squandered much of the promise of a democratic South Africa (Moodley & Adam, 2020 ).

Ethnicity: Group Divisions Rooted in Culture

The power of race as a boundary marker has been continuously demonstrated for the past two centuries in many societies throughout the globe. Its persistence, despite the intellectual bankruptcy of its genetic rationalization, cannot be attributed solely to ignorance, and this explains why education alone is often an insufficient antidote to racial thinking and hierarchies built on racial divisions. Economic, social, and political changes are all part of the process by which racial stratification is challenged, modified, and in some cases overturned. Claims about the relative significance of race or class, and whether strategies emphasizing political mobilization or economic self-sufficiency and advancement hold the key to transforming racial disadvantage and oppression, have been at the core of racial debates throughout the 20th century . Another complication is the overlap between racial markers and ethnic boundaries that often exacerbates such conflicts. Ethnic divisions can be just as deep-seated and ethnic conflicts just as violent as those linked to a racial divide. Language, religion, history, and culture merge and intersect in varying degrees in many of these conflicts. Which factors prove to be salient in any one situation largely depends on the particular historical circumstances that frame the subsequent patterns of ethnic relations.

Among the critical events that influence ethnogenesis and ethnic conflict are patterns of global migration and the related forces of conquest, genocide, settlement, and types of assimilation, integration, and pluralism. Migration has been an endemic force in most societies and in recent centuries has even been incorporated into the founding myths of states that view themselves as based on migration, rather than being derived from some claim of indigenous ownership of a specific land. Such migrant societies include not simply the United States—a self-proclaimed “Society of Immigrants”—but also Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Canada. In reality, most societies over time have experienced considerable influxes of new peoples and large outflows of population groups motivated by a variety of factors including the search for economic opportunities, flight from political persecution or military destruction, and the quest for freedom of religious practice and expression, to mention just a few. Some societies encounter inflows and outflows simultaneously, while others include migrants and settlers of varying lengths of time—seasonal migrants, “guest workers” ( gastarbeiter ), transnational communities, nomadic peoples, diasporas, “global cosmopolitans,” undocumented workers, and refugees—and most change the composition and scale of migrant flows and influence over time. Thus, Italy and Ireland were major sources of global migration, particularly the transatlantic movements to North and South America, for much of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries . However, by the turn of the 21st century , it was the impact of migrants trying to enter these two parts of the prosperous European Union (EU), as opposed to the previous tradition of sympathizing with poor migrants escaping famine and rural poverty, that became the salient issue in both societies (O’Dowd, 2005 ). A similar dramatic reversal in perception could be seen in the opposition and violence directed at refugees and economic migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other sub-Saharan African states living in urban townships around Johannesburg in 2008 .

Different societies have different mechanisms for accommodating ethnic diversity. Some seek to assimilate newcomers as rapidly as possible, while others have more fluid systems of differential incorporation—segmented assimilation, to use one of the common terms employed in the North American literature—with a variety of possible forms. Not all migrant groups wish to become completely integrated into the mainstream of the dominant society; many do but are not accepted without a long period of acculturation and a fierce struggle for structural inclusion. The constant interaction between racism and ethnicity can also be seen in the manner in which some ethnic groups are more readily accepted than others and, in certain cases, migrant groups of one ethnic background may receive advantages denied to oppressed indigenous minorities. In the United States, many of the white ethnic groups, in order to achieve greater acceptance by the core society, quite specifically distanced themselves from blacks and Native Americans, who had been living as stigmatized sectors in the society for centuries prior to their arrival. How the Irish “became white” (Ignatiev, 1995 ; Roediger, 2007 ) was a pattern repeated by many other immigrants, such as the Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews, who arrived toward the end of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries . Other ethnic groups were also assimilated in patterns that reflected the particular set of characteristics that they possessed, in terms of human and social capital, as well as the economic, social, and political conditions prevailing during the period of their arrival. Thus, Cubans fleeing the Castro revolution in 1959 , and for the duration of the Cold War, benefited greatly from the ideological struggles of the period. Haitians, arriving in Florida at much the same time and escaping the murderous regimes of the Duvaliers, received far less support. Although color may have been part of the equation, the political advantage of being fervent anticommunists was probably an even more important factor.

While North America and Western Europe shared many similar patterns of migration and assimilation during the first two decades of the 21st century —unlikely parallels between Mexican and Muslims having been raised by social scientists on both continents (Huntington, 2004 ; Zolberg & Woon, 1999 )—even societies with a strong ideology of ethnic homogeneity were forced to confront their actual diversity. Germany’s powerful ethnic nationalist tradition (Alba & Foner, 2015 ; Alba et al., 2003 ) has had to be modified by the increasing integration of the European Union, so that second- and third-generation Germans of Turkish ethnic background could no longer be regarded as permanent aliens. Much the same is true of Japan, and not only Ainu and Burakumin, but also Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans are increasingly self-conscious minorities that have started to challenge the monoethnic ideology of post-World War II Japan (Lie & Weng, 2020 ; Tarumoto, 2020 ). In China, with its enormous population of 1.3 billion, relatively small numbers of ethnic and religious minorities nevertheless constitute a group of approximately 100 million people, and the situation of the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Hui have started to receive greater scholarly and political attention (Hou & Stone, 2008 ). This is hardly surprising given the monumental transformation of Chinese society as the workshop of the modern world, and the types of pressures that such an economic transition creates for all peoples involved in this historic process. Not only are there massive internal migratory movements linked to rapid industrialization and urbanization (Luo, 2020 ), but the adaptation of minorities to these forces almost inevitably results in language change and perceived threats to traditional ways of life. As for the Tibetan case, China’s vast population has allowed a pattern of outside migration of Han Chinese that for the nationalist critics is seen as tantamount to “ethnic swamping,” a variant on ethnic cleansing with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Contemporary China is facing yet another policy dilemma between playing an increasing global role on the one hand, and using the forces of rising nationalism on the other hand (Hou, 2020 ).

In Africa, ethnic divisions have been a continuing legacy of imperialism that has followed on into the postcolonial era and resulted in much conflict and bloodshed. Even decades after independence, many African states are still permeated by political systems closely linked to ethnic (tribal) loyalties, making a winner-takes-all electoral system unsuited to resolving the problems of state-building and economic development. Nigeria’s war to prevent the Biafran secession ( 1967–1970 ), the genocidal massacres in Rwanda ( 1994 ), and the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan ( 2003 –) are some prominent examples of independent Africa’s struggles with the impact of ethnic conflict. The South African situation was another case where a society that was deeply divided by racial and ethnic boundaries managed to resolve these conflicts in a remarkably peaceful form of negotiation. The society simply redefined the racial and ethnic boundaries to include all groups on the basis of full citizenship for everyone. Whether the South African model, with its distinctive use of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and many other unique features, can be a successful long-term experiment in nonracialism remains to be seen. However, some of the lessons learned from the South African case have been applied to other conflict-torn areas of the world, such as Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain.

The last two cases illustrate the diverse boundary markers that can be found in regions plagued by ethnic conflicts. In Northern Ireland, “religion” was the ostensible ground for group solidarity and division, the centuries-old difference between the Protestant ruling group and the Catholic minority being the manner in which the conflict was framed. However, the underlying struggle appeared to most analysts to have little or nothing to do with doctrinal matters and much more to be based on those who regarded themselves as part of Britain (the “Protestants”) and those who identified with Ireland and being Irish (the “Catholics”). In the Basque case, language and cultural divisions, closely tied in with feelings of historical separation, represented the ethnic glue behind a strong sense of Basque identity and the movement for separation from Spain (Conversi, 1997 ). For both situations, however, many social scientists interpret the struggle as one between groups divided on the basis of nationalism. Once an ethnic group moves toward mobilization with the goal of creating a separate state, or joining a different state from the one that it is currently a part, then ethnicity is transformed into nationalism.

The nature of these movements has been explored by scholars who emphasize a variety of different factors to account for the changing salience of ethnic and national struggles over time (Fearson & Laitin, 2003 , 2005 ). Most of these factors are related to the relative power of ethnonationalist movements compared with the state structures they are fighting against. The components of the power equation can include many influences, including the legitimacy of the groups’ claims for national independence; whether such movements are united or consist of a coalition of conflicting parties; the extent to which ethnic groups and nationalist movements are spread across multiple state boundaries and are geographically concentrated or dispersed; the strength and resilience of the states that oppose them; and the geopolitical context in which the conflict is taking place. The situation of the Kurds illustrates several of these elements, such as the opposition to statehood from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and the opportunities for greater autonomy presented by the collapse of centralized political control that emerged as a consequence of the 2003 Iraq war (O’Leary et al., 2005 ). While the Kurds played a significant military role in the defeat of ISIS during the Syrian civil war ( 2011 –) after the Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad proved decisive, the Kurdish forces were rapidly abandoned by their former allies, reflecting the number of states opposed to any idea of an independent Kurdish state.

The Continuing Significance of the Nation

Thus, ethnicity and nationalism form different stages along a continuum. Some ethnic groups, particularly those living in explicitly multinational states, are content to remain as part of a wider political unit. In certain cases, such as Switzerland, the state is fundamentally based on these separate group components, coexisting in various types of federal structures. The Swiss canton system is a long-established version of federalism that has been able to contain at least three major linguistic groups—German, French, and Italian speakers—in a united state structure.

However, the Swiss example is in many respects exceptional. The clear recognition that these types of arrangements may combine a high degree of autonomy for each national group while retaining the cohesiveness of the overarching political unit is but one way to manage ethnic diversity. Much depends on the perceptions of equal treatment and a just division of power and resources, which explains why these federal solutions are often difficult to maintain. Conflicts between Canada and Quebec, between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, and between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq all point to the complexities of trying to contain the aspirations of diverse ethnonational groups within a single political structure. Lebanon was once regarded as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” before it descended into religious divisions amid corruption and outside interference.

Europe in the postcommunist period provides some interesting examples of failed federalism and federalist expansion taking place simultaneously. The collapse of Yugoslavia, which under Josip Broz Tito had been one of the most genuinely devolved, ethnically diverse states in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, demonstrates how rapidly such arrangements can disintegrate in the aftermath of political change (Sekulic, 2020 ). With the initial breakaway of Slovenia, followed by the wars between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, what had once been a unified power-sharing arrangement rapidly degenerated into a power struggle articulated in nationalist terms. The split with Montenegro, and the declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2008 , finally left Serbia on its own, thus completing the total disintegration of what had been a unified state since 1918 . While Yugoslavia was falling apart, much of the rest of Eastern Europe, having emerged from the political control of the Soviet system, was involved in a scramble to join the European Union. Just as one part of the continent was fragmenting into an increasing number of units defined by their dominant ethnic population, other parts, comprising firmly established states, were voluntarily surrendering some of their sovereignty in order to enjoy the benefits of an enlarged economic and political community. Thus, a continuing dialectic of national fission and fusion demonstrates that there is nothing inevitable about the strength and direction of nationalist sentiment, which can wax and wane depending on a range of economic, social, and political factors. The component parts of the former Yugoslavia would also join the scramble for EU membership in the early decades of the 21st century .

While European consolidation during and after the 1990s was a remarkable transition from centuries of rivalry and warfare, even this has to be seen as an ever-changing development. After having narrowly defeated the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 , the United Kingdom was locked in a struggle to leave the EU in June 2016 , after almost half a century of membership. While this was in part a political miscalculation by Prime Minister David Cameron designed to silence critics within his party, the surprising outcome and the protracted negotiations to work out an exit from the EU—Brexit—came to a head with the electoral victory of Boris Johnson in 2019 . This outcome resonated with other global trends, including the unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 American presidential election together with a string of parallel political movements from Turkey to Brazil, from India to Indonesia, and including Russia and China. This revival of populist nationalism can be seen in part as a massive reaction to the uneven outcome of accelerated globalization (Brubaker, 2017 ; Stone & Rizova, 2020 ).

Furthermore, the expansion and internal dynamics of Europe were also influencing the types of internal “national” conflicts taking place between member states. Thus, the gradual solution of the centuries-old Northern Ireland struggle can in part be attributed to the lower salience of national boundaries resulting from the increasing influence of Brussels and Strasbourg. While many Unionists (Protestants) and Nationalists (Catholics) had a visceral dislike of dealing with Dublin and London respectively, the prospect of a fundamental shift in the European political center of gravity meant that both groups could increasingly bargain with a third party. This was the politically neutral European Parliament and Commission (bureaucracy), which rendered their traditional foes much less important and prevented compromise from looking like capitulation. No one would suggest that this was the only factor involved in the lessening of tensions and facilitating the historic power-sharing arrangement. The phenomenal growth of the Irish economy—the emergence of the Celtic Tiger—and the changed attitude of the American public toward “terrorism” (and hence financial support for the Irish Republican Army) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon were also critical developments pushing the parties in Northern Ireland toward completing the negotiations. However, given the earlier emphasis on the ever-changing nature of these group relationships, the arrival of Brexit raised a totally new obstacle to sustained peace in Northern Ireland. Whether peaceful cooperation can withstand the complex border issues resulting from the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU remains to be seen.

The academic scholarship on nationalism has involved a series of debates about the fundamental nature of the phenomenon that is being analyzed. Proponents of primordialism, ethnosymbolism, and modernism, the three most influential perspectives in the literature, have argued extensively about the content and origin of nationalism. Some maintain that this form of identity is rooted in a long and continuous association of specific peoples, whether it is tied to a perceived cultural history often stretching back over centuries, if not millennia, or whether it is, in fact, a relatively recent form of identity. Others date nationalism to the Industrial Revolution and/or the political revolutions in America and France in the late 18th century and claim it was largely “invented” by modernizing elites in an attempt to unify political structures. There are a large number of permutations and combinations of these basic perspectives. Most primordialists avoid the genetic mechanisms associated with sociobiological arguments—Pierre van den Berghe being a notable exception—for the same reason that the overwhelming majority of scholars analyzing “race” are careful to emphasize that they are describing a fictitious construction based on a poor understanding of biological processes. Thus, sociologists such as Edward Shils and Steven Grosby stress cultural and social mechanisms that bond human groups together on the basis of family, culture, and territory. While not biologically programmed, these cultural affiliations are deeply felt and are often experienced with great intensity, which helps to explain the power and resilience of nationalist sentiments. A related emphasis on the strong psychological basis of much nationalism can be found in Walker Connor’s analysis of what he calls ethnonationalism (Connor, 1993 ). Connor draws a firm distinction between two closely related, but he would insist distinct, sources of identification: nationalism, which refers to loyalty to an ethnic group or nation; and patriotism, which is defined as political identification with the state.

The fact that the nation-state, a perfect overlap between one specific ethnic group and a given political unit, only exists in a few cases, and even then is only an approximation to reality, explains the nature of so many types of nationalist conflict. States often seek to incorporate minority ethnic groups into the structures and culture of the dominant group, and this can often result in reactive resistance by the minority group(s): subordinate nationalism to counter dominant nationalism. A related distinction that is frequently made is between ethnic and civic nationalism, a difference between those states that explicitly attempt to fuse the nation and the state and those that try to maintain an ethnically neutral political organization. In practice, this too is an analytical dichotomy that was initially developed to contrast the types of nationalism found in Eastern Europe and those typically prevailing in the Western states of the continent. Once again, no matter how much the civic ideal-type is professed, it is rarely pure in form, and many of the cultural characteristics of the dominant group are subtly, or often less than subtly, incorporated into the basic assumptions of the state.

Other theorists of nationalism tend to emphasize the modern nature of the phenomenon, insisting that none of the forms of identity that characterized society for long periods of human history share the vital ingredients of the modern understanding of the term. There are several variations on this perspective, some coming out of the Marxist tradition that dismisses nationalism, like religion, as yet another form of false consciousness, and others that view the emergence of nationalism as an integral element of modernity. The former perspective regards nationalism as an ideological smokescreen hiding the “true” interests of the working classes so that the owners of the means of capitalist production can better exploit them. It is a variant on the divide and rule strategy that promotes ideological confusion and pits worker against worker on the basis of a totally irrelevant set of distinctions. Modernity theorists, meanwhile, do not link the rise of nationalism with the growth of capitalism alone but see it as stemming from a combination of political, social, and economic forces generated by the Enlightenment. One result of the economic and political revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries , and the scientific and technological advances associated with these historical transformations, is the need for mass education to build a culturally homogeneous platform to sustain these developments (Gellner, 1983 ). Central to these changes, and resulting as an unintended consequence of the functional requirements of a modern lifestyle, are conditions that encourage and sustain nationalism.

The ethnosymbolists, exemplified by the writings of Anthony Smith ( 1986 , 2008 ) and John Hutchinson ( 2005 , 2017 ), take a middle position between modernist social construction and the sense of historical continuity. While Smith and his colleagues are fully aware of the cultural foundations of nations, they are also equally cognizant of the role of myths, symbols, and the frequently distorted collective memory that underpins all the major forms of nationalist movements. This middle path between the extremes of construction and continuity provides a valuable balance that helps us to understand a wider range of nationalist movements, from those with a pedigree stretching back millennia to the nationalisms of the postimperial era during the 19th and 20th centuries . With the emergence of a variety of interpretations of how and when nationalism developed in modern society, much of the current debate concerns an assessment of the impact of such forces as globalization, religious fundamentalism, and international nonstate terrorism as factors that may shape the continuing importance, growing salience, or declining significance of nationalism in the future.

Globalization and Populist Nationalism

Is it possible that racism, ethnicity, and nationalism will become much less salient in the coming decades? If so, what would be the explanation for such trends? Social scientists do not have a particularly good record in predicting far into the future. While W. E. B. DuBois was remarkably prescient in seeing the power of the color line throughout the 20th century , other predictions have proved to be far less accurate. For example, a claim that the advance of science and technology, as a crucial component of the “rationality” of modernization, would make religion obsolete in the latter half of the 20th century has not turned out to be correct. The particular forms of identity that are likely to be salient or, in contradistinction, may quite probably diminish in significance in the decades to come remains an enduring question.

Of the three elements, racism seemed, until the arrival of Trump, to be the least likely candidate for a rapid revival as a basis of group categorization. There are several forces that could strengthen a general antiracist trend in modern global society. Olzak ( 2006 ) has stressed the need to integrate the changing nature of international organizations and processes into the analysis, particularly the complex ramifications of globalization with its impact on migration, transnational communities, suprastate institutions, and transnational corporations. Increased diversity in all the major societies as a result of the global transformation of the world economy, and the interconnections of capital and labor, can be expected to increase during the successive decades of the century. This will apply not only to the postindustrial societies of the First World, but also to the intermediate developing economies and to the Third World. The sheer diversity of migration patterns, internal flows within regional free trade areas, transnational communities whose dynamics will be enhanced by accelerated innovations in communication technologies and transportation, growing groups of highly skilled global migrants, and the unpredictable flows of refugees from political persecution, famines, and genocidal massacres, will all combine to increase the multiracial complexion of states and federations throughout the world. No one would expect these trends to be entirely in one direction, or to be without the potential for strong backlashes or reactive political movements against the type of social changes that such developments represent.

Ethnicity and nationalism, meanwhile, will probably be rather more persistent markers of group boundaries. There are several reasons for this conclusion. While the United Nations, as a global organization for political governance, has a role to play in trying to respond to crises and catastrophes that cut across state boundaries or involve multiple state conflicts, its structure is fundamentally state-bound. The Security Council’s veto power means that a coordinated response is extremely difficult when a particular state, or power bloc, deems such action to be a threat to their “national interests” or to set a precedent that can be viewed as “interference in the internal affairs of a member state.” Thus, on issues such as genocide, torture, brutal ethnic repression, and the blatant disregard for human rights, UN conventions are invariably ignored when geopolitical interests are involved.

If one overarching political structure is unlikely to reduce ethnic and nationalist sentiments, what about the impact of intermediate-scale organizations that bunch together clusters of states in regional groupings? What will be the net effect of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the EU, NAFTA, and related supranational, but not global, institutions and treaties? Will they, on balance, help to diminish the types of ethnic and national mobilization as increased cooperation and mutual dependency in economic, social, and political ties start to extend the traditional boundaries of group interaction? Or will they lead to strong opposition, with political parties appealing to xenophobic solidarity, to setting up “Fortress Europe,” or building fences to try to curtail the increasing flows of illegal economic migrants that are a direct outcome of the trade and economic policies forcing capital and labor to seek out a new equilibrium? If we add the factors of international terrorism, environmental pressure resulting from global climate change, the worldwide implications of drug policies, and the competitive rivalries of major religious faiths, a volatile mix of influences will undoubtedly be unleashed.

Some sociologists such as Richard Alba ( 2008 ) point to demographic factors that could exert pressure on societies such as the United States to move toward greater economic and social justice for ethnic minorities. Given the differential fertility rates of dominant whites and those of minorities, particularly minorities of color, Alba suggests these trends will have a tendency toward minority inclusion in the upper levels of the U.S. stratification system. While in the past immigration from Europe was one mechanism that provided an alternative reservoir of talent to fill a range of positions in the economic hierarchy, since the 1960s the shortfall in the supply of scientific, technical, and managerial talent has often been filled by foreigners, either those directly recruited by U.S. corporations or American-trained aliens who choose to remain in the country and work after completing their higher education. Alba argues that this pool of talented individuals will be subject to increasing competition from many other growing economies and that, combined with the domestic demographic shortfall, the result will be the incorporation of more American minorities into professional, managerial, and technical positions. What is true of the United States is likely to be repeated in Europe with its even lower demographic rates of reproduction and similar patterns of migration both within the enlarged economic community and from the peripheral regions surrounding it.

None of these macro sociopolitical trends necessarily diminish the tensions that arise from increasing globalization that can be channeled along ethnic and nationalist grooves. In fact, the very success of the integrative economic forces may exacerbate ethnonational mobilization as a way to maintain meaningful identity in a world subject to mounting anomic strains associated with rapid and discontinuous social change. What Mann ( 2005 ) has characterized as “the dark side of democracy” is simply a further elaboration of the argument about the dual-edged sword of modernity, which has its intellectual roots in Weber’s pessimistic analysis of “rationality.” From the “banality of evil,” to cite Hannah Arendt’s classic formulation, genocide and ethnic cleansing are not so much a reversion to primitive violence as a logical outcome of many of the forces inherent in modern society. While it is true that there may also be a “banality of good” that can, on occasions, help to counter such threats (Casiro, 2006 ), it is unlikely that this will be the dominant outcome. “Rational” bureaucratic techniques tend to be harnessed to the goals of modern states, multistate alliances, and nonstate global actors such as multinational corporations. These modern methods can combine the destructiveness of scientific means with the tenacity of group identity to attain highly particularistic ends. Regrettably, there is nothing intrinsically benign in the forces underpinning the societal changes that have taken place during the first two decades of the 21st century . The precise balance between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism remains unclear but their possible eradication from future social, economic, and political conflicts seems highly unlikely.

Sign in through your institution

Browse content in Arts and Humanities
Browse content in Archaeology
Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
Archaeology by Region
Archaeology of Religion
Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
Biblical Archaeology
Contemporary and Public Archaeology
Environmental Archaeology
Historical Archaeology
History and Theory of Archaeology
Industrial Archaeology
Landscape Archaeology
Mortuary Archaeology
Prehistoric Archaeology
Underwater Archaeology
Urban Archaeology
Zooarchaeology
Browse content in Architecture
Architectural Structure and Design
History of Architecture
Residential and Domestic Buildings
Theory of Architecture
Browse content in Art
Art Subjects and Themes
History of Art
Industrial and Commercial Art
Theory of Art
Biographical Studies
Byzantine Studies
Browse content in Classical Studies
Classical Literature
Classical Reception
Classical History
Classical Philosophy
Classical Mythology
Classical Art and Architecture
Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
Greek and Roman Papyrology
Greek and Roman Archaeology
Greek and Roman Epigraphy
Greek and Roman Law
Late Antiquity
Religion in the Ancient World
Digital Humanities
Browse content in History
Colonialism and Imperialism
Diplomatic History
Environmental History
Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
Historical Geography
History by Period
History of Emotions
History of Agriculture
History of Education
History of Gender and Sexuality
Industrial History
Intellectual History
International History
Labour History
Legal and Constitutional History
Local and Family History
Maritime History
Military History
National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
Oral History
Political History
Public History
Regional and National History
Revolutions and Rebellions
Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
Social and Cultural History
Theory, Methods, and Historiography
Urban History
World History
Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
Language Learning (Specific Skills)
Language Teaching Theory and Methods
Browse content in Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
Cognitive Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
Forensic Linguistics
Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
History of English
Language Evolution
Language Reference
Language Variation
Language Families
Language Acquisition
Lexicography
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic Theories
Linguistic Typology
Phonetics and Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Translation and Interpretation
Writing Systems
Browse content in Literature
Bibliography
Children's Literature Studies
Literary Studies (Romanticism)
Literary Studies (American)
Literary Studies (Modernism)
Literary Studies (Asian)
Literary Studies (European)
Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
Literary Studies - World
Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
Literary Studies (19th Century)
Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
Literary Studies (African American Literature)
Literary Studies (British and Irish)
Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
Literary Studies (History of the Book)
Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
Literary Studies (War Literature)
Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Mythology and Folklore
Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
Browse content in Media Studies
Browse content in Music
Applied Music
Dance and Music
Ethics in Music
Ethnomusicology
Gender and Sexuality in Music
Medicine and Music
Music Cultures
Music and Media
Music and Culture
Music and Religion
Music Education and Pedagogy
Music Theory and Analysis
Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
Musicology and Music History
Performance Practice and Studies
Race and Ethnicity in Music
Sound Studies
Browse content in Performing Arts
Browse content in Philosophy
Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
Epistemology
Feminist Philosophy
History of Western Philosophy
Metaphysics
Moral Philosophy
Non-Western Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Perception
Philosophy of Action
Philosophy of Law
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
Practical Ethics
Social and Political Philosophy
Browse content in Religion
Biblical Studies
Christianity
East Asian Religions
History of Religion
Judaism and Jewish Studies
Qumran Studies
Religion and Education
Religion and Health
Religion and Politics
Religion and Science
Religion and Law
Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
Religious Studies
Browse content in Society and Culture
Cookery, Food, and Drink
Cultural Studies
Customs and Traditions
Ethical Issues and Debates
Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
Sports and Outdoor Recreation
Technology and Society
Travel and Holiday
Visual Culture
Browse content in Law
Arbitration
Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
Commercial Law
Company Law
Browse content in Comparative Law
Systems of Law
Competition Law
Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
Government Powers
Judicial Review
Local Government Law
Military and Defence Law
Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
Construction Law
Contract Law
Browse content in Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure
Criminal Evidence Law
Sentencing and Punishment
Employment and Labour Law
Environment and Energy Law
Browse content in Financial Law
Banking Law
Insolvency Law
History of Law
Human Rights and Immigration
Intellectual Property Law
Browse content in International Law
Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
Public International Law
IT and Communications Law
Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
Law and Society
Law and Politics
Browse content in Legal System and Practice
Courts and Procedure
Legal Skills and Practice
Primary Sources of Law
Regulation of Legal Profession
Medical and Healthcare Law
Browse content in Policing
Criminal Investigation and Detection
Police and Security Services
Police Procedure and Law
Police Regional Planning
Browse content in Property Law
Personal Property Law
Study and Revision
Terrorism and National Security Law
Browse content in Trusts Law
Wills and Probate or Succession
Browse content in Medicine and Health
Browse content in Allied Health Professions
Arts Therapies
Clinical Science
Dietetics and Nutrition
Occupational Therapy
Operating Department Practice
Physiotherapy
Radiography
Speech and Language Therapy
Browse content in Anaesthetics
General Anaesthesia
Neuroanaesthesia
Clinical Neuroscience
Browse content in Clinical Medicine
Acute Medicine
Cardiovascular Medicine
Clinical Genetics
Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
Dermatology
Endocrinology and Diabetes
Gastroenterology
Genito-urinary Medicine
Geriatric Medicine
Infectious Diseases
Medical Toxicology
Medical Oncology
Pain Medicine
Palliative Medicine
Rehabilitation Medicine
Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
Rheumatology
Sleep Medicine
Sports and Exercise Medicine
Community Medical Services
Critical Care
Emergency Medicine
Forensic Medicine
Haematology
History of Medicine
Browse content in Medical Skills
Clinical Skills
Communication Skills
Nursing Skills
Surgical Skills
Medical Ethics
Browse content in Medical Dentistry
Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
Paediatric Dentistry
Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
Surgical Dentistry
Medical Statistics and Methodology
Browse content in Neurology
Clinical Neurophysiology
Neuropathology
Nursing Studies
Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
Gynaecology
Occupational Medicine
Ophthalmology
Otolaryngology (ENT)
Browse content in Paediatrics
Neonatology
Browse content in Pathology
Chemical Pathology
Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
Histopathology
Medical Microbiology and Virology
Patient Education and Information
Browse content in Pharmacology
Psychopharmacology
Browse content in Popular Health
Caring for Others
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Self-help and Personal Development
Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
Cell Biology
Molecular Biology and Genetics
Reproduction, Growth and Development
Primary Care
Professional Development in Medicine
Browse content in Psychiatry
Addiction Medicine
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Forensic Psychiatry
Learning Disabilities
Old Age Psychiatry
Psychotherapy
Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
Epidemiology
Public Health
Browse content in Radiology
Clinical Radiology
Interventional Radiology
Nuclear Medicine
Radiation Oncology
Reproductive Medicine
Browse content in Surgery
Cardiothoracic Surgery
Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
General Surgery
Neurosurgery
Paediatric Surgery
Peri-operative Care
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
Surgical Oncology
Transplant Surgery
Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
Vascular Surgery
Browse content in Science and Mathematics
Browse content in Biological Sciences
Aquatic Biology
Biochemistry
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Developmental Biology
Ecology and Conservation
Evolutionary Biology
Genetics and Genomics
Microbiology
Molecular and Cell Biology
Natural History
Plant Sciences and Forestry
Research Methods in Life Sciences
Structural Biology
Systems Biology
Zoology and Animal Sciences
Browse content in Chemistry
Analytical Chemistry
Computational Chemistry
Crystallography
Environmental Chemistry
Industrial Chemistry
Inorganic Chemistry
Materials Chemistry
Medicinal Chemistry
Mineralogy and Gems
Organic Chemistry
Physical Chemistry
Polymer Chemistry
Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
Theoretical Chemistry
Browse content in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Architecture and Logic Design
Game Studies
Human-Computer Interaction
Mathematical Theory of Computation
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
Systems Analysis and Design
Virtual Reality
Browse content in Computing
Business Applications
Computer Games
Computer Security
Computer Networking and Communications
Digital Lifestyle
Graphical and Digital Media Applications
Operating Systems
Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
Atmospheric Sciences
Environmental Geography
Geology and the Lithosphere
Maps and Map-making
Meteorology and Climatology
Oceanography and Hydrology
Palaeontology
Physical Geography and Topography
Regional Geography
Soil Science
Urban Geography
Browse content in Engineering and Technology
Agriculture and Farming
Biological Engineering
Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
Electronics and Communications Engineering
Energy Technology
Engineering (General)
Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
History of Engineering and Technology
Mechanical Engineering and Materials
Technology of Industrial Chemistry
Transport Technology and Trades
Browse content in Environmental Science
Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
Environmental Sustainability
Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
History of Science and Technology
Browse content in Materials Science
Ceramics and Glasses
Composite Materials
Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
Nanotechnology
Browse content in Mathematics
Applied Mathematics
Biomathematics and Statistics
History of Mathematics
Mathematical Education
Mathematical Finance
Mathematical Analysis
Numerical and Computational Mathematics
Probability and Statistics
Pure Mathematics
Browse content in Neuroscience
Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
Development of the Nervous System
Disorders of the Nervous System
History of Neuroscience
Invertebrate Neurobiology
Molecular and Cellular Systems
Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
Neuroscientific Techniques
Sensory and Motor Systems
Browse content in Physics
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Biological and Medical Physics
Classical Mechanics
Computational Physics
Condensed Matter Physics
Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
History of Physics
Mathematical and Statistical Physics
Measurement Science
Nuclear Physics
Particles and Fields
Plasma Physics
Quantum Physics
Relativity and Gravitation
Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
Browse content in Psychology
Affective Sciences
Clinical Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Neuroscience
Criminal and Forensic Psychology
Developmental Psychology
Educational Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology
Health Psychology
History and Systems in Psychology
Music Psychology
Neuropsychology
Organizational Psychology
Psychological Assessment and Testing
Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
Psychology Professional Development and Training
Research Methods in Psychology
Social Psychology
Browse content in Social Sciences
Browse content in Anthropology
Anthropology of Religion
Human Evolution
Medical Anthropology
Physical Anthropology
Regional Anthropology
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Theory and Practice of Anthropology
Browse content in Business and Management
Business Ethics
Business History
Business Strategy
Business and Technology
Business and Government
Business and the Environment
Comparative Management
Corporate Governance
Corporate Social Responsibility
Entrepreneurship
Health Management
Human Resource Management
Industrial and Employment Relations
Industry Studies
Information and Communication Technologies
International Business
Knowledge Management
Management and Management Techniques
Operations Management
Organizational Theory and Behaviour
Pensions and Pension Management
Public and Nonprofit Management
Strategic Management
Supply Chain Management
Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Criminal Justice
Criminology
Forms of Crime
International and Comparative Criminology
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
Development Studies
Browse content in Economics
Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
Asian Economics
Behavioural Finance
Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
Economic History
Economic Methodology
Economic Systems
Economic Development and Growth
Financial Markets
Financial Institutions and Services
General Economics and Teaching
Health, Education, and Welfare
History of Economic Thought
International Economics
Labour and Demographic Economics
Law and Economics
Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
Microeconomics
Public Economics
Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
Welfare Economics
Browse content in Education
Adult Education and Continuous Learning
Care and Counselling of Students
Early Childhood and Elementary Education
Educational Equipment and Technology
Educational Strategies and Policy
Higher and Further Education
Organization and Management of Education
Philosophy and Theory of Education
Schools Studies
Secondary Education
Teaching of a Specific Subject
Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
Teaching Skills and Techniques
Browse content in Environment
Applied Ecology (Social Science)
Climate Change
Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
Natural Disasters (Environment)
Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
Browse content in Human Geography
Cultural Geography
Economic Geography
Political Geography
Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
Communication Studies
Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
Browse content in Politics
African Politics
Asian Politics
Chinese Politics
Comparative Politics
Conflict Politics
Elections and Electoral Studies
Environmental Politics
Ethnic Politics
European Union
Foreign Policy
Gender and Politics
Human Rights and Politics
Indian Politics
International Relations
International Organization (Politics)
International Political Economy
Irish Politics
Latin American Politics
Middle Eastern Politics
Political Behaviour
Political Economy
Political Institutions
Political Theory
Political Methodology
Political Communication
Political Philosophy
Political Sociology
Politics and Law
Politics of Development
Public Policy
Public Administration
Quantitative Political Methodology
Regional Political Studies
Russian Politics
Security Studies
State and Local Government
UK Politics
US Politics
Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
African Studies
Asian Studies
East Asian Studies
Japanese Studies
Latin American Studies
Middle Eastern Studies
Native American Studies
Scottish Studies
Browse content in Research and Information
Research Methods
Browse content in Social Work
Addictions and Substance Misuse
Adoption and Fostering
Care of the Elderly
Child and Adolescent Social Work
Couple and Family Social Work
Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
Emergency Services
Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
International and Global Issues in Social Work
Mental and Behavioural Health
Social Justice and Human Rights
Social Policy and Advocacy
Social Work and Crime and Justice
Social Work Macro Practice
Social Work Practice Settings
Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
Welfare and Benefit Systems
Browse content in Sociology
Childhood Studies
Community Development
Comparative and Historical Sociology
Economic Sociology
Gender and Sexuality
Gerontology and Ageing
Health, Illness, and Medicine
Marriage and the Family
Migration Studies
Occupations, Professions, and Work
Organizations
Population and Demography
Race and Ethnicity
Social Theory
Social Movements and Social Change
Social Research and Statistics
Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
Sociology of Religion
Sociology of Education
Sport and Leisure
Urban and Rural Studies
Browse content in Warfare and Defence
Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
Land Forces and Warfare
Military Administration
Military Life and Institutions
Naval Forces and Warfare
Other Warfare and Defence Issues
Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
Weapons and Equipment

Critical Philosophy of Race: Essays

Cite Icon Cite
Permissions Icon Permissions

The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either to miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow. For example, relying on biology to reject the concept of race as a way of disarming racism misses the fact that racism precedes the biology of race. It also ignores the prevalence of forms of racism, such as cultural racism, that do not take their starting point in biology. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, the late Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Robert Bernasconi argues for a holistic approach that integrates the concrete experience of racism faced by individuals into the study of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. Studying the interventions of such Black philosophers as Ottobah Cugoano, Anténor Firmin, and W. E. B. Du Bois shows the value of allowing them to set the terms of the debate, instead of trying to fit them into debates shaped by other areas of philosophy. If race is indeed a social construct, then it is necessary to uncover the different forces, material as well as intellectual, that at different times shaped the various forms the concept of race has taken and the value then placed on preserving racial purity. Critical philosophy of race has a role to play in rendering both the material and psychological effects of slavery and segregation more intelligible as forms of systemic racism. When critical philosophers of race ignore the history of racism, they are in danger of being complicit with that part of society that seeks to erase that history.

Personal account

Sign in with email/username & password
Get email alerts
Save searches
Purchase content
Activate your purchase/trial code
Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with username/password
Recommend to your librarian
Institutional account management
Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutionâ€™s website and Oxford Academic.

Click Sign in through your institution.
Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutionâ€™s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see â€˜Sign in through society siteâ€™ in the sign in pane within a journal:

Click Sign in through society site.
When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

Month:	Total Views:
November 2022	2
November 2022	3
November 2022	2
November 2022	1
November 2022	2
November 2022	3
November 2022	1
November 2022	2
November 2022	2
November 2022	3
November 2022	2
November 2022	2
November 2022	3
December 2022	1
December 2022	2
December 2022	3
December 2022	1
December 2022	1
December 2022	3
December 2022	11
December 2022	5
December 2022	1
December 2022	2
December 2022	1
December 2022	3
December 2022	2
December 2022	4
December 2022	2
December 2022	3
January 2023	6
January 2023	3
January 2023	6
January 2023	4
January 2023	9
January 2023	2
January 2023	4
January 2023	1
January 2023	2
January 2023	4
January 2023	8
January 2023	6
January 2023	8
January 2023	4
January 2023	4
January 2023	5
January 2023	8
January 2023	4
January 2023	3
January 2023	8
January 2023	7
January 2023	10
January 2023	5
January 2023	3
February 2023	8
February 2023	9
February 2023	6
February 2023	7
February 2023	2
February 2023	18
February 2023	2
February 2023	8
February 2023	5
February 2023	5
February 2023	5
February 2023	6
February 2023	9
February 2023	11
February 2023	5
February 2023	5
February 2023	8
February 2023	6
February 2023	10
February 2023	4
February 2023	10
February 2023	9
February 2023	5
February 2023	7
March 2023	20
March 2023	10
March 2023	2
March 2023	1
March 2023	4
March 2023	22
March 2023	9
March 2023	4
March 2023	8
March 2023	6
March 2023	10
March 2023	7
March 2023	12
March 2023	8
March 2023	4
March 2023	17
March 2023	5
March 2023	11
April 2023	16
April 2023	11
April 2023	8
April 2023	15
April 2023	5
April 2023	3
April 2023	1
April 2023	4
April 2023	15
April 2023	22
April 2023	8
April 2023	13
April 2023	23
April 2023	12
April 2023	9
April 2023	13
April 2023	1
April 2023	6
April 2023	12
April 2023	20
April 2023	5
May 2023	18
May 2023	7
May 2023	11
May 2023	3
May 2023	6
May 2023	12
May 2023	7
May 2023	2
May 2023	25
May 2023	1
May 2023	4
May 2023	6
May 2023	8
May 2023	8
May 2023	17
May 2023	8
May 2023	21
May 2023	8
May 2023	10
May 2023	6
May 2023	6
May 2023	7
May 2023	10
May 2023	3
June 2023	9
June 2023	9
June 2023	1
June 2023	4
June 2023	6
June 2023	1
June 2023	11
June 2023	4
June 2023	1
June 2023	14
June 2023	11
June 2023	10
June 2023	8
June 2023	6
June 2023	6
June 2023	15
June 2023	8
June 2023	9
June 2023	4
June 2023	8
June 2023	2
July 2023	12
July 2023	5
July 2023	18
July 2023	10
July 2023	7
July 2023	16
July 2023	18
July 2023	3
July 2023	15
July 2023	4
July 2023	17
July 2023	2
July 2023	16
July 2023	16
July 2023	19
July 2023	10
July 2023	19
July 2023	13
July 2023	21
July 2023	5
July 2023	14
July 2023	11
July 2023	15
July 2023	5
August 2023	7
August 2023	8
August 2023	7
August 2023	6
August 2023	4
August 2023	10
August 2023	24
August 2023	13
August 2023	7
August 2023	4
August 2023	5
August 2023	2
August 2023	8
August 2023	8
August 2023	10
August 2023	5
August 2023	11
August 2023	4
August 2023	11
August 2023	8
August 2023	5
August 2023	11
August 2023	4
September 2023	7
September 2023	7
September 2023	12
September 2023	5
September 2023	7
September 2023	5
September 2023	6
September 2023	2
September 2023	12
September 2023	5
September 2023	1
September 2023	3
September 2023	10
September 2023	9
September 2023	1
September 2023	8
September 2023	5
September 2023	4
September 2023	5
September 2023	6
September 2023	7
September 2023	4
September 2023	6
September 2023	13
October 2023	24
October 2023	2
October 2023	11
October 2023	8
October 2023	19
October 2023	11
October 2023	16
October 2023	16
October 2023	5
October 2023	8
October 2023	12
October 2023	4
October 2023	2
October 2023	1
October 2023	7
October 2023	3
October 2023	11
October 2023	1
October 2023	8
October 2023	4
October 2023	7
October 2023	14
October 2023	14
November 2023	43
November 2023	5
November 2023	13
November 2023	13
November 2023	1
November 2023	12
November 2023	14
November 2023	23
November 2023	11
November 2023	14
November 2023	10
November 2023	27
November 2023	20
November 2023	13
November 2023	15
November 2023	11
November 2023	12
November 2023	9
November 2023	13
November 2023	3
December 2023	10
December 2023	5
December 2023	9
December 2023	25
December 2023	6
December 2023	13
December 2023	23
December 2023	6
December 2023	6
December 2023	10
December 2023	8
December 2023	12
December 2023	2
December 2023	10
December 2023	2
December 2023	4
December 2023	15
December 2023	10
December 2023	4
December 2023	5
December 2023	12
December 2023	11
December 2023	11
December 2023	13
January 2024	18
January 2024	2
January 2024	1
January 2024	9
January 2024	14
January 2024	12
January 2024	6
January 2024	5
January 2024	12
January 2024	12
January 2024	5
January 2024	2
January 2024	6
January 2024	9
January 2024	5
January 2024	2
January 2024	1
January 2024	7
February 2024	26
February 2024	4
February 2024	5
February 2024	2
February 2024	3
February 2024	1
February 2024	8
February 2024	1
February 2024	10
February 2024	2
February 2024	2
February 2024	1
February 2024	3
February 2024	7
February 2024	7
February 2024	22
February 2024	3
February 2024	16
February 2024	11
February 2024	10
February 2024	4
February 2024	16
February 2024	3
February 2024	2
March 2024	2
March 2024	12
March 2024	2
March 2024	2
March 2024	4
March 2024	5
March 2024	4
March 2024	8
March 2024	18
March 2024	4
March 2024	12
March 2024	5
March 2024	8
March 2024	6
March 2024	21
March 2024	6
March 2024	3
March 2024	13
April 2024	14
April 2024	6
April 2024	6
April 2024	13
April 2024	5
April 2024	2
April 2024	2
April 2024	8
April 2024	22
April 2024	8
April 2024	5
April 2024	2
April 2024	16
April 2024	31
April 2024	13
April 2024	13
April 2024	5
April 2024	14
April 2024	4
April 2024	8
April 2024	6
April 2024	12
April 2024	2
May 2024	16
May 2024	4
May 2024	7
May 2024	1
May 2024	2
May 2024	38
May 2024	1
May 2024	15
May 2024	4
May 2024	5
May 2024	10
May 2024	10
May 2024	5
May 2024	6
May 2024	3
May 2024	1
May 2024	8
May 2024	4
May 2024	8
May 2024	1
June 2024	2
June 2024	3
June 2024	2
June 2024	1
June 2024	58
June 2024	6
June 2024	2
June 2024	1
June 2024	4
June 2024	5
June 2024	2
June 2024	10
June 2024	4
June 2024	7
June 2024	1
June 2024	3

About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Rights and permissions
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Table of Contents
Random Entry
Chronological
Editorial Information
About the SEP
Editorial Board
How to Cite the SEP
Special Characters
Advanced Tools
Support the SEP
PDFs for SEP Friends
Make a Donation
SEPIA for Libraries
Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

The concept of race has historically signified the division of humanity into a small number of groups based upon five criteria: (1) Races reflect some type of biological foundation, be it Aristotelian essences or modern genes; (2) This biological foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race share a set of biological characteristics that are not shared by members of other races; (3) This biological foundation is inherited from generation to generation, allowing observers to identify an individual’s race through her ancestry or genealogy; (4) Genealogical investigation should identify each race’s geographic origin, typically in Africa, Europe, Asia, or North and South America; and (5) This inherited racial biological foundation manifests itself primarily in physical phenotypes, such as skin color, eye shape, hair texture, and bone structure, and perhaps also behavioral phenotypes, such as intelligence or delinquency.

This historical concept of race has faced substantial scientific and philosophical challenge, with some important thinkers denying both the logical coherence of the concept and the very existence of races. Others defend the concept of race, albeit with substantial changes to the foundations of racial identity, which they depict as either socially constructed or, if biologically grounded, neither discrete nor essentialist, as the historical concept would have it.

Both in the past and today, determining the boundaries of discrete races has proven to be most vexing and has led to great variations in the number of human races believed to be in existence. Thus, some thinkers categorized humans into only four distinct races (typically white or Caucasian, Black or African, yellow or Asian, and red or Native American), and downplayed any biological or phenotypical distinctions within racial groups (such as those between Scandinavians and Spaniards within the white or Caucasian race). Other thinkers classified humans into many more racial categories, for instance arguing that those humans “indigenous” to Europe could be distinguished into discrete Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races.

The ambiguities and confusion associated with determining the boundaries of racial categories have led to the widespread position that discrete or essentialist races are socially constructed, not biologically real. However, significant scholarly debate persists regarding whether reproductive isolation, either during human evolution or through modern practices barring miscegenation, may have generated sufficient genetic isolation as to justify using the term race to signify the existence of non-discrete human groups that share not only physical phenotypes but also clusters of genetic material. In addition, scholarly debate exists concerning the formation and character of socially constructed, discrete racial categories. For instance, some scholars suggest that race is inconceivable without racialized social hierarchies, while others argue that egalitarian race relations are possible. Finally, substantial controversy surrounds the moral status of racial identity and solidarity and the justice and legitimacy of policies or institutions aimed at undermining racial inequality.

This entry focuses primarily on contemporary scholarship regarding the conceptual, ontological, epistemological, and normative questions pertaining to race, with an introductory section on the history of the concept of race in the West and in Western philosophy. Aside from some discussion in Section 5, it does not focus in depth on authors such as Frederick Douglass , W.E.B. Du Bois , or Frantz Fanon , or movements, such as Négritude , Critical Philosophy of Race , or Philosophy of Liberation . Interested readers should consult these relevant entries for insight into these and other topics important to the study of race in philosophy.

In Section 1, we trace the historical origins and development of the concept of race. Section 2 covers contemporary philosophical debates over whether races actually exist. Thereafter, in Section 3 we examine the differences between race and ethnicity. Section 4 surveys debates among moral, political and legal philosophers over the validity of racial identity, racial solidarity, and race-specific policies such as affirmative action and race-based representation. Section 5 outlines engagement with the concept of race within Continental philosophy.

1. History of the Concept of Race

2. do races exist contemporary philosophical debates, 3. race versus ethnicity, 4. race in moral, political and legal philosophy, 5. race in continental philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there is less agreement regarding whether racism , even absent a developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The influential work of classicist Frank Snowden (1970; 1983), who emphasized the lack of antiblack prejudice in the ancient world, led many scholars of race to conclude that racism did not exist in that epoch. However, later classicists have responded that Snowden’s work unnecessarily reduced all forms of racism to its peculiarly American version based on skin color and other markers of non-white identity. Benjamin Isaac (2004) and Denise McCoskey (2012) contend that the ancient Greeks and Romans did hold proto-racist views that applied to other groups which today might be considered white. Isaac persuasively argues that these views must be considered proto-racist : although they were formed without the aid of a modern race concept grounded in ideas of deterministic biology (2004, 5), they nevertheless resembled modern racism by attributing “to groups of people common characteristics considered to be unalterable because they are determined by external factors or heredity” (2004, 38). More importantly, both Isaac and McCoskey contend that ancient proto-racism influenced the development of modern racism.

Perhaps the first, unconscious stirrings of the concept of race arose within the Iberian Peninsula. Following the Moorish conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century C.E., the Iberian Peninsula became the site of the greatest intermingling between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers. During and after their reconquista (reconquest) of the Muslim principalities in the peninsula, the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand sought to establish a uniformly Christian state by expelling first the Jews (in 1492) and then the Muslims (in 1502). But because large numbers of both groups converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion (and before this to avoid persecution), the monarchs distrusted the authenticity of these Jewish and Muslim conversos (converts). To ensure that only truly faithful Christians remained within the realm, the grand inquisitor Torquemada reformulated the Inquisition to inquire not just into defendants’ religious faith and practices but into their lineage. Only those who could demonstrate their ancestry to those Christians who resisted the Moorish invasion were secure in their status in the realm. Thus, the idea of purity of blood was born ( limpieza de sangre ), not fully the biological concept of race but perhaps the first occidental use of blood heritage as a category of religio-political membership (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, vii; Hannaford 1996, 122–126; Frederickson 2002, 31–35).

The Iberian Peninsula may also have witnessed the first stirrings of antiblack and anti-Native-American racism. Since this region was the first in Europe to utilize African slavery while gradually rejecting the enslavement of fellow European Christians, Iberian Christians may have come to associate Black people as physically and mentally suitable only for menial labor. In this they were influenced by Arab slave merchants, who assigned the worst tasks to their dark-skinned slaves while assigning more complex labor to light or tawny-skinned slaves (Frederickson 2002, 29). The “discovery” of the New World by Iberian explorers also brought European Christians into contact with indigenous Americans for the first time. This resulted in the heated debate in Valladolid in 1550 between Bartolomé Las Casas and Gines de Sepúlveda over whether the Indians were by nature inferior and thus worthy of enslavement and conquest. Whether due to Las Casas’ victory over Sepúlveda, or due to the hierarchical character of Spanish Catholicism which did not require the dehumanization of other races in order to justify slavery, the Spanish empire did avoid the racialization of its conquered peoples and African slaves. Indeed, arguably it was the conflict between the Enlightenment ideals of universal freedom and equality versus the fact of the European enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans that fostered the development of the idea of race (Blum 2002, 111–112; Hannaford 1996, 149–150).

While events in the Iberian Peninsula may have provided the initial stirrings of modern racial sentiments, the concept of race, with its close links to ideas of deterministic biology, emerged with the rise of modern natural philosophy and its concern with taxonomy (Smith 2015). The first important articulation of the race concept came with the 1684 publication of “A New Division of the Earth” by Francois Bernier (1625–1688) (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii; Hannaford 1996, 191, 203). Based on his travels through Egypt, India, and Persia, this essay presented a division of humanity into “four or five species or races of men in particular whose difference is so remarkable that it may be properly made use of as the foundation for a new division of the earth” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 1–2). First were the peoples inhabiting most of Europe and North Africa, extending eastward through Persia, northern and central India, and right up to parts of contemporary Indonesia. Despite their differing skin tones, these peoples nevertheless shared common physical characteristics, such as hair texture and bone structure. The second race was constituted by the people of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, who notably possessed smooth Black skin, thick noses and lips, thin beards, and wooly hair. The peoples inhabiting lands from east Asia, through China, today’s central Asian states such as Uzbekistan, and westward into Siberia and eastern Russia represented the third race, marked by their “truly white” skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, flat noses, thin beards, and long, thin eyes, while the short and squat Lapps of northern Scandinavia constituted the fourth race. Bernier considered whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a fifth race, but he ultimately assigned them to the first (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 2–3).

But while Bernier initiated the use of the term “race” to distinguish different groups of humans based on physical traits, his failure to reflect on the relationship between racial division and the human race in general mitigated the scientific rigor of his definition (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii). Central to a scientific concept of race would be a resolution of the question of monogenesis versus polygenesis. Monogenesis adhered to the Biblical creation story in asserting that all humans descended from a common ancestor, perhaps Adam of the Book of Genesis; polygenesis, on the other hand, asserted that different human races descended from different ancestral roots. Thus, the former position contended that all races are nevertheless members of a common human species, whereas the latter saw races as distinct species.

David Hume’s position on the debate between polygenesis versus monogenesis is the subject of some scholarly debate. The bone of contention is his essay “Of National Characters,” where he contends that differences among European nations are attributable not to natural differences but to cultural and political influences. Amidst this argument against crude naturalism, Hume inserts a footnote in the 1754 edition, wherein he writes: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (Zack 2002, 15; emphasis added). Whereas even the most barbarous white nations such as the Germans “have something eminent about them,” the “uniform and constant difference” in accomplishment between whites and non-whites could not occur “if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men” (Zack 2002, 15). Responding to criticism, he softens this position in the 1776 edition, restricting his claims to natural inferiority only to “negroes,” stating that “ scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, not even of individual eminent in action or speculation” (Zack 2002, 17; Hume 1776 [1987], 208; emphasis added). Richard Popkin (1977) and Naomi Zack (2002, 13–18) contend that the 1754 version of the essay assumes, without demonstration, an original, polygenetic difference between white and non-white races. Andrew Valls (2005, 132) denies that either version of the footnote espouses polygenesis.

A strong and clear defense of monogenesis was provided by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his essay “Of the Different Human Races,” first published in 1775 and revised in 1777. Kant argued that all humans descend from a common human “lineal root genus” in Europe, which contained the biological “seeds” and “dispositions” that can generate the distinct physical traits of race when triggered by divergent environmental factors, especially combinations of heat and humidity. This, combined with patterns of migration, geographic isolation, and in-breeding, led to the differentiation of four distinct, pure races: the “noble blond” of northern Europe; the “copper red” of America (and east Asia); the “black” of Senegambia in Africa; and the “olive-yellow” of Asian-India. Once these discrete racial groups were developed over many generations, further climatic changes will not alter racial phenotypes (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 8–22).

Yet despite the distinction generated between different races, Kant’s monogenetic account led him to maintain that the different races were part of a common human species. As evidence, he adduced the fact that individuals from different races were able to breed together, and their offspring tended to exhibit blended physical traits inherited from both parents. Not only did blending indicate that the parents were part of a common species; it also indicated that they are of distinct races. For the physical traits of parents of the same race are not blended but often passed on exclusively: a blond white man and a brunette white woman may have four blond children, without any blending of this physical trait; whereas a Black man and a white woman will bear children who blend white and Black traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 9–10). Such inter-racial mixtures accounted for the existence of liminal individuals, whose physical traits seem to lie between the discrete boundaries of one of the four races; peoples who do not fit neatly into one or another race are explained away as groups whose seeds have not been fully triggered by the appropriate environmental stimuli (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 11).

The “science” of race was furthered by the man sometimes considered to be the father of modern anthropology, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). In his doctoral dissertation, “On the Natural Variety of Mankind,” first published in 1775, Blumenbach identified four “varieties” of mankind: the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. His essay was revised and republished both in 1781, wherein he introduced a fifth variety of mankind, that inhabiting the South Pacific islands, and in 1795, wherein he first coined the term “Caucasian” to describe the variety of people inhabiting Europe, West Asia, and Northern India. This term reflected his claim that this variety originated in the Caucuses mountains, in Georgia, justifying this etiology through reference to the superior beauty of the Georgians. The 1795 version also included the terms Mongolian to describe the non-Caucasian peoples of Asia, Ethiopian to signify Black Africans, American to denote the indigenous peoples of the New World, and Malay to identify the South Pacific Islanders (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 27–33; Hannaford 1996, 207).

While noting differences in skin tone, he based his varieties upon the structures of the cranium, which supposedly gave his distinctions a stronger scientific foundation than the more superficial characteristic of color (Hannaford 1996, 206). In addition, he strongly denied polygenetic accounts of racial difference, noting the ability of members of different varieties to breed with each other, something that humans were incapable of doing with other species. Indeed, he took great pains to dismiss as spurious accounts of Africans mating with apes or of monstrous creatures formed through the union of humans with other animals (Hannaford 1996, 208–209). In final support of his more scientific, monogenist approach, Blumenbach posited the internal, biological force which generated racial difference, the “nisus formativus,” which when triggered by specific environmental stimuli generated the variations found within the varieties of humans (Hannaford 1996, 212).

Despite the strong monogenist arguments provided by Kant and Blumenbach, polygenesis remained a viable intellectual strain within race theory, particularly in the “American School of Anthropology,” embodied by Louis Agassiz, Robins Gliddon, and Josiah Clark Nott. Agassiz was born in Switzerland, received an M.D. in Munich and later studied zoology, geology, and paleontology in various German universities under the influence of Romantic scientific theories. His orthodox Christian background initially imbued him with a strong monogenist commitment, but upon visiting America and seeing an African American for the first time, Agassiz experienced a type of conversion experience, which led him to question whether these remarkably different people could share the same blood as Europeans. Eventually staying on and making his career in America, and continually struck by the physical character of African Americans, Agassiz officially announced his turn to polygenesis at the 1850 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Charleston, South Carolina. Nott, a South Carolina physician, attended the same AAAS meeting and, along with Gliddon, joined Agassiz in the promulgation of the American School’s defense of polygenesis (Brace 2005, 93–103).

Along with Agassiz, Nott was also influenced by the French romantic race theorist Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), whose “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1853–1855) Nott partially translated into English and published for the American audience. Although the Catholic Gobineau initially espoused monogenesis, he later leaned towards polygenesis and ended up ambivalent on this issue (Hannaford 1996, 268–269). Nevertheless, Gobineau lent credence to the white racial supremacy that Nott supported (Brace 2005, 120–121). Gobineau posited two impulses among humans, that of attraction and repulsion. Civilization emerges when humans obey the law of attraction and intermingle with peoples of different racial stocks. According the Gobineau, the white race was created through such intermingling, which allowed it alone to generate civilization, unlike the other races, which were governed only by the law of repulsion. Once civilization is established, however, further race mixing leads to the degeneration of the race through a decline in the quality of its blood. Consequently, when the white race conquers other Black or yellow races, any further intermingling will lead it to decline. Thus, Gobineau claimed that the white race would never die so long as its blood remains composed of its initial mixture of peoples. Notably, Nott strategically excised those sections discussing the law of attraction when translating Gobineau’s essay for an American audience (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 45–51).

Eventually, polygenesis declined through the intellectual success of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (Brace 2005, 124). Darwin himself weighed in on this debate in the chapter “On the Races of Man” in his book The Descent of Man (1871), arguing that as the theory of evolution gains wider acceptance, “the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 68), with the former winning out. The rest of the essay entertained both sides of the debate regarding whether or not different races constitute different species or sub-species of humans. Although Darwin did not explicitly take sides in this debate, the preponderance of his argument gives little support to the idea of races being different species. For instance, he noted that couples from different races produce fertile offspring, and that individuals from different races seem to share many mental similarities. That said, while Darwinian evolution may have killed off polygenesis and the related idea that the races constituted distinct species, it hardly killed off race itself. Darwin himself did not think natural selection would by itself generate racial distinctions, since the physical traits associated with racial differences did not seem sufficiently beneficial to favor their retention; he did, however, leave open a role for sexual selection in the creation of races, through repeated mating among individuals with similar traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 77–78). Consequently, later race thinkers would replace polygenesis with natural selection and sexual selection as scientific mechanisms whereby racial differentiation could slowly, unintentionally, but nevertheless inevitably proceed (Hannaford 1996, 273).

Sexual selection became a central focus for race-thinking with the introduction of the term “eugenics” in 1883 by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in his essay “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development” (Hannaford 1996, 290). Focusing on physical as opposed to “moral” qualities, Galton advocated selective breeding to improve the “health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition” of the human species in his later essay “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 80). Following the same currents of “Social Darwinism” that advocated the evolutionary improvement of the human condition through active human intervention, Galton proposed making eugenics not only an element in popular culture or “a new religion” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 82) but even a policy enforced by the American government. While positive eugenics, or the enforced breeding of higher types, never became law, negative eugenics, or the sterilization of the feebleminded or infirm, did become public policy enforced by a number of American states and upheld by the United States Supreme Court in an eight-to-one decision in Buck v. Bell (274 U.S. 200, 1927). The widespread acceptance of negative eugenics can be inferred by the fact that the Court Opinion justifying the decision was authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a figure usually associated with progressive and civil libertarian positions, and whose doctrine of “clear and present danger” sought to expand the protection of free speech.

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits (Hannaford 1996, 351). Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization—Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art—emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle’s distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain’s writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

If Chamberlain’s writings served as intellectual fodder for German racial prejudice, Madison Grant (1865–1937) provided similar foundations for American race prejudice against Black people and Native Americans in his popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Rejecting political or educational means of ameliorating the destitution of the subordinate racial groups in America, Grant instead advocated strict segregation and the prohibition of miscegenation, or the interbreeding of members of different races (Hannaford 1996, 358). Like Galton, Grant had similar success in influencing American public policy, both through the imposition of racist restrictions on immigration at the federal level and through the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws in thirty states, until such prohibitions were finally overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1 [1967]).

If the apogee of biological race was reached in the early twentieth century, its decline began at about the same time. While writers such as Chamberlain and Grant popularized and politicized biological conceptions of race hierarchy, academic anthropologists since Blumenbach gave the concept of race its scientific validity. But academic anthropology also provided the first challenge to biological race in the person of Columbia University professor Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German-born Jewish immigrant to the United States. Boas challenged the fixed character of racial groups by taking on one of the key fundaments to racial typology, cranium size. Boas showed that this characteristic was profoundly affected by environmental factors, noting that American-born members of various “racial” types, such as Semitic Jews, tended to have larger crania than their European-born parents, a result of differences in nourishment. From this he concluded that claims about racially differential mental capacities could similarly be reduced to such environmental factors. In so doing, Boas undermined one measure of racial distinction, and although he did not go so far as to reject entirely the concept of biological race itself, he strongly influenced anthropologists to shift their focus from putatively fixed biological characteristics to apparently mutable cultural factors in order to understand differences among human groups (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 84–88; Brace 2005, 167–169; Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 42–43).

A stronger anthropological rejection of the biological conception of race was leveled by Ashley Montagu (1905–1999). Drawing on insights from modern, experimental genetics, Montagu forcefully argued that the anthropological conception of race relied on grouping together various perceptible physical characteristics, whereas the real building blocks of evolution were genes, which dictated biological changes among populations at a much finer level. The morphological traits associated with race, thus, were gross aggregates of a variety of genetic changes, some of which resulted in physically perceptible characteristics, many others of which resulted in imperceptible changes. Moreover, since genetic evolution can occur through both the mixture of different genes and the mutation of the same gene over generations, the traits associated with races cannot be attributed to discrete lines of genetic descent, since the dark skin and curly hair of one individual may result from genetic mixture while the same traits in another individual may result from genetic mutation (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 100–107). Montagu’s efforts eventually resulted in the publication of an official statement denying the biological foundations of race by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1950, although it would take until 1996 for the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) to publish a similar document (Brace 2005, 239).

Ron Mallon (2004, 2006, 2007) provides a nice sketch of the contemporary philosophical terrain regarding the status of the concept of race, dividing it into three valid competing schools of thought regarding the ontological status of race, along with the discarded biological conception. Racial naturalism signifies the old, biological conception of race, which depicts races as bearing “biobehavioral essences: underlying natural (and perhaps genetic) properties that (1) are heritable, biological features, (2) are shared by all and only the members of a race, and (3) explain behavioral, characterological, and cultural predispositions of individual persons and racial groups” (2006, 528–529). While philosophers and scientists have reached the consensus against racial naturalism, philosophers nevertheless disagree on the possible ontological status of a different conception of race. Mallon divides such disagreements into three metaphysical camps ( racial skepticism , racial constructivism , and racial population naturalism ) and two normative camps ( eliminativism and conservationism ). We have used ‘constructivism’ throughout for the sake of consistency but it should be read as interchangeable with ‘constructionism.’

Racial skepticism holds that because racial naturalism is false, races of any type do not exist. Racial skeptics, such as Anthony Appiah (1995, 1996) and Naomi Zack (1993, 2002) contend that the term race cannot refer to anything real in the world, since the one thing in the world to which the term could uniquely refer—discrete, essentialist, biological races—have been proven not to exist. Zack (2002, 87–88) provides an accessible summary of the racial skeptic’s argument against the biological foundations for race, sequentially summarizing the scientific rejection of essences, geography, phenotypes, post-Mendelian transmission genetics, and genealogies as possible foundations for races. Aristotelian essences , thought to ground the common characteristics of distinct species, were correctly rejected by early modern philosophers. If essences cannot even ground differences among species, then they clearly cannot ground the differences among races, which even nineteenth century racial science still understood as members of the same species. Whereas folk theories rely on geography to divide humanity into African, European, Asian, and Amerindian races, contemporary population genetics reveal the vacuity of this foundation for two reasons. First, geographically based environmental stimuli lead to continuous physical adaptations in skin, hair and bone rather than the discrete differences associated with race; and second, although mitochondrial DNA mutations provide evidence of the geographical origins of populations, these mutations do not correlate with the physical traits associated with racial groups. Similarly, phenotypes cannot ground folk theories of race: for instance, differences in skin tone are gradual, not discrete; and blood-type variations occur independently of the more visible phenotypes associated with race, such as skin color and hair texture. Race cannot be founded upon transmission genetics , since the genes transmitted from one generation to the next lead to very specific physical traits, not general racial characteristics shared by all members of a putatively racial group. And finally, genealogy cannot ground race, since clades (populations descended from a common ancestor) may have common genetic characteristics, but these need not correlate with the visible traits associated with races. Zack concludes: “Essences, geography, phenotypes, genotypes, and genealogy are the only known candidates for physical scientific bases of race. Each fails. Therefore, there is no physical scientific basis for the social racial taxonomy” (Zack 2002, 88).

Racial skeptics like Appiah and Zack adopt normative racial eliminativism , which recommends discarding the concept of race entirely, according to the following argument. Because of its historical genealogy, the term race can only refer to one or more discrete groups of people who alone share biologically significant genetic features. Such a monopoly on certain genetic features could only emerge within a group that practices such a high level of inbreeding that it is effectively genetically isolated. Such genetic isolation might refer to the Amish in America (Appiah 1996, 73) or to Irish Protestants (Zack 2002, 69), but they clearly cannot refer to those groupings of people presently subsumed under American racial census categories. Because the concept “race” can only apply to groups not typically deemed races (Amish, Irish Protestants), and because this concept cannot apply to groups typically deemed races (African Americans, Whites, Asians, Native Americans), a mismatch occurs between the concept and its typical referent. Thus, the concept of race must be eliminated due to its logical incoherence (Mallon 2006, 526, 533).

Appiah has since modified his skepticism in such a way that softens the eliminitivist element of his position. Appiah has come to argue for racial nominalism by admitting the importance of “human folk races,” namely, that they are forms of social identity that do in fact exist (2006, 367). The way in which they are social identities, however, is a problem because we treat them as if there were some biological underpinning to them (2006, 367). The folk theory of race, then, is false because it is based on mistaken beliefs, yet it is nonetheless true that we continue to categorize people along its lines. Appiah’s nominalist view of race aims to reveal how these social identities work by analyzing the labels we use for them. According to Appiah there are three ways that we categorize using folk racial labels: ascription, identification, and treatment, and it takes all three for a given label to be a functioning social identity (2006, 368–370). As a result, we come to live as these identities and look to them as a central resource for constructing our lives. Furthermore, norms of identification and authenticity arise around them (2006, 372). Since there is no biological story that can be told to ground these labels then race is not real (2006, 372). For a critique of Appiah’s modified view that focuses on Appiah (1996) see Ronald R. Sundstrom (2002).

Racial constructivism refers to the argument that, even if biological race is false, races have come into existence and continue to exist through “human culture and human decisions” (Mallon 2007, 94). Race constructivists accept the skeptics’ dismissal of biological race but argue that the term still meaningfully refers to the widespread grouping of individuals into certain categories by society, indeed often by the very members of such racial ascriptions. Normatively, race constructivists argue that since society labels people according to racial categories, and since such labeling often leads to race-based differences in resources, opportunities, and well-being, the concept of race must be conserved, in order to facilitate race-based social movements or policies, such as affirmative action, that compensate for socially constructed but socially relevant racial differences. While sharing this normative commitment to race conservationism , racial constructivists can be subdivided into three groups with slightly different accounts of the ontology of race. As we will see below, however, Sally Haslanger’s eliminitivist constructivism illustrates how these commitments can come apart.

Thin constructivism depicts race as a grouping of humans according to ancestry and genetically insignificant, “superficial properties that are prototypically linked with race,” such as skin tone, hair color and hair texture (Mallon 2006, 534). In this way, thin constructivists such as Robert Gooding-Williams (1998), Lucius Outlaw (1990, 1996) and Charles Mills (1998) rely on the widespread folk theory of race while rejecting its scientific foundation upon racial naturalism. Interactive kind constructivism goes further, in arguing that being ascribed to a certain racial category causes the individuals so labeled to have certain common experiences (Mallon 2006, 535; Piper 1992). For instance, if society ascribes you as black, you are likely to experience difficulty hailing cabs in New York or are more likely to be apprehended without cause by the police (James 2004, 17). Finally, institutional constructivism emphasizes race as a social institution, whose character is specific to the society in which it is embedded and thus cannot be applied across cultures or historical epochs (Mallon 2006, 536). Michael Root (2000, 632) notes that a person ascribed as Black in the United States would likely not be considered Black in Brazil, since each country has very different social institutions regarding the division of humanity into distinct races. Similarly, Paul Taylor (2000) responds to Appiah’s racial skepticism by holding that races, even if biologically unreal, remain real social objects (Mallon 2006, 536–537). Indeed, in a later work Taylor (2004) argues that the term “race” has a perfectly clear referent, that being those people socially ascribed to certain racial categories within the United States, regardless of the widespread social rejection of biological racial naturalism.

Sally Haslanger’s constructivism (2000, 2010, 2019) is not, however, conservationist. She understands races as racialized groups, whose membership requires three criteria. One, members are those who are “observed or imagined” to have certain bodily features that are evidence of certain ancestry from certain geographical locations; two, “having (or being imagined to have)” those features marks members as occupying either a subordinate or privileged social position, thereby justifying that position; and three, the satisfaction of the first two criteria plays a role in members’ systemic subordination or privilege (2019, 25–26). Racial identity in such contexts need not focus exclusively on subordination or privilege, as “many forms of racial identity are important, valuable, and in some cases even inevitable responses to racial hierarchy” (2019, 29–30). She worries, however, that even though we should embrace “cultural groups marked by ancestry and appearance” in the short term to fight for justice, she worries about embracing them for the long term (2019, 30).

Constructivism also cleaves along political and cultural dimensions, a distinction owed to Chike Jeffers (Jeffers, 2013, 2019). Haslanger’s view is paradigmatic of political constructivism by understanding the meaning of race as determined by hierarchical relations of power by definition : “race is made real wholly or most importantly by hierarchical relations of power” (Jeffers 2019, 48). Jeffers’ cultural constructivism corrects for political constructivism’s inability to account for race existing after racism, including the idea of racial equality (2013, 421; 2019, 71). Cultural constructivism rejects “the idea that cultural difference is less important than differences in power relations for understanding racial phenomena in the present” (2019, 65). At the extreme, political constructivism argues for, one, differential power relations bring racial difference into existence; two, differential power relations are fundamental for understanding the present reality of race; and three, differential power relations are essential to race, so race will cease to exist in an egalitarian society where appearance and ancestry do not correlate to certain hierarchical positions (2019, 56–57). Jeffers concedes race’s political origin while rejecting the two other ways that power relations define race (2013, 419; 2019, 57–58). The cultural significance of race can be seen in three ways. First, even the emergence of racial categories counts as a cultural shift, insofar as new social contexts are created in which those viewed as being of different races are also viewed as having different cultures. Second, there are “novel forms of cultural difference” that emerge in the wake of racial difference. And third, racial groups are shaped culturally by happenings prior to racial formation (2019, 62–63). Jeffers thus writes of Blackness, “What it means to be a Black person, for many of us, including myself, can never be exhausted through reference to problems of stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization, and disadvantage, as real and as large-looming as these factors are in the racial landscape as we know it. There is also joy in blackness, a joy shaped by culturally distinctive situations” (2013, 422).

There are also views that challenge the broad strokes of constructivism while avoiding racial skepticism: Lionel K. McPherson’s deflationary pluralism (2015), Joshua Glasgow’s basic racial realism (2015, with Jonathan M. Woodward, 2019), and Michael O. Hardimon’s deflationary realism (2003, 2014, 2017). McPherson argues that “race” should be replaced with his concept of socioancestry, since “‘race’ talk overall is too ambiguous and contested to be salvaged in the search for a dominant understanding” (2015, 676). He aims to sidestep Appiah’s eliminativism by claiming that deflationary pluralism “does not maintain that ‘race’ talk is necessarily an error and does not take a hard line about whether races exist” (2015, 675). Socioancestry retains the possibility of “color-conscious social identity” without the burdens of assumptions or confusions about race and racial nature (2015, 686). This is because it is “visible continental ancestry,” rather than race, which is the root of color-consciousness (2015, 690). Socioancestry, then, focuses on visible continental ancestry alone to explain social group formation. Accordingly, socioancestral identities develop “when persons accept (or are ascribed) a social identity because they share a component of continental ancestry that distinctively shapes color-conscious social reality” (2015, 690).

Glasgow’s basic racial realism aims to capture our operative meaning of race: “the meaning that governs our use of the term, even when we are unaware of it” (2019, 115). Glasgow defines his position in the following way: “Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin color) to a disproportionate extent.” The position is therefore anti-realist, since it claims that races are neither biologically nor socially real (2019, 117). Glasgow’s position is grounded in judgments about our commitments, believing that we are more willing to give up on the biological basis for race than we are to give up on the idea that there are certain “core features and identities” connected to the idea of race” (2019, 127). In other words, disbelieving in the biological reality of race doesn’t lead to eliminativism. Glasgow holds, however, that it also doesn’t lead to social constructivism. Race is not socially made because, “no matter which social facts we attend to, we can always imagine them disappearing while race stays. And if race is conceptually able to persist across all social practices, then by definition it is not a social phenomenon” (2019, 133). This intuition is based in his focus on our ordinary usage of the term “race,” which is fully captured by visible traits.

Hardimon’s deflationary realism argues that we need four interrelated race concepts to coherently answer the question of what race is to human beings: the racialist concept of race, the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race, and the concept of socialrace (2017, 2–3, 7). The racialist concept of race is the view that there are fixed patterns of race-based moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics that are heritable, based in an underlying biological essence, correlate to physical characteristics, and form a distinct racial hierarchy (2017, 15–16). Minimalist race “says that people differ in shape and color in ways that correspond to differences in their geographical ancestry. Essentially that is all it says” (2017, 6; see also 2003). It aims to capture in “a nonmalefic way” what the racialist concept of race says that it captures. In other words, it admits of the nonsocial and biological reality of race but in a value-neutral way (2017, 7). Populationist race aims to do the same thing in a more robust and specific way by giving a genetic underpinning to the minimalist conception based on a “geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population” (2017, 99). This concept is distinguished from cladistic race because it does not require monophyly (2017, 110). Finally, socialrace captures race in terms of its social relations and practices. It refers to “the social groups in racist societies that appear to be racialist races as social groups that falsely appear to be biological groups” (2017, 10; see also 2014). Hardimon argues that it is only through using all four concepts, with the rejection of the first being the basis for the construction of the latter three, that we can actually understand our concept of race.

The third school of thought regarding the ontology of race is racial population naturalism . This camp suggests that, although racial naturalism falsely attributed cultural, mental, and physical characters to discrete racial groups, it is possible that genetically significant biological groupings could exist that would merit the term races. Importantly, these biological racial groupings would not be essentialist or discrete: there is no set of genetic or other biological traits that all and only all members of a racial group share that would then provide a natural biological boundary between racial groups. Thus, these thinkers confirm the strong scientific consensus that discrete, essentialist races do not exist. However, the criteria of discreteness and essentialism would also invalidate distinctions between non-human species, such as lions and tigers. As Philip Kitcher puts it, “there is no…genetic feature…that separates one species of mosquito or mushroom from another” (Kitcher 2007, 294–296; Cf. Mallon 2007, 146–168). Rather, biological species are differentiated by reproductive isolation, which is relative, not absolute (since hybrids sometimes appear in nature); which may have non-genetic causes (e.g., geographic separation and incompatible reproduction periods or rituals); which may generate statistically significant if not uniform genetic differences; and which may express distinct phenotypes. In effect, if the failure to satisfy the condition of discreteness and essentialism requires jettisoning the concept of race, then it also requires jettisoning the concept of biological species. But because the biological species concept remains epistemologically useful, some biologists and philosophers use it to defend a racial ontology that is “biologically informed but non-essentialist,” one that is vague, non-discrete, and related to genetics, genealogy, geography, and phenotype (Sesardic 2010, 146).

There are three versions of racial population naturalism: cladistic race; socially isolated race; and genetically clustered race. Cladistic races are “ancestor-descendant sequences of breeding populations that share a common origin” (Andreasen 2004, 425). They emerged during human evolution, as different groups of humans became geographically isolated from each other, and may be dying out, if they have not already, due to more recent human reproductive intermingling (Andreasen 1998, 214–216; Cf. Andreasen 2000, S653–S666). Socially isolated race refers to the fact that legal sanctions against miscegenation might have created a genetically isolated African American race in the USA (Kitcher 1999). Finally, defenders of genetically clustered race argue that although only 7% of the differences between any two individuals regarding any one specific gene can be attributed to their membership in one of the commonly recognized racial categories, the aggregation of several genes is statistically related to a small number of racial categories associated with major geographic regions and phenotypes (Sesardic 2010; Kitcher 2007, 304).

The question is whether these new biological ontologies of race avoid the conceptual mismatches that ground eliminativism. The short answer is that they can, but only through human intervention. Socially isolated race faces no mismatch when applied to African Americans, defined as the descendants of African slaves brought to the United States. However, this racial category would not encompass Black Africans. Moreover, because African American race originated in legally enforced sexual segregation, it is “both biologically real and socially constructed” (Kitcher 2007, 298). Genetic clustering would seem to provide an objective, biological foundation for a broader racial taxonomy, but differences in clustered genes are continuous, not discrete, and thus scientists must decide where to draw the line between one genetically clustered race and another. If they program their computers to distinguish four genetic clusters, then European, Asian, Amerindian, and African groups will emerge; if only two clusters are sought, then only the African and Amerindian “races” remain (Kitcher 2007, 304). Thus, genetic clustering avoids racial mismatch only through the decisions of the scientist analyzing the data. The same problem also confronts cladistic race, since the number of races will vary from nine, at the most recent period of evolutionary reproductive isolation, to just one, if we go back to the very beginning, since all humans were originally Africans. But in addition, cladistic race faces a stronger mismatch by “cross-classifying” groups that we typically think of as part of the same race, for example by linking northeast Asians more closely with Europeans than with more phenotypically similar southeast Asians. Robin Andreasen defends the cladistic race concept by correctly arguing that folk theories of race have themselves generated counter-intuitive cross-classifications, particularly with respect to the Census’ Asian category, which previously excluded Asian Indians and now excludes native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. (Andreasen 2005, 100–101; Andreasen 2004, 430–431; Cf. Glasgow 2003, 456–474; Glasgow 2009, 91–108). But this hardly saves her argument, since the US Census’s history of shifting racial categories and past use of ethnic and religious terms (e.g., Filipino, Hindu, and Korean) to signify races is typically taken as evidence of the social , rather than biological, foundations of race (Espiritu 1992, Chapter 5).

Quayshawn Spencer (2012, 2014, 2019) is resistant to arguments that cladistic subspecies are a viable biological candidate for race (2012, 203). Instead, he defends a version of biological racial realism that understands “biologically real” as capturing “all of the entities that are used in empirically successful biology…and that adequately rules out all of the entities that are not” (2019, 77; see also 95). Spencer argues that such an entity exists and can be found in the US government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and its racial classifications. The basis for this claim is that population genetics has identified five distinctive “human continental populations” that satisfy the criteria for biological reality (2019, 98; 95). The OMB classifications map onto these continental populations. The importance of the OMB is that its ubiquity in our lives means that one of the primary ways that we talk about race is through its categories. Spencer highlights this centrality when he points out the ways that Americans self-report their races correspond to the parameters of the OMB classifications (2019, 83–85). Spencer is pluralist about race talk, however, meaning that OMB race is just one dominant meaning of race, while there is no single dominant meaning among users of the term (2019, 213).

In each case, racial population naturalism encounters problems in trying to demarcate discrete boundaries between different biological populations. If discreteness is indispensable to a human racial taxonomy, then mismatches can only be avoided, if at all, through human intervention. But as noted above, biological species are also not genetically discrete, and thus boundaries between non-human species must also be imposed through human intervention. And just as the demarcation of non-human species is justified through its scientific usefulness, so too are human racial categories justified. For instance, Andreason contends that a cladistic race concept that divides northeastern from southeastern Asians is scientifically useful for evolutionary research, even if it conflicts with the folk concept of a unified Asian race. In turn, the concepts of genetically clustered and socially isolated race may remain useful for detecting and treating some health problems. Ian Hacking provides a careful argument in favor of the provisional use of American racial categories in medicine. Noting that racial categories do not reflect essentialist, uniform differences, he reiterates the finding that there are statistically significant genetic differences among different racial groups. As a result, an African American is more likely to find a bone marrow match from a pool of African American donors than from a pool of white donors. Thus, he defends the practice of soliciting African American bone marrow donors, even though this may provide fodder to racist groups who defend an essentialist and hierarchical conception of biological race (Hacking 2005, 102–116; Cf. Kitcher 2007, 312–316). Conversely, Dorothy Roberts emphasizes the dangers of using racial categories within medicine, suggesting that it not only validates egregious ideas of biological racial hierarchy but also contributes to conservative justifications for limiting race-based affirmative action and even social welfare funding, which supposedly would be wasted on genetically inferior minority populations. In effect, race-based medicine raises the specter of a new political synthesis of colorblind conservatism with biological racialism (Roberts 2008, 537–545). However, Roberts’ critique fails to engage the literature on the statistical significance of racial categories for genetic differences. Moreover, she herself acknowledges that many versions of colorblind conservatism do not rely at all on biological justifications.

Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (1998) provide a helpful discussion of the differences between the concepts of race and ethnicity. Relying on social constructivism, they define race as “a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics that are held to be inherent…Determining which characteristics constitute the race…is a choice human beings make. Neither markers nor categories are predetermined by any biological factors” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 24). Ethnicity, conversely, is defined as a sense of common ancestry based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations, claimed kinship, or some physical traits (1998, 19). Racial identities are typically thought of as encompassing multiple ethnic identities (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 26). Thus, people who are racially categorized as black may possess a variety of ethnic identities based either on African national or cultural markers (e.g., Kenyan, Igbo, Zulu) or the newer national, sub-national, or trans-national identities created through the mixing of enslaved populations in the Americas (e.g., African American, Haitian, West Indian).

Cornell and Hartmann outline five additional characteristics that distinguish race from ethnicity: racial identity is typically externally imposed by outsiders, as when whites created the Negro race to homogenize the multiple ethnic groups they conquered in Africa or brought as slaves to America; race is a result of early globalization, when European explorers “discovered” and then conquered peoples with radically different phenotypical traits; race typically involves power relations, from the basic power to define the race of others to the more expansive power to deprive certain racial groups of social, economic, or political benefits; racial identities are typically hierarchical, with certain races being perceived as superior to others; and racial identity is perceived as inherent, something individuals are born with (1998, 27–29).

Race and ethnicity differ strongly in the level of agency that individuals exercise in choosing their identity. Individuals rarely have any choice over their racial identity, due to the immediate visual impact of the physical traits associated with race. Individuals are thought to exercise more choice over ethnic identification, since the physical differences between ethnic groups are typically less striking, and since individuals can choose whether or not to express the cultural practices associated with ethnicity. So an individual who phenotypically appears white with ancestors from Ireland can more readily choose whether to assert their Irish identity (by celebrating St. Patrick’s Day) than whether to choose their white identity (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 29–30). Moreover, Mary Waters (1990) argues that the high level of intermarriage among white Americans from various national ancestries grants their children significant “ethnic options” in choosing with which of their multiple heritages to identify. Waters (1999) and Philip Kasinitz (1992) document how phenotypically black West Indian immigrants exercise agency in asserting their ethnic identity in order to differentiate themselves from native-born African Americans, but discrimination and violence aimed at all Black people, regardless of ethnicity, strongly constrains such agency.The greater constraints on racial identity stem from the role of informal perceptions, discriminatory social action, and formal laws imposing racial identity, such as Census categorization (Nobles 2000), the infamous “hypodescent” laws, which defined people as black if they had one drop of African blood (Davis 1991), and judicial decisions such as the “prerequisite cases,” which determined whether specific immigrants could be classified as white and thus eligible for naturalized citizenship (Lopez 1996).

The line between race and ethnicity gets blurred in the case of Asians and Latinos in the United States. Yen Le Espiritu (1992) notes that Asian American racial identity, which of course encompasses a remarkable level of ethnic diversity, results from a combination of external assignment and agency, as when Asians actively respond to anti-Asian discrimination or violence through political action and a sense of shared fate. Consequently, Espiritu uses the term “panethnicity” to describe Asian American identity, a concept which has racial connotations, given the role of “racial lumping” together of members of diverse Asian ethnicities into a single racial group defined by phenotypical traits. Thus, she declares that “African Americans [are] the earliest and most developed pan-ethnic group in the United States” (1992, 174). Hispanic or Latino identity exhibits traits similar to pan-ethnicity. Indeed, unlike Asian identity, Hispanic identity is not even a formal racial identity under the Census. However, informal perceptions, formal laws, and discrimination based on physical appearance nevertheless tend to lump together various nationalities and ethnicities that share some connection to Latin America (Rodriquez 2000). Moreover, scholars have noted that Jews (Brodkin 1998) and the Irish (Ignatiev 1995) were once were considered distinct, non-white races but are now considered to be racially white ethnic groups, partly by exercising agency in distancing themselves from African Americans exercising political power. Thus, it is conceivable that groups today considered to be sociological racial groups could transform into something more like an ethnic group. For this reason, Blum describes Hispanics and Asians as incompletely racialized groups (Blum 2002, 149–155).

A robust philosophical debate has emerged regarding the status of Hispanic or Latino identity. Jorge Gracia (2000) defends the utility of Hispanic ethnic identity as grounded primarily in the shared, linguistic culture that can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula. Jorge Garcia (2001, 2006) challenges this approach, arguing that the diversity of individual experiences undermines the use of Hispanic ethnicity as a meaningful form of collective identity. Linda Martin Alcoff (2006) develops a “realist” defense of Latino identity against charges of essentialism and views it as a category of solidarity that develops in reaction to white privilege. Christina Beltran (2010), on the other hand, does not try to paper over the diversity within Latinidad , which she instead portrays as a pluralistic, fragmented, and agonistic form of political action.

Two strands in moral, political, and legal philosophy are pertinent to the concept of race. One strand examines the broader conceptual and methodological questions regarding the moral status of race and how to theorize racial justice; the other strand normatively assesses specific policies or institutional forms that seek to redress racial inequality, such as affirmative action, racially descriptive representation, the general question of colorblindness in law and policy, residential racial segregation, and racism in the criminal justice system and policing.

Lawrence Blum, Anthony Appiah, and Tommie Shelby articulate indispensable positions in addressing the moral status of the concept of race. Blum (2002) examines both the concept of race and the problem of racism. He argues that “racism” be restricted to two referents: inferiorization , or the denigration of a group due to its putative biological inferiority; and antipathy , or the “bigotry, hostility, and hatred” towards another group defined by its putatively inherited physical traits (2002, 8). These two moral sins deserve this heightened level of condemnation associated with the term racism, because they violate moral norms of “respect, equality, and dignity” and because they are historically connected to extreme and overt forms of racial oppression (2002, 27). But because these connections make “racism” so morally loaded a term, it should not be applied to “lesser racial ills and infractions” that suggest mere ignorance, insensitivity or discomfort regarding members of different groups (28), since doing so will apply a disproportionate judgment against the person so named, closing off possible avenues for fruitful moral dialogue.

Due to the historical connection between racism and extreme oppression, Blum argues against using the term race, since he rejects its biological foundation. Instead, he advocates using the term “racialized group” to denote those socially constructed identities whose supposedly inherited common physical traits are used to impose social, political, and economic costs. To Blum, “racialized group” creates distance from the biological conception of race and it admits of degrees, as in the case of Latinos, whom Blum describes as an “incompletely racialized group” (2002, 151). This terminological shift, and its supposed revelation of the socially constructed character of physiognomically defined identities, need not require the rejection of group-specific policies such as affirmative action. Members of sociologically constructed racialized identities suffer real harms, and laws might have to distinguish individuals according to their racialized identities in order to compensate for such harms. Nevertheless, Blum remains ambivalent about such measures, arguing that even when necessary they remain morally suspect (2002, 97).

Similar ambivalence is also expressed by Anthony Appiah, earlier discussed regarding the metaphysics of race. While his metaphysical racial skepticism was cited as grounding his normative position of eliminativism , Appiah is “against races” but “for racial identities” (1996). Because of a wide social consensus that races exist, individuals are ascribed to races regardless of their individual choices or desires. Moreover, racial identity remains far more salient and costly than ethnic identity (1996, 80–81). As a result, mobilization along racial lines is justifiable, in order to combat racism. But even at this point, Appiah still fears that racial identification may constrain individual autonomy by requiring members of racial groups to behave according to certain cultural norms or “scripts” that have become dominant within a specific racial group. Appiah thus concludes, “Racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism; but even as we struggle against racism…let us not let our racial identities subject us to new tyrannies” (1996, 104). This residual ambivalence, to recall the metaphysical discussions of the last section, perhaps ground Mallon’s contention that Appiah remains an eliminativist rather than a racial constructivist , since ideally Appiah would prefer to be free of all residual constraints entailed by even socially constructed races.

Tommie Shelby responds to the ambivalence of Appiah and Blum by distinguishing classical black nationalism , which rested upon an organic black identity, with pragmatic black nationalism , based on an instrumental concern with combating antiblack racism (2005, 38–52; 2003, 666–668). Pragmatic nationalism allows Black people to generate solidarity across class or cultural lines, not just through the modus vivendi of shared interests but upon a principled commitment to racial equality and justice (2005, 150–154). As a result, black solidarity is grounded upon a principled response to common oppression, rather than some putative shared identity (2002), thus mitigating the dangers of biological essentialism and tyrannical cultural conformity that Appiah associates with race and racial identities. Anna Stubblefield (2005) provides an alternative defense of Black solidarity by comparing it to familial commitments.

Shelby (2005, 7) briefly mentions that his pragmatic, political version of black solidarity is compatible with John Rawls’s Political Liberalism , but his more detailed defense of the ideal social contract method of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice for theorizing racial justice has drawn substantial controversy (Shelby 2004). Elizabeth Anderson eschews ideal theory for analyzing racial justice because it assumes motivational and cognitive capacities beyond those of ordinary humans; it risks promoting ideal norms (like colorblindness) under unjust conditions that require race-specific policies; and its idealizing assumptions, like an original position in which parties do not know relevant personal and social racial facts, precludes recognition of historical and present racial injustice. She instead uses a normative framework of democratic equality to ground her moral imperative of integration.

Charles Mills, extending his critique of how early modern social contract thinking obfuscates racial injustice (1997), fears that Rawls’s ideal theory can similarly serve as an ideology that whitewashes non-white oppression (Mills 2013). But rather than jettisoning a contractarian approach entirely, Mills instead develops a model of a non-ideal contract, in which the parties do not know their own racial identities but are aware of their society’s history of racial exploitation and its effects. Because the parties know of racial hierarchy but do not know if they will be its beneficiaries or victims, Mills hypothesizes that they will rationally agree to racial reparations as a form of corrective or rectificatory justice (Pateman and Mills 2007, Chapters 3, 4, 8).

Shelby responds that, while Rawls’s ideal theory of justice excludes a theory of rectification because it is not comprehensive, rectificatory justice is not only complementary but in fact presupposes an ideal theory that can clarify when injustices have occurred and need to be rectified. More importantly, Shelby suggests that complying with rectificatory justice through racial reparations could well leave Black people living in a society that nevertheless remains racially unjust in other ways. For this reason, Shelby concludes that ideal theory remains indispensable (2013).

Christopher Lebron (2013, 28–42) also suggests that the approaches of Rawls and Mills are complementary, but in a very different way. He argues that Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society provides explanatory mechanisms through which white supremacy persists, something unspecified in earlier work by Mills (2003). And in sharp contrast to Shelby (2013), Lebron criticizes Mills for rehabilitating Rawlsian contract thinking, since even a non-ideal form eliminates the epistemological advantage of a non-white perspective on white supremacy. Instead of reformulating contractarian thinking to fit the needs of racial justice, Lebron instead focuses on analyzing how “historically evolved power” and “socially embedded power” perpetuate racial injustice.

Turning to the second strand of practical philosophy devoted to race, various scholars have addressed policies such as affirmative action, race-conscious electoral districting, and colorblindness in policy and law. The literature on affirmative action is immense, and may be divided into approaches that focus on compensatory justice, distributive justice, critiques of the concept of merit, and diversity of perspective. Alan Goldman (1979) generally argues against affirmative action, since jobs or educational opportunities as a rule should go to those most qualified. Only when a specific individual has been victimized by racial or other discrimination can the otherwise irrelevant factor of race be used as a compensatory measure to award a position or a seat at a university. Ronald Fiscus (1992) rejects the compensatory scheme in favor of a distributive justice argument. He claims that absent the insidious and invidious effects of a racist society, success in achieving admissions to selective universities or attractive jobs would be randomly distributed across racial lines. Thus, he concludes that distributive justice requires the racially proportional distribution of jobs and university seats. Of course, Fiscus’s argument displaces the role of merit in the awarding of jobs or university admissions, but this point is addressed by Iris Young (1990, Chapter 7), who argues that contemporary criteria of merit, such as standardized testing and educational achievement, are biased against disadvantaged racial and other groups, and rarely are functionally related to job performance or academic potential. Finally, Michel Rosenfeld (1991) turns away from substantive theories of justice in favor of a conception of justice as reversibility, a position influenced by the “Discourse Ethics” of Jürgen Habermas (1990), which defines justice not by the proper substantive awarding of goods but as the result of a fair discursive procedure that includes all relevant viewpoints and is free of coercive power relations. Thus, affirmative action is justified as an attempt to include racially diverse viewpoints. All of these positions are summarily discussed in a useful debate format in Cohen and Sterba (2003).

The issues of race-conscious electoral districting and descriptive racial representation have also garnered substantial attention. Race-conscious districting is the practice of drawing geographically based electoral districts in which the majority of voters are Black. Descriptive racial representation holds that Black populations are best represented by Black politicians. Iris Marion Young (1990, 183–191) provides a spirited defense of descriptive representation for racial minorities, grounded in their experiences of “oppression, the institutional constraint on self-determination”, and domination “the institutional constraint on self-determination” (1990, 37). Anne Phillips (1995) furthers this position, arguing that representatives who are members of minority racial groups can enhance legislative deliberation. Melissa Williams (1998) also defends the deliberative contribution of descriptive racial representation, but adds that minority constituents are more likely to trust minority representatives, since both will be affected by laws that overtly or covertly discriminate against minority racial groups. Finally, Jane Mansbridge (1999) carefully demonstrates why a critical mass of minority representatives is needed, in order to adequately advocate for common minority interests as well as to convey the internal diversity within the group. In a later work, Young (2000) addresses critics who argue that descriptive representation relies upon group essentialism, since members of a racial group need not all share the same interests or opinions. In response, Young suggests that members of the same racial group do share the same “social perspective” grounded in common experiences, similar to the interactive kind variant of racial constructivism discussed earlier. But because it is unclear that Black individuals are more likely to share common experiences than common interests or opinions, Michael James prioritizes using race-conscious districting to create Black racial constituencies which can hold Black or non-Black representatives accountable to Black interests (James 2011). Abigail Thernstrom (1987) condemns race-conscious districting for violating the original principles behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 15 th Amendment, by promoting the election of black representatives rather than simply guaranteeing black voters the right to cast ballots. J. Morgan Kousser (1999) responds that race-conscious districting simply reflects the right to cast a “meaningful” vote, as implied by the 15 th Amendment protection against not only the denial but also the “abridgment” of the right to vote. Lani Guinier (1994) compellingly suggests that instead of drawing majority black districts, we should adopt more proportional electoral system that facilitate the electoral strength of racial and other minorities. Michael James (2004) suggests that alternative electoral systems facilitate not only descriptive racial representation but also democratic deliberation across racial lines.

A general advantage of using alternative electoral systems to enhance minority racial representation is that they are technically colorblind, not requiring lawmakers or judges to group citizens according to their racial identities. The general value of colorblindness is an ongoing topic of debate within legal philosophy. Drawing on Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson , and a not-uncontroversial interpretation of the origins of the equal protection clause, Andrew Kull (1992) argues that contemporary American statutory and constitutional law should strive to be colorblind and combat racial inequality without dividing citizens into different racial groups. Ian Haney Lopez (2006, 143–162), on the other hand, fears “colorblind white dominance,” whereby facially race-neutral laws leave untouched the race-based inequality that operates within American political, legal, and economic structures. Elizabeth Anderson (2010) provides a trenchant critique of colorblindness as a normative standard for law, policy, or ethics. Racial segregation and the potential for integration have garnered much less philosophical attention than affirmative action and racially descriptive representation. Bernard Boxill (1992) offers a treatment of busing and self-segregation, while Howard McGary (1999) offers a clarification of integration and separation. Iris Young (2002, chapter 6) treats residential segregation in the context of regional democracy, while Owen Fiss (2003) analyzes it in the context of the legacy of racism. Anderson herself (2010) argues for the moral imperative of integration, with Tommie Shelby (2014) and Ronald Sundstrom (2013) offering critical responses to Anderson’s argument. More recently, Andrew Valls (2018, chapter 6) has written on the subject.

In recent years, the problem of racism within policing and criminal justice in the United States has attracted intense popular and scholarly attention. Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser (2004) offer a qualified defense of racial profiling that engages both utilitarian and non-consequentialist reasoning. Annabelle Lever’s (2005) objection and response prompted a subsequent round of debate (Risse 2007, Lever 2007). Michelle Alexander (2010) famously depicted the contemporary American criminal justice system as the “New Jim Crow,” for its intense racial disparities. Naomi Zack (2015) provides a trenchant critique of racial profiling and police homicide. David Boonin (2011), on the other hand, reluctantly defends racial profiling on pragmatic grounds. Finally, Adam Hosein (2018) argues against it for reasons of political equality. Shelby (2016) offers a justification of Black resistance based in the unjust legacy of racial segregation while deepening his earlier critique of Anderson’s view.

While the debates in contemporary philosophy of race within the analytic tradition have largely revolved around whether or not races exist along with criteria for determining realness or existence, philosophers working in the Continental traditions have taken up the concept of race along other dimensions (see Bernasconi and Cook 2003 for an overview). First, those working within the traditions of Existentialism and Phenomenology have called on Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, among others, to understand how race and functions within our lived, bodily experiences of everyday life. This strand of scholarship focuses on the materiality of race. As Emily S. Lee puts it, “both the social structural and the individual subconscious levels of analysis rely on perceiving the embodiment of race” (2014, 1). Second, philosophers building on the work of Michel Foucault have articulated genealogical understandings of race that focus on its historical emergence as a concept and the ways that it has functioned within discourses of knowledge and power.

Frantz Fanon has been the primary influence for those understanding race and racism within Existentialism and Phenomenology. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon writes, “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects” (2008/1952, 89). Furthermore, this “inferiority is determined by the Other,” by the “white gaze” (2008/1952, 90). Such a position is understood through the schema of the body: “In a white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an image in the third person” (2008/1952, 90). Rather than being at home in his own body, and moving “out of habit,” Fanon understands his body as existing primarily as an object for others, requiring him to move “by implicit knowledge” of the rules and norms of that white world (2008/1952, 91).

Fanon critiques Sartre’s understanding of race and racism by pointing out that Sartre understands antiracism as a negative movement that will be overcome (2008/1952, 111–112). Sartre treats antiracism as the transition toward something else and not as an end in itself. Against this view Fanon writes, “ Sartre forgets that the Black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (2008/1952, 117). He is trapped by his body schema, “a toy in the hands of the white man” (2008/1952, 119).

Lewis Gordon draws on both Fanon and Sartre in articulating his Africana existentialism. He distinguishes between Existentialism as a specific historical European movement and philosophies of existence, or existential philosophies, which are preoccupied with “freedom, anguish, responsibility, embodied agency, sociality, and liberation.” These concerns yield a focus on the “lived context of concern” (2000, 10). For Gordon, due to the history of racial oppression of Black peoples, an Africana existential philosophy revolves around the questions, “what does it mean to be a problem, and what is to be understood by Black suffering?” (2000, 8).

According to Gordon, what is sometimes referred to as the “race question” is really a question about the status of Blackness, for “race has emerged, throughout its history, as the question fundamentally of ‘the blacks’ as it has for no other group” (2000, 12). Rather than a denial that other groups have been racialized, the claim instead is that such other racializations have been conditioned on a scale of European personhood to Black subpersonhood (see also Mills 1998, 6–10). Blackness itself has been characterized as “the breakdown of reason” and “an existential enigma” in such a way that to ask after race and racialization is to ask after Blackness in the first instance.

Both Gordon and Zack use Sartre’s notion of bad faith to understand race. We can understand bad faith as the evasion of responsibility and fidelity to human freedom, and an understanding of the human being as a for-itself. Bad faith falsely turns the human being into an object without agency, into an in-itself. For Gordon, antiblack racism conceives of Blackness itself as a problem so as to avoid having to understand Black problems. As a result, actual Black people disappear along with any responsibility to them (1997, 74). Gordon gives the example of The Philadelphia Negro , Du Bois’ sociological study of the residents of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Gordon recounts how those commissioning the study set Du Bois up to fail so that he would only perpetuate the pathologizing of the Black population, presenting Blackness itself as a problem rather than attempt to understand the problems of Black people and communities (2000, 69).

Whereas Gordon uses bad faith to understand antiblack racism, Zack does so to deepen her eliminativism. For Sartre, authenticity is the antidote to bad faith – to live authentically is to understand and embrace human freedom rather than evade it. Zack’s eliminativism attributes bad faith to those who affirm that racial designations describe human beings when in fact they do not (1993, 3–4). If racial identifications lack adequate support because races do not exist, then identification as mixed race is also done in bad faith. Instead, Zack understands her position of “anti-race” as true authenticity that looks to the future in the name of freedom and resistance to oppression in the name of racelessness (1993, 164).

Embodiment and visibility are central to these views. Gordon understands the body as “our perspective in the world,” which occurs along (at least) three matrices: seeing, being seen, and being conscious of being seen (1997, 71). In an antiblack world this means that the Black body is a form of absence, going unseen in the same manner as Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man (1997, 72–3). George Yancy tells us that he writes from his “lived embodied experience,” which is a “site of exposure” (2008, 65). Black embodiment here is the lens used to critique whiteness and its normative gaze. For Yancy, Black resistance itself decodes and recodes Black embodied existence, affirming the value of the Black body in the face of centuries of white denial (2008, 112–3).

Linda Martín Alcoff offers a phenomenological account of race that highlights a “visual registry,” which is socially and historically constructed and that is “determinant over individual experience” (2006, 194). Like Yancy, Alcoff locates race in embodied lived experience. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, Alcoff notes how the way that our perceptual practices are organized affects the way we come to know the world (2006, 188). When race operates through visibility, these ways of normalized perceptual knowing become racialized. As she notes, “racial consciousness works through learned practices and habits of visual discrimination and visual marks on the body…race exists there on the body itself” (2006, 196).

Lee argues that racial meaning fits squarely within the space that a phenomenological framework seeks to explore, namely, the space between the natural and the cultural, the objective and the subjective, and thinking and nonthinking (Lee 2014, 8). Furthermore, a phenomenological approach can illuminate how, even when race is understood as a social construction, it can nonetheless become naturalized through “the sedimentation of racial meaning into the very structures and practices of society” (Lee 2019, xi).

A second line of thought runs through the work of Michel Foucault. In his 1975–1976 lectures at the Collège de France , published as Society Must Be Defended , Foucault details the emergence of a discourse on race beginning in early 17th Century England. According to Foucault, race war discourse emerges through claims of illegitimacy against the Stuart monarchy. These claims were couched in the language of injustice as well as foreign invasion, in which an indigenous race is pitted against in invading outsider (2003, 60). Race, at this point, is not a biological concept, instead referring to lineage, custom, and tradition (2003, 77). Only later does this cultural notion of race transform into the scientific notion of race.

Cornel West employs a Foucaultian methodology to produce a genealogy of modern racism (1982). West analyzes how the discourse of modernity came into being to show how central white supremacy is to its practices of knowledge and meaning making (47). By modern discourse he means, “The controlling metaphors, notions, categories, and norms that shape the predominant conception of truth and knowledge in the modern West,” which are driven by the scientific revolution, the Cartesian transformation of philosophy, and the classical revival (50). It is a discourse comprising certain forms of rationality, scientificity, objectivity, and aesthetic and cultural ideals, the parameters of which exclude Black equality from the outset, marking it as unintelligible and illegitimate within the prevailing norms of discourse and knowledge (47–48). Notions of truth and knowledge produced by these three forces are governed by a value-free subject that observes, compares, orders, and measures in order to obtain evidence and make inferences that verify the true representations of reality.

Ladelle McWhorter uses Foucault’s lectures to conduct a genealogy of racism and sexual oppression of a more proximate time and place. According to McWhorter, “racism in twentieth-century Anglo-America [has] to be understood in light of Foucault’s work on normalization,” where racism exists as a crusade against deviance, abnormality, and pathology (2009, 12). Building on Foucault’s analysis of race war discourse McWhorter carries out a genealogy of race, ultimately arguing that race and sexuality “are historically codependent and mutually determinative” (2009, 14). Anglo-American discourse on race is therefore linked to discourses on eugenics, the family, sexual predation, normality, and population management, all of which function within the networks of power that Foucault referred to biopower (2009, 15). Ann Laura Stoler (1995) offers an extended reconstruction and critique of Foucault’s treatment of race in light of colonialism and empire. Joy James goes even further, arguing that Foucault is not useful for thinking about race at all (1996, chapter 1).

Alcoff, L., 2006, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self , New York: Oxford University Press.
Alexander, M., 2010, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , New York: The Free Press.
Anderson, E., 2010, The Imperative of Integration , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Andreasen, R., 1998, “A New Perspective on the Race Debate,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science , 49 (2): 199–225.
–––, 2000, “Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?” Philosophy of Science , 67 (Supplement): S653–S666.
–––, 2004, “The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense,” Biology and Philosophy , 19: 425–442.
–––, 2005, “The Meaning of ‘Race’: Folk Conceptions and the New Biology of Race,” The Journal of Philosophy : 94–106
Appiah, K. A., 1992, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture , New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 1995, “The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race,” in Overcoming Racism and Sexism , L. Bell and D. Blumenfeld (eds.), Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
–––, 1996, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Color Conscious , Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
–––, 2006, “How to Decide If Races Exist,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 106: 365–382
Babbitt, S. and Campbell, S. (eds.), Racism and Philosophy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bernasconi, R. and Lott, T., (eds.), 2000, The Idea of Race , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Bernasconi, R., with Cook, S. (eds.), 2003, Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bethencourt, F., 2015, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blum, L., 2002, I’m not a Racist, But…The Moral Quandary of Race , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Boonin, D., 2011, Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Boxill, B., 1992, Blacks and Social Justice , revised edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Brace, C. L., 2005, Race is a Four-Letter Word , New York: Oxford University Press.
Brodkin, K., 1998, How the Jews Became White Folks , New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Cohen, C. and Sterba, J., 2003, Affirmative Action and Race Preference: A Debate , New York: Oxford University Press.
Cornell, S. and Hartmann, D., 1998, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World , Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Davis, F. J., 1991, Who is Black? University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Espiritu, Y. L., 1992, Asian American Panethnicity , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Fanon, F., 2008 [1952], Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press.
Fiscus, R., 1992, The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fiss, O., 2003, A Way Out: America’s Ghettoes and the Legacy of Racism , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M., 1997, Society Must Be Defended , trans. David Macey, New York: Picador.
Frederickson, G., 2002, Racism: A Short History , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Garcia, J., 1996, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 27: 5–45.
–––, 1999, “Philosophical Analysis and the Moral Concept of Racism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism , 25: 1–32.
–––, 2001, “Is Being Hispanic an Identity?” Philosophy and Social Criticism , 27: 29–43.
–––, 2006, “Identity Confusions,” Philosophy and Social Criticism , 32: 839–862.
Gilroy, P., 2000, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Glasgow, J., 2003, “On the New Biology of Race,” The Journal of Philosophy , 100(9): 456–474.
–––, 2009, A Theory of Race , New York: Routledge.
–––, 2019, “Is Race an Illusion or a (Very) Basic Reality?” in What is Race? Four Philosophical Views , New York: Oxford.
Glasgow, J. and Woodward, J.M., 2015, “Basic Racial Realism,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 449–466.
Goldberg, D.T., 2002, The Racial State , Oxford: Blackwell.
Goldman, A., 1979, Justice and Reverse Discrimination , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gooding-Williams, R., 1998, “Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy,” Constellations , 5(1): 18–41.
–––, 2006, Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics , London and New York: Routledge.
Gordon, L., 1997, Existence in Black , New York, Routledge.
–––, 2000, Existentia Africana , New York, Routledge.
Gracia, J., 2000, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective , Oxford: Blackwell.
Guinier, L., 1994, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy , New York: The Free Press.
Hacking, I., 2005, “Why Race Still Matters,” Daedelus , (Fall): 102–116.
–––, 2006, “Genetics, Biosocial Groups, and the Future of Identity,” Daedelus , (Fall): 81–95.
Haney Lopez, I., 1996, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race , New York: New York University Press.
Hannaford, I., 1996, Race: The History of an Idea in the West , Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hardimon, M., 2003, “The Ordinary Concept of Race,” The Journal of Philosophy , 100(9): 437–455.
–––, 2014, “The Concept of Socialrace,” Philosophy and Social Criticism , 40(1): 69–90.
–––, 2017, Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haslanger, S., 2000, “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?,” Noûs , 34: 31–55.
–––, 2010, “Language, Politics and ‘The Folk’: Looking for ‘The Meaning’ of ‘Race’,” Monist , 93: 169–187.
–––, 2019, “Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race” in What is Race? Four Philosophical Views , New York: Oxford, pp. 4–37.
Hosein, A.O., 2018, “Racial Profiling and a Reasonable Sense of Inferior Political Status,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 26(3): 1–20.
Ignatiev, N., 1995, How the Irish Became White , New York: Routledge.
Isaac, B., 2004, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jaksic, I. (ed.), 2015, Debating Race, Ethnicity, and Latino Identity: Jorge J. E. Gracia and His Critics , New York: Columbia University Press.
James, J., 1996, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
James, M., 2004, Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity , Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas.
–––, 2011, “The Priority of Racial Constituency over Descriptive Representation,” Journal of Politics , 73(4): 899–914.
Jeffers, C., 2013, “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races”,” Ethics , 123: 403–426.
–––, 2019, “Cultural Constructionism” in What is Race? Four Philosophical Views , New York: Oxford.
Kasinitz, P., 1992, Caribbean New York , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kitcher, P., 1999, “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Racism , L. Harris (ed.), New York: Humanity Books.
–––, 2007, “Does ‘Race’ Have a Future?” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 35(4): 293–317.
Kousser, J. M., 1999, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Kull, A., 1992, The Color-Blind Constitution , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lever, A., 2005, “Why Racial Profiling Is Hard to Justify: A Response to Risse and Zeckhauser,” Philosophy & Public Affairs , 33(1): 94–110.
–––, 2007, “What’s Wrong with Racial Profiling? Another Look at the Problem,” Criminal Justice Ethics , 26(1): 20–28.
Lebron, C., 2013, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in our Time , New York: Oxford University Press.
Lee, E.S., (ed.), 2014, Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
–––, (ed.), 2019, Race as Phenomena , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Lott, T., 1999, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Lublin, D., 1997, The Paradox of Representation , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mallon, R., 2004, “Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race,” Noûs , 38(4): 644–673.
–––, 2006, “Race: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ethics , 116(3): 525–551.
–––, 2007, “A Field Guide to Social Construction,” Philosophy Compass , 2(1): 93–108.
Mansbridge, J., 1999, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent Yes,” The Journal of Politics , 61(3): 628–657.
Marx, A., 1998, Making Race and Nation , New York: Cambridge University Press.
McCoskey, D., 2012, Race: Antiquity and its Legacy , London: I.B. Tauris.
McGary, H., 1999, Race and Social Justice , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
McPherson, L.K., 2015, “Deflating ‘Race’,” The Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 1(4): 674–693.
McWhorter, L. 2009, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Mills, C., 1997, The Racial Contract , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
–––, 1998, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
–––, 2003, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
–––, 2013, “Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice? A Critique of Tommie Shelby,” Critical Philosophy of Race , 1: 1–27.
Nobles, M., 2000, Shades of Citizenship , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Omi, M. and Winant, H., 1994. Racial formation in the United States . New York: Routledge.
Outlaw, L., 1990, “Toward a Critical Theory of Race,” in Anatomy of Racism , D. T. Goldberg (ed.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
–––, 1996, On Race and Philosophy , New York: Routledge.
Pateman, C. and Mills, C., 2007, Contract and Domination , Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Phillips, A., 1995, The Politics of Presence , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Popkin, R., 1977, “Hume’s Racism,” Philosophical Forum , 9 (Winter-Spring): 211–26.
Risse, M., 2007, “Racial Profiling: A Reply to Two Critics,” Criminal Justice Ethics , 26(1): 4–19.
Risse, M. and Zeckhauser, R., 2004, “Racial Profiling,” Philosophy & Public Affairs , 32(2): 131–70.
Roberts, D., 2008, “Is Race-Based Medicine Good for Us? African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics , 36: 537–545.
Rodriguez, C., 2000, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States , New York: New York University Press.
Root, M., 2000, “How We Divide the World,” Philosophy of Science (Supplement), 67: S628–S639.
Rosenfeld, M., 1991, Affirmative Action and Justice , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sesardic, N., 2010, “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept,” Biology and Philosophy , 25: 143–162.
Shelby, T., 2002, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression,” Ethics , 112: 231–266.
–––, 2003, “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the Meaning of Black Political Solidarity,” Political Theory , 31(5): 664–692.
–––, 2004, “Race and Social Justice: Rawlsian Considerations,” Fordham Law Review , 72: 1697–1714.
–––, 2005, We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
–––, 2013, “Racial Realities and Corrective Justice: A Reply to Charles Mills,” Critical Philosophy of Race , 1: 145–162.
–––, 2014 “Inequality, Integration, and Imperatives of Justice: A Review Essay,” Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42: 253–285.
–––, 2016, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smith, J., 2015, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Snowden, F., 1970, Blacks in Antiquity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
–––, 1983, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Spencer, Q., 2012, “What ‘Biological Racial Realism’ Should Mean,” Philosophical Studies, 159: 181–204.
–––, 2014, “A Radical Solution to the Race Problem,” Philosophy of Science , 81: 1025–1038.
–––, 2019, “How to Be a Biological Racial Realist” in What is Race? Four Philosophical Views , New York: Oxford, pp. 73–110.
Spinner, J., 1994, The Boundaries of Citizenship , Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stoler A.L., 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stubblefield, A., 2005, Ethics along the Color Line , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Sundstrom, R.R., 2002, ““Racial” Nominalism,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 33(2): 193–210.
–––, 2013, “Comment on Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy , Vol. 9(2). [ Sundstrom 2013 available online ]
Swain, C., 1993, Black Faces, Black Interests , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tate, K., 2003, Black Faces in the Mirror: African Americans and their Representatives in the U.S. Congress , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, P., 2000, “Appiah’s Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Reality of Race,” Social Theory and Practice , 26(1): 103–128.
–––, 2004, Race: A Philosophical Introduction , Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Thernstrom, A., 1987, Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Valls, A, 2005, “A Lousy Empirical Scientist,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy , A. Valls (ed.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
––– (ed.), 2005, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
–––, 2010, “A Liberal Defense of Black Nationalism,” American Political Science Review , 104: 467–481.
–––, 2018, Rethinking Racial Justice , New York: Oxford University Press.
Waters, M., 1990, Ethnic Options , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
–––, 1999, Black Identities , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
West, C., 1982, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity , Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.
Williams, M., 1998, Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Yancy, G., 2008, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
–––, 2012, Look, A White: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Young, I., 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
–––, 2002, Inclusion and Democracy , New York: Oxford University Press.
Zack, N., 1993, Race and Mixed Race , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
–––, 2002, Philosophy of Science and Race , New York: Routledge.
–––, 2011, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
–––, 2015, White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Race: Are we so different? , educational website project of the American Anthropological Association
Race: The Power of an Illusion , PBS website associated with the California Newsreel documentary
Facts about Race/Color Discrimination , from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Race, Racism, and the Law , edited by Vernellia Randall at the University of Dayton Law School

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism Reading List

In This Section

Complete Collection

In the wake of violence against Black Americans and in a moment of national reckoning in Summer 2020, the HKS Library pulled together a reading list that is inspired and largely informed by Resources and Reading on Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism published by the Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project (IARA) at the Ash Center and in partnership with the HKS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging .

This reading list is a starting place to find resources that speak to racial justice, racial equity, and anti-racism. If you have suggestions or feedback, please send us an email: [email protected] . Books are linked to e-book versions where available.

In addition to access through Harvard Library, we believe these titles should be a part of other academic and public libraries. If these titles are not a part of your local libraries, most libraries solicit and support community requests. If you have questions about how to request a title for inclusion in your local library collection, please feel free to reach out to our staff ( [email protected] ) and we are happy to provide guidance.

The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’ s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.”

Citation: Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . New York: The New Press, 2020.

Read e-book @ Harvard Library
View @ Publisher Site

One Person, No Vote

Carol Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

Citation: Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy . New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Carefully linking historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Carol Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage.

Citation: Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide . New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

The Fire Next Time

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin ’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Citation: Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time . New York: Vintage, 1992.

Read e-book @ Harvard Library

White Fragility

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, Robin DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Citation: DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism . Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.

Never Caught

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Erica Armstrong Dunbar tells the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked it all to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom.

Citation: Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge . 37Ink; Atria Books: New York, 2017.

View @ Author Site

How to Be Less Stupid About Race

Crystal Fleming provides your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics.

Citation: Fleming, Crystal. How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide . New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.

The Broken Heart of America

From Lewis and Clark’s 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past.

Citation: Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi 's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America - but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

Citation: Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist . New York: One World, 2019.

Kiese Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed Black son to a complicated and brilliant Black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

Citation: Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir . New York: Scribner, 2018.

The Condemnation of Blackness

The idea of Black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of Black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad - HKS Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy - reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Citation: Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

The Color of Law

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein , a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Citation: Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . New York; London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.

View @ Harvard Library

Courageous Conversations About Race

Glenn Singleton explains the need for candid, courageous conversations about race so that educators may understand why student disengagement and achievement inequality persists and learn how they can develop a curriculum that promotes true educational equity and excellence.

Citation: Singleton, Glenn. Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools . Los Angeles: Corwin, 2015.

This book is Bryan Stevenson 's (MPP/JD 1985 LLD 2015) unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice. Stevenson was honored by HKS in 2018 with the 2018 Alumni Public Service Award .

Citation: Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

View young adult adaptation @ Publisher Site

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, white, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum , a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides.

Citation: Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race . New York: Basic Books, 2003.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Citation: Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

R ead e-book @ Harvard Library

Race Matters

Race Matters contains Cornel West ’s most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate.

Citation: West, Cornel. Race Matters . Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Citation: Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . New York: Random House, 2020.

Charleston Syllabus

In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, Professors Chad Williams , Kidada E. Williams , and Keisha N. Blain sought a way to put the murder-and the subsequent debates in the media-in the context of America's tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the Charleston Syllabus on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder.

Citation: Williams, Chad, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain. (Eds.) Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence . Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence

If you believe that talking about race is impolite, or that "colorblindness" is the preferred approach, you must read this book. Derald Wing Sue debunks the most pervasive myths using evidence, easy-to-understand examples, and practical tools.

Citation: Wing Sue, Derald. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

The Sum of Us

The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, materially rich but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. Heather McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to tell an irrefutable story of racism's costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy's collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.

Citation: McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together . New York: One World, 2021.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. (2019). The 1619 Project . The New York Times Magazine .
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. (2014). The Case for Reparations . The Atlantic .
DiAngelo, Robin. (2017). Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism . Huffington Post .
McIntosh, Peggy. (1989). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack . Peace and Freedom .
Serwer, Adam. (2020). The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying . The Atlantic .
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem. (2020). Don’t Understand the Protests? What You're Seeing is People Pushed to the Edge . Los Angeles Times .
Hinton, Elizabeth. (2020). The Minneapolis Uprising in Context . Boston Review .
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 1619 . The New York Times .
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran and Ben Austen. Some of My Best Friends Are . Pushkin .
Carroll, Rebecca. Come Through with Rebecca Carroll . WNYC Studios .
Biewen, John. Seeing White . Scene On Radio .
Raghuveera, Nikhil and Erica Licht. Untying Knots . SoundCloud .
Moyo, Thoko. A historic crossroads for systemic racism and policing in America . PolicyCast . Featuring Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Erica Chenoweth .

Select Community Organizations, provided by the IARA

View the organizations here (last page of document)

Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project

An Ash Center project working at the intersection of community, academia, and policy to address questions of anti-racism policy, practice, and institutional change.

Maya Sen & Matthew Blackwell's "Deep Roots"

In this Behind the Book video, professors take an historical look at how the institution of U.S. slavery continues to shape the views of the present.

Fairness & Justice

HKS faculty tackle policy questions from racial equity, to the climate, to education, and beyond.

Justice Matters Podcast

Carr Center director Sushma Raman investigates a wide array of human rights issues at home and abroad.

Anti-Racism Book & Film Club

Harvard Library facilitates community discussions of anti-Black racism through books & film.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
Am J Public Health
v.100(Suppl 1); Apr 2010

Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis

C. L. Ford originated the commentary and led the writing. C. O. Airhihenbuwa assisted in developing key ideas and in writing the commentary.

Racial scholars argue that racism produces rates of morbidity, mortality, and overall well-being that vary depending on socially assigned race. Eliminating racism is therefore central to achieving health equity, but this requires new paradigms that are responsive to structural racism's contemporary influence on health, health inequities, and research.

Critical Race Theory is an emerging transdisciplinary, race-equity methodology that originated in legal studies and is grounded in social justice. Critical Race Theory's tools for conducting research and practice are intended to elucidate contemporary racial phenomena, expand the vocabulary with which to discuss complex racial concepts, and challenge racial hierarchies.

We introduce Critical Race Theory to the public health community, highlight key Critical Race Theory characteristics (race consciousness, emphases on contemporary societal dynamics and socially marginalized groups, and praxis between research and practice) and describe Critical Race Theory's contribution to a study on racism and HIV testing among African Americans.

ALTHOUGH RACE REMAINS salient to public health in a variety of ways, the field's theoretical and methodological conventions inadequately address the complexity with which structural racism influences both health and the production of knowledge about populations, health, and health disparities. Many projects lack clarity about the nature of racial stratification. They conceptualize, measure, and analyze race- and racism-related factors using tools better suited for studying other risk factors. Although structural forces drive inequities, research and interventions disproportionately emphasize individual and interpersonal mechanisms. Additionally, overconfidence in the objectivity of research can blind investigators to the inadvertent influence of a priori assumptions on research.

Race as a category denoting skin color was first used to classify human bodies by Francois Bernier, a French physician. 1 The notion of racial groupings was introduced in Carolus Linnaeus's Natural History in 1735 and subsequently advanced by many others. 1 Both Linnaeus's concept of race and the subsequent racial groupings devalued and degraded those classified as non-European. 2 Linnaeus's classification became the foundation on which many countries, including the United States, based their racial policies. Later, racialized policies gained “scientific” affirmation in the work of scholars such as Josiah Nott, whose publications reinforcing White supremacy appeared in 1843 in such respected journals as the American Journal of the Medical Sciences .

Prevailing notions about race shaped early scientific research, but because investigators were not critical about their relationships to their racialized social contexts, they were unable to perceive the insidious influence of racism in their work. The contributions of minorities who might have challenged underlying assumptions were largely excluded. Their exclusion buttressed artificially high levels of confidence among researchers about the import and validity of racial findings. Against this backdrop, progressive scholars, many of them racial or ethnic minorities, began to scrutinize knowledge production processes and the implications for minority communities. By the late 20th century, they had begun developing new frameworks such as Critical Race Theory to explicitly account for the influences of racism on both outcomes and research processes.

Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 3 (p247) This definition suggests that health for all cannot be achieved if structural racism persists. Eliminating racism, therefore, is part and parcel to achieving the objectives of public health. Table 1 provides definitions of public health and of the Critical Race Theory concepts discussed in this commentary.

Definitions of Public Health and Selected Concepts of Critical Race Theory

Concept	Definition
Public health	The art (i.e., practice) and science (i.e., research) of protecting and improving the health of communities
Centering in the margins	Making the perspectives of socially marginalized groups, rather than those of people belonging to dominant race or culture, the central axis around which discourse on a topic revolves
Critical consciousness	Digging beneath the surface of information to develop deeper understandings of concepts, relationships, and personal biases
Experiential knowledge	Ways of knowing that result from critical analysis of one's personal experiences
Ordinariness	The nature of racism in post–civil rights society: that is, integral and normal rather than aberrational
Praxis	Iterative process by which the knowledge gained from theory, research, personal experiences, and practice inform one another
Primacy	Prioritizing the study of racial influences on outcomes
Race consciousness	Explicit acknowledgment of the workings of race and racism in social contexts or in one's personal life
Social construction of race	The endowment of a group or concept with a delineation, name, or reality based on historical, contextual, political, or other social considerations

Source. Critical Race Theory concepts adapted from Delgado and Stefancic. 5

Critical Race Theory offers the field of public health a new paradigm for investigating the root causes of health disparities. Based on race equity and social justice principles, Critical Race Theory encourages the development of solutions that bridge gaps in health, housing, employment, and other factors that condition living.

The newly developed Public Health Critical Race Framework adapts Critical Race Theory for public health research and practice (Ford CL and Airhihenbuwa CO, unpublished paper, 2009). Our aim here, however, is to introduce Critical Race Theory to the multidisciplinary field of public health and, more specifically, to researchers of health disparities and health equity. We also illustrate its application to empirical research.

In the following section, we discuss the origins of Critical Race Theory, highlighting 4 of its basic features: race consciousness, contemporary orientation, centering in the margins rather than in the mainstream, and praxis (i.e., theory-informed action).

Although the term “theory” appears in its name, Critical Race Theory is not like behavior change or epidemiological theories. Rather, it is an iterative methodology for helping investigators remain attentive to equity while carrying out research, scholarship, and practice. It also urges scholars to work to transform the hierarchies they identify through research.

Critical Race Theory integrates transdisciplinary methodologies that draw on theory, experiential knowledge, and critical consciousness ( Table 1 ) to illuminate and combat root causes of structural racism. It emerged after years of struggle by law students and faculty contesting what they perceived as institutionalized racism in the hiring and curricular decisions of elite law schools. 4 Convinced that their understandings of racial power dynamics diverged in important ways from those of other legal models, they convened a meeting in 1989 at which they enumerated key racial equity principles. They coined the term “Critical Race Theory” to name the emergent set of methodologies that draws on these principles in pursuing racial equity via the law. Persons whose scholarship relies on Critical Race Theory (called critical race theorists) are often described as “a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” 5 (p2)

Over the last 2 decades, Critical Race Theory scholarship has generated a broad transdisciplinary movement toward race equity. Knowledge production is the primary medium through which Critical Race Theory operates. The scholarship distinguishes contemporary racial mechanisms from older ones (e.g., Jim Crowism), expands the vocabulary for discussing racial phenomena and investigating racism effects, and explicitly incorporates the knowledge of racial and ethnic minority communities regarding marginality.

Race Consciousness

Critical Race Theory challenges widely held but erroneous beliefs that “race consciousness” is synonymous with “racism” and that “colorblindness” is synonymous with the absence of racism. 6 Colorblindness, which is both an attitude and a school of thought, posits that nonracial factors (e.g., income) fundamentally explain ostensibly racial phenomena. Although abuses of race-conscious research (such as early eugenics research) have been noted, in truth, both race consciousness and colorblindness can be deployed in ways that contribute to inequities. Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism's potential contributions to inequities. Race consciousness is essential for understanding racialized constructs and mechanisms.

Contemporary Mechanisms

By definition, structural racism evolves across time and contexts. Research on racism should reflect the aspects of racialization that are contemporarily salient. 7 Currently, structural mechanisms continue to have the greatest impacts even though contemporary racism is characterized by its subtlety and ordinariness ( Table 1 ). The Critical Race Theory concept of ordinariness posits that racism is normal and integral to society. Minorities are chronically exposed to diverse forms of everyday racism (e.g., being followed while shopping). In response, they may learn to ignore everyday racism because it occurs so frequently, become adept at detecting it, or become hypervigilant about it, perceiving any unfair treatment as racism. Understanding ordinariness can inform research hypotheses about minorities’ health behaviors and attitudes.

Centering in the Margins

To center in the margins ( Table 1 ) is to shift a discourse's starting point from a majority group's perspective, which is the usual approach, to that of the marginalized group or groups. The position of critical race theorists as “outsiders within” their respective disciplines is valuable in facilitating this process. By grounding themselves in the experiences and perspectives of the minority communities from which they largely come, critical race theorists integrate critical analyses of their lived experiences and disciplinary conventions to advance knowledge on inequities. This synthesis can enhance the relevancy of findings for communities and provide disciplines with fresh perspectives on old problems.

Critical Race Theory is an iterative methodology for helping investigators remain attentive to equity while carrying out research, scholarship, and practice. Community engagement and critical self-reflection enrich research processes, while research based on the lived experiences of marginalized communities provides the communities with more meaningful data for their ongoing efforts toward collective self-improvement.

For years, some public health researchers have employed (implicitly or explicitly) Critical Race Theory approaches to investigate racism, 8 , 9 emphasize the historical and sociopolitical roots of contemporary disparities, 10 – 12 study how the field's conventions may inadvertently constrain movement toward equity, 13 – 15 focus on structural forces, 16 – 19 emphasize the intersectionality of racial and other axes of inequity, 20 , 21 investigate links between White racial identity and inequities, 22 , 23 and use allegory 24 as an antiracism educational tool. Critical Race Theory can contribute the following: a comprehensive framework for connecting these research endeavors, a vocabulary for advancing understandings of racial constructs and phenomena, critical analyses of knowledge production processes, and praxis that builds on community-based participatory approaches linking research, practice, and communities. 25 , 26 To illustrate how Critical Race Theory can inform public health research, we describe in the next section several ways that it informed a study 27 of HIV testing among African Americans. That study, by C. L. Ford et al., purposefully employed Critical Race Theory in its design and in carrying out the research.

APPLICATION OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

The study was conducted from 2003 to 2005 in an urban area with a high prevalence of HIV. It sought to understand whether racism-related factors are potential barriers to African Americans obtaining readily available, routine HIV testing as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Routine HIV testing has become the backbone of US HIV prevention because, after more than 2 decades of HIV prevention efforts, prevalence remains elevated. 28 Although African Americans are diagnosed later and have worse prognoses than members of other groups, the factors influencing their HIV testing behaviors are poorly understood. The focus on racism as a potential barrier grew in part out of formative research during which some African Americans reported that discriminatory treatment by clinic staff might be a barrier to HIV testing.

The study's methods and key findings have been described elsewhere. 27 Briefly, we enrolled approximately 400 African Americans presenting to a public health clinic for diagnosis or screening of a sexually transmitted disease. Everyone newly presenting for these purposes was automatically offered HIV testing. Controlling for standard HIV prevention covariates such as perceived HIV risk and patient satisfaction, we examined the contribution of perceived everyday racism to laboratory-confirmed HIV test uptake or decline. As perceived racism may be inversely correlated with segregation, 29 we also accounted for levels of segregation in participants’ residential areas. In the next section, we discuss the relevance of race consciousness, contemporary mechanisms, centering in the margins, and praxis to the study. This discussion is illustrative and does not capture the entirety of Critical Race Theory or all the ways it informed this research.

Conceptual Model

The conceptual model integrated the Andersen access to care model, 30 , 31 which is widely used to examine behavior within clinical settings, a socioecological framework, 32 and Critical Race Theory concepts. Figure 1 shows the backbone of Andersen's model, which we adapted to specify variables for inclusion ( Figure 2 ). In Andersen's model, race typically is considered a population characteristic that predisposes one toward particular behavior(s). According to Critical Race Theory, however, race is socially constructed. It is less a risk factor itself than a marker of risk for racism-related exposures. Race is useful in that it enables the identification of persons at risk for exposures that vary by racial category (e.g., discrimination). We removed race from the model as a manipulable variable, limited the sample to African Americans, and incorporated 2 racism variables: perceived everyday racism (individual level) and residential segregation (neighborhood level). Removing race from the model shifted the focus from how Black race might influence behaviors to how the racialized experiences of African Americans might do so.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is S30fig1.jpg

Andersen's access to care model.

Note . Andersen's model 30 , 31 goes beyond behavioral outcomes to examine health outcomes.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is S30fig2.jpg

Adaptation of Andersen's access to care model 30 , 31 used as the study's conceptual model.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is S30fig3.jpg

Robert Brackman allied the independent spirit of his young subject with the future of the whole country, titling his portrait of her “Somewhere in America.” From the recent Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition, “1934: A New Deal for Artists.” Printed with permission. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Art Museum.

Race consciousness ( Table 1 ) informed all aspects of the project, including development of the conceptual model. Race consciousness suggested that considering the racialized social context of African Americans would be germane to research on their HIV preventive behaviors given their historical experiences with the health care system and stigma linking HIV and Black race. Social construction suggests that different racial groups experience the social environment differently. We conceptualized social contexts as racialized at the individual, clinical, and residential levels and sought to explain African Americans’ experiences of their social contexts. Limiting the study to African Americans contrasts with typical approaches that compare groups, making the underlying question, “How do African Americans differ from Whites?” 15 Our within-group design encouraged exploration of the diversity of perceptions, experiences, and attitudes among African Americans. 15 , 33 , 34

The study controlled for standard explanatory factors (e.g., perceived HIV risk) to focus on racism-related contributions. Drawing on race consciousness, the investigators first enumerated salient aspects of contemporary racism (e.g., its ubiquity, multilevel nature, etc.) and applied these broad characteristics to Andersen's model. This led to the individual-level focus on perceived everyday racism rather than on the extreme forms of racism (e.g., HIV conspiracy beliefs) previously examined.

A key characteristic of contemporary racism is its subtlety and ordinariness. Ordinariness suggests that constant, chronic exposure to seemingly minor insults (e.g., being followed while shopping) may have lasting impacts on one's health. Ordinariness reinforced the decision to operationalize the main individual-level explanatory factor as perceived everyday racism. Everyday racism is an integral element of the social environment. We conceptualized everyday racism as a ubiquitous aspect of the social environment and perceived everyday racism as individuals’ detection of it.

The study was motivated in part by extensive outreach conducted among community residents. Critical self-awareness, especially regarding personal privilege and racial relations, informed team members’ interactions with community members, study participants, and other research project staff. For instance, throughout the research process, members of the research team noted ways that their identities (especially with regard to race) and social positions (e.g., educational attainment) could influence power dynamics in their interactions with participants or recruits.

Through critical self-consciousness, 1 member of the research team realized that she considered her racial identity (African American) to be more important than her other identities (e.g., class), which led her to hold a priori assumptions (e.g., that she and study participants held similar views). By identifying these assumptions and their potential implications early on, she prevented their inadvertent influences on the research process (e.g., data collection or data interpretation) and derived more accurate assessments of the nature of her interactions with community members. For some recruits and participants, her affiliation with a predominantly White institution was a major source of distrust and was more salient than her race. Challenging power differentials is central to Critical Race Theory. Her critical self-consciousness helped her to do just that by attending to intraracial power imbalances throughout the research process.

Together, critical consciousness and race consciousness ( Table 1 ) helped the project remain oriented toward race equity. Because all research is produced within and in relation to social contexts that may inadvertently influence research, 35 , 36 this grounding in equity heightened awareness of the power imbalances between academic institutions and the communities in which they conduct research. We attempted to redress these imbalances throughout the research process. For instance, African American community members were recruited and trained as research assistants even though doing so was more expensive and labor intensive than hiring student research assistants.

The project was attentive to the ways that researchers may be personally affected by racism while studying it. In an arm of the study that entailed phoning a probability sample of residents based on a sampling frame derived from telephone directory white pages, interviewers sometimes reached non–African Americans who, ineligible for the study, responded to the interviewers with hostility. Staff debriefed after such incidents. Research staff also read literature on racism and race, discussed their personal experiences with and perceptions about racism, and regularly checked in with each other during the data collection period.

Analyses and Interpretations

The choice of analytic technique—logistic regression with generalized estimating equations (GEE)—followed from the conceptual model in which perceived racism occurs within racialized social environments. Critical Race Theory was relevant to the analyses in that it informed the conceptual model and interpretations of the study's findings. As in other recent studies, 37 , 38 our findings suggested that despite perceiving everyday racism, African Americans at high risk for HIV transmission actively engage in primary preventive behaviors. 27 On the basis of the Critical Race Theory concept “centering in the margins,” our report of the findings included the strengths on which members of marginalized communities may draw.

One objective of Critical Race Theory is to go beyond merely documenting disparities. Therefore, we included policy and practice implications in the published findings and shared the findings with community members, frontline public health professionals (e.g., outreach workers, clinic staff), and study participants.

CONCLUSIONS

We have introduced Critical Race Theory, a race equity methodology that originated in legal studies, to the public health community, and described several ways that Critical Race Theory informed a study of racism and HIV testing among African Americans. Four Critical Race Theory concepts—race consciousness, contemporary orientation, centering in the margins, and praxis—were central to that study. Critical Race Theory has been adapted for use in several fields, including education and gender studies. Public health's tradition of championing social justice issues suggests that Critical Race Theory can provide powerful new tools for targeting racial and ethnic health inequities. To facilitate appropriate and systematic use of Critical Race Theory within public health, Ford and Airhihenbuwa developed the Public Health Critical Race Framework (unpublished paper, 2009). That framework and the Critical Race Theory concepts introduced here build on the growing public health momentum toward achieving health equity.

Acknowledgments

This project received support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholars Program (P0117943) and the UCLA AIDS Institute and Center for AIDS Research.

We acknowledge Peter Ford, JD, and Phyllis M. Autry for their contributions regarding Critical Race Theory, Kara Keeling for rich conversations on this topic, and 2 anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Understanding the Influence of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Class on Inequalities in Academic and Non-Academic Outcomes among Eighth-Grade Students: Findings from an Intersectionality Approach

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, Department of Social Statistics, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Affiliation Australian National University, Acton, Australia

Laia Bécares,
Naomi Priest

Published: October 27, 2015
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363
Reader Comments

Socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gender inequalities in academic achievement have been widely reported in the US, but how these three axes of inequality intersect to determine academic and non-academic outcomes among school-aged children is not well understood. Using data from the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten (ECLS-K; N = 10,115), we apply an intersectionality approach to examine inequalities across eighth-grade outcomes at the intersection of six racial/ethnic and gender groups (Latino girls and boys, Black girls and boys, and White girls and boys) and four classes of socioeconomic advantage/disadvantage. Results of mixture models show large inequalities in socioemotional outcomes (internalizing behavior, locus of control, and self-concept) across classes of advantage/disadvantage. Within classes of advantage/disadvantage, racial/ethnic and gender inequalities are predominantly found in the most advantaged class, where Black boys and girls, and Latina girls, underperform White boys in academic assessments, but not in socioemotional outcomes. In these latter outcomes, Black boys and girls perform better than White boys. Latino boys show small differences as compared to White boys, mainly in science assessments. The contrasting outcomes between racial/ethnic and gender minorities in self-assessment and socioemotional outcomes, as compared to standardized assessments, highlight the detrimental effect that intersecting racial/ethnic and gender discrimination have in patterning academic outcomes that predict success in adult life. Interventions to eliminate achievement gaps cannot fully succeed as long as social stratification caused by gender and racial discrimination is not addressed.

Citation: Bécares L, Priest N (2015) Understanding the Influence of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Class on Inequalities in Academic and Non-Academic Outcomes among Eighth-Grade Students: Findings from an Intersectionality Approach. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0141363. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363

Editor: Emmanuel Manalo, Kyoto University, JAPAN

Received: June 10, 2015; Accepted: October 6, 2015; Published: October 27, 2015

Copyright: © 2015 Bécares, Priest. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Data Availability: All ECLS-K Kindergarten-Eighth Grade Public-use File are available from the National Center for Education Statistics website ( https://nces.ed.gov/ecls/dataproducts.asp#K-8 ).

Funding: This work was funded by an ESRC grant (ES/K001582/1) and a Hallsworth Research Fellowship to LB.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The US racial/ethnic academic achievement gap is a well-documented social inequality [ 1 ]. National assessments for science, mathematics, and reading show that White students score higher on average than all other racial/ethnic groups, particularly when compared to Black and Hispanic students [ 2 , 3 ]. Explanations for these gaps tend to focus on the influence of socioeconomic resources, neighborhood and school characteristics, and family composition in patterning socioeconomic inequalities, and on the racialized nature of socioeconomic inequalities as key drivers of racial/ethnic academic achievement gaps [ 4 – 10 ]. Substantial evidence documents that indicators of socioeconomic status, such as free or reduced-price school lunch, are highly predictive of academic outcomes [ 2 , 3 ]. However, the relative contribution of family, neighborhood and school level socioeconomic inequalities to racial/ethnic academic inequalities continues to be debated, with evidence suggesting none of these factors fully explain racial/ethnic academic achievement gaps, particularly as students move through elementary school [ 11 ]. Attitudinal outcomes have been proposed by some as one explanatory factor for racial/ethnic inequalities in academic achievement [ 12 ], but differences in educational attitudes and aspirations across groups do not fully reflect inequalities in academic assessment. For example, while students of poorer socioeconomic status have lower educational aspirations than more advantaged students [ 13 ], racial/ethnic minority students report higher educational aspirations than White students, particularly after accounting for socioeconomic characteristics [ 14 – 16 ]. Similarly, while socio-emotional development is considered highly predictive of academic achievement in school students, some racial/ethnic minority children report better socio-emotional outcomes than their White peers on some indicators, although findings are inconsistent [ 17 – 22 ].

In addition to inequalities in academic achievement, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities also exist across measures of socio-emotional development [ 23 – 26 ]. And as with academic achievement, although socioeconomic factors are highly predictive of socio-emotional outcomes, they do not completely explain racial/ethnic inequalities in school-related outcomes not focused on standardized assessments [ 11 ].

Further complexity in understanding how academic and non-academic outcomes are patterned by socioeconomic factors, and how this contributes to racial/ethnic inequalities, is added by the multi-dimensional nature of socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status is widely recognized as comprising diverse factors that operate across different levels (e.g. individual, household, neighborhood), and influence outcomes through different causal pathways [ 27 ]. The lack of interchangeability between measures of socioeconomic status within and between levels (e.g. income, education, occupation, wealth, neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics, or past socioeconomic circumstances) is also well established, as is the non-equivalence of measures between racial/ethnic groups [ 27 ]. For example, large inequalities have been reported across racial/ethnic groups within the same educational level, and inequalities in wealth have been shown across racial/ethnic that have similar income. It is therefore imperative that studies consider these multiple dimensions of socioeconomic status so that critical social gradients across the entire socioeconomic spectrum are not missed [ 27 ], and racial/ethnic inequalities within levels of socioeconomic status are adequately documented. It is also important that differences in school outcomes are considered across levels of socioeconomic status within and between racial/ethnic groups, so that the influence of specific socioeconomic factors on outcomes within specific racial/ethnic groups can be studied [ 28 ]. However, while these analytic approaches have been identified as research priorities in order to enhance our understanding of the complex ways in which socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity intersect to influence school outcomes, research that operationalizes these recommendations across academic and non-academic outcomes of school children is scant.

In addition to the complexity that arises from race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and intersections between them, different patterns in academic and non-academic outcomes by gender have also received longstanding attention. Comparisons across gender show that, on average, boys have higher scores in mathematics and science, whereas girls have higher scores in reading [ 2 , 3 , 29 ]. In contrast to explanations for socioeconomic inequalities, gender differences have been mainly attributed to social conditioning and stereotyping within families, schools, communities, and the wider society [ 30 – 35 ]. These socialization and stereotyping processes are also highly relevant determining factors in explaining racial/ethnic academic and non-academic inequalities [ 35 , 36 ], as are processes of racial discrimination and stigmatization [ 37 , 38 ]. Gender differences in academic outcomes have been documented as differently patterned across racial/ethnic groups and across levels of socioeconomic status. For example, gender inequalities in math and science are largest among White and Latino students, and smallest among Asian American and African American students [ 39 – 43 ], while gender gaps in test scores are more pronounced among socioeconomically disadvantaged children [ 44 , 45 ]. In terms of attitudes towards math and sciences, gender differences in attitudes towards math are largest among Latino students, but gender differences in attitudes towards science are largest among White students [ 39 , 40 ]. Gender differences in socio-developmental outcomes and in non-cognitive academic outcomes, across race/ethnicity and socio-economic status, have received far less attention; studies that consider multiple academic and non-academic outcomes among school aged children across race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender are limited in the US and internationally.

Understanding how different academic and non-academic outcomes are differently patterned by race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, and gender, including within and between group differences, is an important research area that may assist in understanding the potential causal pathways and explanations for observed inequalities, and in identifying key population groups and points at which interventions should be targeted to address inequalities in particular outcomes [ 28 , 46 ]. Not only is such knowledge critical for population level policy and/or local level action within affected communities, but failing to detect potential factors for interventions and potential solutions is argued as reinforcing perceptions of the unmodifiable nature of inequality and injustice [ 46 ].

Notwithstanding the importance of documenting patterns of inequality in relation to a particular social identity (e.g. race/ethnicity, gender, class), there is increasing acknowledgement within both theoretical and empirical research of the need to move beyond analyzing single categories to consider simultaneous interactions between different aspects of social identity, and the impact of systems and processes of oppression and domination (e.g., racism, classism, sexism) that operate at the micro and macro level [ 47 , 48 ]. Such intersectional approaches challenge practices that isolate and prioritize a single social position, and emphasize the potential of varied inter-relationships of social identities and interacting social processes in the production of inequities [ 49 – 51 ]. To date, exploration of how social identities interact in an intersectional way to influence outcomes has largely been theoretical and qualitative in nature. Explanations offered for interactions between privileged and marginalized identities, and associated outcomes, include family and teacher socialization of gender performance (e.g. math and science as male domains, verbal and emotional skills as female), as well as racialized stereotypes and expectations from teachers and wider society regarding racial/ethnic minorities that are also gendered (e.g. Black males as violent prone and aggressive, Asian females as submissive) [ 52 – 57 ]. That is, social processes that socialize and pattern opportunities and outcomes are both racialized and gendered, with racism and sexism operating in intersecting ways to influence the development and achievements of children and youth [ 58 – 60 ]. Socioeconomic status adds a third important dimension to these processes, with individuals of the same race/ethnicity and gender having access to vastly different resources and opportunities across levels of socioeconomic status. Moreover, access to resources as well as socialization experiences and expectations differ considerably by race and gender within the same level of socio-economic status. Thus, neither gender nor race nor socio-economic status alone can fully explain the interacting social processes influencing outcomes for youth [ 27 , 28 ]. Disentangling such interactions is therefore an important research priority in order to inform intervention to address inequalities at a population level and within local communities.

In the realm of quantitative approaches to the study of inequality, studies often examine separate social identities independently to assess which of these axes of stratification is most prominent, and for the most part do not consider claims that the varied dimensions of social stratification are often juxtaposed [ 56 , 61 ]. A pressing need remains for quantitative research to consider how multiple forms of social stratification are interrelated, and how they combine interactively, not just additively, to influence outcomes [ 46 ]. Doing so enables analyses that consider in greater detail the representation of the embodied positions of individuals, particularly issues of multiple marginalization as well as the co-occurrence of some form of privilege with marginalization [ 46 ]. It is important to note that the languages of statistical interaction and of intersectionality need to be carefully distinguished (e.g. intersectional additivity or additive assumptions, versus additive scale and cross-product interaction terms) to avoid misinterpretation of findings, and to ensure appropriate application of statistical interaction to enable the description of outcome measures for groups of individuals at each cross-stratified intersection [ 46 ]. Ultimately this will provide more nuanced and realistic understandings of the determinants of inequality in order to inform intervention strategies.

This study fills these gaps in the literature by examining inequalities across several eighth grade academic and non-academic outcomes at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. It aims to do this by: identifying classes of socioeconomic advantage/disadvantage from kindergarten to eighth grade; then ascertaining whether membership into classes of socioeconomic advantage/disadvantage differ for racial/ethnic and gender groups; and finally, by contrasting academic and non-academic outcomes at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic advantage/disadvantage. Intersecting identities of race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic characteristics are compared to the reference group of White boys in the most advantaged socioeconomic category, as these are the three identities (male, White, socioeconomically privileged) that experience the least marginalization when compared to racial/ethnic and gender minority groups in disadvantaged socioeconomic positions.

This study used data on singleton children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten (ECLS-K). The ECLS-K employed a multistage probability sample design to select a nationally representative sample of children attending kindergarten in 1998–99. In the base year the primary sampling units (PSUs) were geographic areas consisting of counties or groups of counties. The second-stage units were schools within sampled PSUs. The third- and final-stage units were children within schools [ 62 ]. Analyses were conducted on data collected from direct child assessments, as well as information provided by parents and school administrators.

Ethics Statement

This article is based on the secondary analysis of anonymized and de-identified Public-Use Data Files available to researchers via the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Human participants were not directly involved in the research reported in this article; therefore, no institutional review board approval was sought.

Outcome Variables.

Eight outcome variables, all assessed in eighth grade, were selected to examine the study aims: two measures relating to non-cognitive academic skills (perceived interest/competence in reading, and in math); three measures capturing socioemotional development (internalizing behavior, locus of control, self-concept); and three measures of cognitive skills (math, reading and science assessment scores).

For the eighth-grade data collection, children completed the 16-item Self Description Questionnaire (SDQ) II [ 63 ], where they provided self-assessments of their academic skills by rating their perceived competence and interest in English and mathematics. The SDQ also asked children to report on problem behaviors with which they might struggle. Three subscales were produced from the SDQ items: The SDQ Perceived Interest/Competence in Reading, including four items on grades in English and the child’s interest in and enjoyment of reading. The SDQ Perceived Interest/Competence in Math, including four items on mathematics grades and the child’s interest in and enjoyment of mathematics. And the SDQ Internalizing Behavior subscale, which includes eight items on internalizing problem behaviors such as feeling sad, lonely, ashamed of mistakes, frustrated, and worrying about school and friendships [ 62 ].

The Self-Concept and Locus of Control scales ask children about their self-perceptions and the amount of control they have over their own lives. These scales, adopted from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, asked children to indicate the degree to which they agreed with 13 statements (seven items in the Self-Concept scale, and six items in the Locus of Control Scale) about themselves, including “I feel good about myself,” “I don’t have enough control over the direction my life is taking,” and “At times I think I am no good at all.” Responses ranged from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Some items were reversed coded so that higher scores indicate more positive self-concept and a greater perception of control over one’s own life. The seven items in the Self-Concept scale, and the six items in the Locus of Control were standardized separately to a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1. The scores of each scale are an average of the standardized scores [ 62 ].

Academic achievement in reading, mathematics and science was measured with the eighth-grade direct cognitive assessment battery [ 62 ].

Children were given separate routing assessment forms to determine the level (high/low) of their reading, mathematics, and science assessments. The two-stage cognitive assessment approach was used to maximize the accuracy of measurement and reduce administration time by using the child’s responses from a brief first-stage routing form to select the appropriate second-stage level form. First, children read items in a booklet and recorded their responses on an answer form. These answer forms were then scored by the test administrator. Based on the score of the respective routing forms, the test administrator then assigned a high or low second-stage level form of the reading and mathematics assessments. For the second-stage level tests, children read items in the assessment booklet and recorded their responses in the same assessment booklet. The routing tests and the second-stage tests were timed for 80 minutes [ 62 ]. The present analyses use the standardized scores (T-scores), allowing relative comparisons of children against their peers.

Individual and Contextual Disadvantage Variables.

Latent Class Analysis, described in greater detail below, was used to classify students into classes of individual and contextual advantage or disadvantage. Nine constructs, measuring characteristics at the individual-, school-, and neighborhood-level, were captured using 42 dichotomous variables measured across the different waves of the ECLS-K.

Individual-level variables captured household composition, material disadvantage, and parental expectations of the children’s success. Measures included whether the child lived in a single-parent household at kindergarten, first, third, fifth and eighth grades; whether the household was below the poverty threshold level at kindergarten, fifth and eighth grades; food insecurity at kindergarten, first, second and third grades; and parental expectations of the child’s academic achievement (categorized as up to high school and more than high school) at kindergarten, first, third, fifth and eighth grades. An indicator of whether parents had moved since the previous interview (measured at kindergarten, first, third, fifth and eighth grades) was included to capture stability in the children’s life. A household-level composite index of socioeconomic status, derived by the National Center for Education Statistics, was also included at kindergarten, first, third, fifth and eighth grades. This measure captured the father/male guardian’s education and occupation, the mother/female guardian’s education and occupation, and the household income. Higher scores reflect higher levels of educational attainment, occupational prestige, and income. In the present analyses, the socioeconomic composite index was categorized into quintiles and further divided into the lowest first and second quintiles, versus the third, fourth and fifth quintiles.

Two variables measured the school-level environment: percentage of students eligible for free school meals, and percentage of students from a racial/ethnic background other than White non-Hispanic. These two variables were dichotomized as more than or equal to 50% of students belonging to each category. Both variables were measured in the kindergarten, first, third, fifth and eighth grade data collections.

To capture the neighborhood environment, a variable was included which measured the level of safety of the neighborhood in kindergarten, first, third, fifth and eighth grades. Parents were asked “How safe is it for children to play outside during the day in your neighborhood?” with responses ranging from 1, not at all safe, to 3, very safe. For the present analyses, response categories were recoded into 1 “not at all and somewhat safe,” and 0 “very safe.”

Predictor Variables.

The race/ethnicity and gender of the children were assessed during the parent interview. In order to empirically measure the intersection between race/ethnicity and gender in the classes of disadvantage, a set of six dummy variables were created that combined racial/ethnic and gender categories into White boys, White girls, Black boys, Black girls, Latino boys, and Latina girls.

Statistical Analyses

This study used the manual 3-step approach in mixture modeling with auxiliary variables [ 64 , 65 ] to independently evaluate the relationship between the predictor auxiliary variables (the combined race/ethnicity and gender groups), the latent class variable of advantage/disadvantage, and the outcome (non-cognitive skills, socioemotional development, cognitive assessments). This is a data-driven, mixture modelling technique which uses indicator variables (in this case the variables described under Individual and Contextual Disadvantage Variables section) to identify a number of latent classes. It also includes auxiliary information in the form of covariates (the race/ethnicity and gender combinations described under Predictor Variables) and distal outcomes (the eight outcome variables), to better explore the relationships between the characteristics that make up the latent classes, the predictors of class membership, and the associated consequences of membership into each class.

The first step in the 3-step procedure is to estimate the measurement part of the joint model (i.e., the latent class model) by creating the latent classes without adding covariates. Latent class analyses first evaluated the fit of a 2-class model, and systematically increased the number of classes in subsequent models until the addition of latent classes did not further improve model fit. For each model, replication of the best log-likelihood was verified to avoid local maxima. To determine the optimal number of classes, models were compared across several model fit criteria. First, the sample-size adjusted Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) [ 66 ] was evaluated; lower relative BIC values indicate improved model fit. Given that the BIC criterion tends to favor models with fewer latent classes [ 67 ], the Lo, Mendell, and Rubin likelihood ratio test (LMR-LRT) statistic [ 68 ] was also considered. The LMR-LRT can be used in mixture modeling to compare the fit of the specified class solution ( k -class model) to a model with fewer classes ( k -1 class model). A non-significant chi-square value suggests that a model with one fewer class is preferred. Entropy statistics, which measure the separation of the classes based on the posterior class membership probabilities, were also examined; entropy values approaching 1 indicate clear separation between classes [ 69 ].

After determining the latent class model in step 1, the second step of the analyses used the latent class posterior distribution to generate a nominal variable N , which represented the most likely class [ 64 ]. During the third step, the measurement error for N was accounted for while the model was estimated with the outcomes and predictor auxiliary variables [ 64 ]. The last step of the analysis examined whether race/ethnic and gender categories predict class membership, and whether class membership predicts the outcomes of interest.

All analyses were conducted using MPlus v. 7.11 [ 70 ], and used longitudinal weights to account for differential probabilities of selection at each sampling stage and to adjust for the effects of non-response. A robust standard error estimator was used in MPlus to account for the clustering of observations in the ECLS-K.

Four distinct classes of advantage/disadvantage were identified in the latent class analysis (see Table 1 ).

PPT PowerPoint slide
PNG larger image
TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363.t001

Class characteristics are shown in Table A in S1 File . Trajectories of advantage and disadvantage were stable across ECLS-K waves, so that none of the classes identified changed in individual and contextual characteristics across time. The largest proportion of the sample (47%; Class 3: Individually and Contextually Wealthy) lived in individual and contextual privilege, with very low proportions of children in socioeconomic deprived contexts. A class representing the opposite characteristics (children living in individually- and contextually-deprived circumstances) was also identified in the analyses (19%; Class 1: Individually and Contextually Disadvantaged). Class 1 had the highest proportion of children living in socioeconomic deprivation, attending schools with more than 50% racial/ethnic minority students, and living in unsafe neighborhoods, but did not have a high proportion of children with the lowest parental expectations. Class 4 (19%; Individually Disadvantaged, Contextually Wealthy) had the highest proportion of children with the lowest parental expectations (parents reporting across waves that they expected children to achieve up to a high school education). Class 4 (Individually Disadvantaged, Contextually Wealthy) also had high proportions of children living in individual-level socioeconomic deprivation, but had low proportions of children attending a school with over 50% of children eligible for free school meals. It also had relatively low proportions of children living in unsafe neighborhoods and low proportions of children attending diverse schools, forming a class with a mixture of individual-level deprivation, and contextual-level advantage. The last class was composed of children who lived in individually-wealthy environments, but who also lived in unsafe neighborhoods and attended diverse schools where more than 50% of pupils were eligible for free school meals (13%; Class 2: Individually Wealthy, Contextually Disadvantaged; see Table A in S1 File ).

The combined intersecting racial/ethnic and gender characteristics yielded six groups consisting of White boys (n = 2998), White girls (n = 2899), Black boys (n = 553), Black girls (n = 560), Latino boys (n = 961), and Latina girls (n = 949). All pairs containing at least one minority status of either race/ethnicity or gender (e.g., Black boys, Black girls, Latino boys, Latina girls) were more likely than White boys to be assigned to the more disadvantaged classes, as compared to being assigned to Class 3, the least disadvantaged (see Table B in S1 File ).

Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences in Eighth-Grade Academic Outcomes

Table 2 shows broad patterns of intersecting racial/ethnic and gender inequalities in academic outcomes, although interesting differences emerge across racial/ethnic and gender groups. Whereas Black boys achieved lower scores than White boys across all classes on the math, reading and science assessments, this was not the case for Latino boys, who only underperformed White boys on the science assessment within the most privileged class (Class 3: Individually and Contextually Wealthy). Latina girls, in contrast, outperformed White boys on reading scores within Class 4 (Individually Disadvantaged, Contextually Wealthy), but scored lower than White boys on science and math assessments, although only when in the two most privileged classes (Class 3 and 4). For Black girls the effect of class membership was not as pronounced, and they had lower science and math scores than White boys across all but one instance.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363.t002

In general, the largest inequalities in academic outcomes across racial/ethnic and gender groups appeared in the most privileged classes. For example, results show no differences in math scores across racial/ethnic and gender categories within Class 4, the most disadvantaged class, but in all other classes that contain an element of advantage, and particularly in Class 3 (Individually and Contextually Wealthy), there are large gaps in math scores across racial/ethnic and gender groups, when compared to White boys. These patterns of heightened inequality in the most advantaged classes are similar for reading and science scores (see Table 2 ).

Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences in Eighth-Grade Non-Academic Outcomes

Interestingly, racialized and gendered patterns of inequality observed in academic outcomes were not as stark in non-cognitive academic outcomes (see Table 3 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363.t003

Racial/ethnic and gender differences were small across socioemotional outcomes, and in fact, White boys were outperformed on several outcomes. Black boys scored lower than White boys on internalizing behavior and higher on self-concept within Classes 2 (Individually Wealthy, Contextually Disadvantaged) and 4 (Individually Disadvantaged, Contextually Wealthy), and Black girls scored higher than White boys on self-concept within Classes 2 and 3 (Individually Wealthy, Contextually Disadvantaged, and Individually and Contextually Wealthy, respectively). White and Latina girls, but not Black girls, scored higher than White boys on internalizing behavior (within Classes 3 and 4 for White girls, and within Classes 1 and 3 for Latina girls; see Table 3 ).

As with academic outcomes, most racial/ethnic and gender differences also emerged within the most privileged classes, and particularly in Class 3 (Individually and Contextually Wealthy), although in the case of perceived interest/competence in reading, White and Latina girls performed better than White boys. White girls also reported higher perceived interest/competence in reading than White boys in Class 4: Individually Disadvantaged, Contextually Wealthy.

This study set out to examine inequalities across several eighth grade academic and non-academic outcomes at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. It first identified four classes of longstanding individual- and contextual-level disadvantage; then determined membership to these classes depending on racial/ethnic and gender groups; and finally compared non-cognitive skills, academic assessment scores, and socioemotional outcomes across intersecting gender, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic social positions.

Results show the clear influence of race/ethnicity in determining membership to the most disadvantaged classes. Across gender dichotomies, Black students were more likely than White boys to be assigned to all classes of disadvantage as compared to the most advantaged class, and this was particularly strong for the most disadvantaged class, which included elements of both individual- and contextual-level disadvantage. Latino boys and girls were also more likely than White boys to be assigned to all the disadvantaged classes, but the strength of the association was much smaller than for Black students. Whereas membership into classes of disadvantage appears to be more a result of structural inequalities strongly driven by race/ethnicity, the salience of gender is apparent in the distribution of academic assessment outcomes within classes of disadvantage. Results show a gendered pattern of math, reading and science assessments, particularly in the most privileged class, where girls from all ethnic/racial groups (although mostly from Black and Latino racial/ethnic groups) underperform White boys in math and science, and where Black boys score lower, and White girls higher, than White boys in reading.

With the exception of educational assessments, gender and racial/ethnic inequalities within classes are either not very pronounced or in the opposite direction (e.g. racial/ethnic and gender minorities outperform White males), but differences in outcomes across classes are stark. The strength of the association between race/ethnicity and class membership, and the reduced racial/ethnic and gender inequalities within classes of advantage and disadvantage, attest to the importance of socioeconomic status and wealth in explaining racial/ethnic inequalities; should individual and contextual disadvantage be comparable across racial/ethnic groups, racial/ethnic inequalities would be substantially reduced. This being said, most within-class differences were observed in the most privileged classes, showing that benefits brought about by affluence and advantage are not equal across racial/ethnic and gender groups. The measures of advantage and disadvantage captured in this study relate to characteristics afforded by parental resources, implying an intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, regardless of the presence of absolute adversity in childhood. This pattern of differential returns of affluence has been shown in other studies, which report that White teenagers benefit more from the presence of affluent neighbors than do Black teenagers [ 71 ]. Among adult populations, studies show that across several health outcomes, highly educated Black adults fare worse than White adults with the lowest education [ 72 ]. Intersectional approaches such as the one applied in this study reveal how power within gendered and racialized institutional settings operates to undermine access to and use of resources that would otherwise be available to individuals of advantaged classes [ 72 ]. The present study further contributes to this literature by documenting how, in a key stage of the life course, similar levels of advantage, but not disadvantage, lead to different academic outcomes across racial/ethnic and gender groups. These findings suggest that, should socioeconomic inequalities be addressed, and levels of advantage were similar across racial/ethnic and gender groups, systems of oppression that pattern the racialization and socialization of children into racial/ethnic and gender roles in society would still ensure that inequalities in academic outcomes existed across racial/ethnic and gender categories. In other words, racism and sexism have a direct effect on academic and non-academic outcomes among 8 th graders, independent of the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage on these outcomes. An important limitation of the current study is that although it uses a comprehensive measure of advantage/disadvantage, including elements of deprivation and affluence at the family, school and neighborhood levels through time, it failed to capture these two key causal determinants of racial/ethnic and gender inequality: experiences of racial and gender discrimination.

Despite this limitation, it is important to note that socioeconomic inequalities in the US are driven by racial and gender bias and discrimination at structural and individual levels, with race and gender discrimination exerting a strong influence on academic and non-academic inequalities. Racial discrimination, prevalent in the US and in other industrialized nations [ 38 , 73 ] determines differential life opportunities and resources across racial/ethnic groups, and is a crucial determinant of racial/ethnic inequalities in health and development throughout life and across generations [ 37 , 38 ]. In the context of this study’s primary outcomes within school settings, racism and racial discrimination experienced by both the parents and the children are likely to contribute towards explaining observed racial/ethnic inequalities in outcomes within classes of disadvantage. Gender discrimination—another system of oppression—is apparent in this study in relation to academic subjects socially considered as typically male or female orientated. For example, results show no difference between Black girls and White boys from the most advantaged class in terms of perceived interest and competence in math but, in this same class, Black girls score much lower than White boys in the math assessment. This difference, not explained by intrinsic or socioeconomic differences, can be contextualized as a consequence of experienced intersecting racial and gender discrimination. The consequences of the intersection between two marginalized identities are found throughout the results of this study when comparing across broad categorizations of race/ethnicity and gender, and in more detailed conceptualizations of minority status. Growing up Black, Latino or White in the US is not the same for boys and girls, and growing up as a boy or a girl in America does not lead to the same outcomes and opportunities for Black, Latino and White children as they become adults. With this study’s approach of intersectionality one can observe the complexity of how gender and race/ethnicity intersect to create unique academic and non-academic outcomes. This includes the contrasting results found for Black and Latino boys, when compared to White boys, which show very few examples of poorer outcomes among Latino boys, but several instances among Black boys. Results also show different racialization for Black and Latina girls. Latina girls, but not Black girls, report higher internalizing behavior than White boys, whereas Black girls, but not Latina girls, report higher self-concept than White boys. Black boys also report higher self-concept and lower internalizing behavior than White boys, findings that mirror research on self-esteem among Black adolescents [ 74 , 75 ]. In cognitive assessments, intersecting racial/ethnic and gender differences emerge across classes of disadvantage. For example, Black girls in all four classes score lower on science scores than White boys, but only Latina girls in the most advantaged class score lower than White boys. Although one can observe differences in the racialization of Black and Latino boys and girls across classes of disadvantage, findings about broad differences across Latino children compared to Black and White children should be interpreted with caution. The Latino ethnic group is a large, heterogeneous group, representing 16.7% of the total US population [ 76 ]. The Latino population is composed of a variety of different sub-groups with diverse national origins and migration histories [ 77 ], which has led to differences in sociodemographic characteristics and lived experiences of ethnicity and minority status among the various groups. Differences across Latino sub-groups are widely documented, and pooled analyses such as those reported here are masking differences across Latino sub-groups, and providing biased comparisons between Latino children, and Black and White children.

Poorer performance of girls and racial/ethnic minority students in science and math assessments (but not in self-perceived competence and interest) might result from stereotype threat, whereby negative stereotypes of a group influence their member’s performance [ 78 ]. Stereotype threat posits that awareness of a social stereotype that reflects negatively on one's social group can negatively affect the performance of group members [ 35 ]. Reduced performance only occurs in a threatening situation (e.g., a test) where individuals are aware of the stereotype. Studies show that early adolescence is a time when youth become aware of and begin to endorse traditional gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes [ 79 ]. Findings among youth parallel findings among adult populations, which show that adult men are generally perceived to be more competent than women, but that these perceptions do not necessarily hold for Black men [ 80 ]. These stereotypes have strong implications for interpersonal interactions and for the wider structuring of systemic racial/ethnic and gender inequalities. An example of the consequences of negative racial/ethnic and gender stereotypes as children grow up is the well-documented racial/ethnic and gender pay gap: women earn less than men [ 81 ], and racial/ethnic minority women and men earn less than White men [ 82 ].

In addition to the focus on intersectionality, a strength of this study is its person-centered methodological approach, which incorporates measures of advantage and disadvantage across individual and contextual levels through nine years of children’s socialization. Children live within multiple contexts, with risk factors at the family, school, and neighborhood level contributing to their development and wellbeing. Individual risk factors seldom operate in isolation [ 83 ], and they are often strongly associated both within and across levels [ 84 ]. All risk factors captured in the latent class analyses have been independently associated with increased risk for academic problems [ 10 , 71 , 85 , 86 ], and given that combinations of risk factors that cut across multiple domains explain the association between early risk and later outcomes better than any isolated risk factor [ 83 , 84 ], the incorporation of person-centered and intersectionality approaches to the study of racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities across school outcomes provides new insight into how children in marginalized social groups are socialized in the early life course.

Conclusions

The contrasting outcomes between racial/ethnic and gender minorities in self-assessment and socioemotional outcomes, as compared to standardized assessments, provide support for the detrimental effect that intersecting racial/ethnic and gender discrimination have in patterning academic outcomes that predict success in adult life. Interventions to eliminate achievement gaps cannot fully succeed as long as social stratification caused by gender and racial discrimination is not addressed [ 87 , 88 ].

Supporting Information

S1 file. supporting tables..

Table A: Class characteristics. Table B: Associations between race/ethnicity and gender groups and assigned class membership (membership to Classes 1, 2 or 4 as compared to Class 3: Individually and Contextually Wealthy).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363.s001

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by an ESRC grant (ES/K001582/1) and a Hallsworth Research Fellowship to LB. Most of this work was conducted while LB was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. She would like to thank them for hosting her visit and for the support provided.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: LB. Performed the experiments: LB. Analyzed the data: LB. Wrote the paper: LB NP.

1. Jencks C, Phillips M. The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press; 1998.
2. (NCES) NCfES. The Nation’s Report Card: Science 2011(NCES 2012–465). Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2012.
3. (NCES) NCfES. The Nation’s Report Card: A First Look: 2013 Mathematics and Reading (NCES 2014–451). Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2013.
View Article
Google Scholar
PubMed/NCBI
12. Ogbu J. Low performance as an adaptation: The case of blacks in Stockton, California. In: Gibson M, Ogbu J, editors. Minority Status and Schooling. New York: Grand Publishing; 1991.
41. Coley R. Differences in the gender gap: Comparisons across racial/ethnic groups in education and work. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 2001.
47. Hankivsky O, Cormier R. Intersectionality: Moving women’s health research and policy forward. Vancouver: Women’s Health Research Network; 2009.
48. Dhamoon K, Hankivsky O. Why the theory and practice of intersectionality matter to health research and policy. In: Hankivsky O, editor. Health Inequities in Canada: Intersectional Frameworks and Practices. Vancouver: UBC Press; 2011. p. 16–50.
50. Crenshaw K. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1989:139–67.
62. Tourangeau K, Nord C, Lê T, Sorongon A, Najarian M. Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 (ECLS-K), Combined User’s Manual for the ECLS-K Eighth-Grade and K–8 Full Sample Data Files and Electronic Codebooks (NCES 2009–004). Washington, DC.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education., 2009.
63. Marsh HW. Self Description Questionnaire (SDQ) II: A theoretical and empirical basis for the measurement of multiple dimensions of adolescent self-concept. An interim test manual and a research monograph. Sydney: University of Western Sydney: 1992.
64. Asparouhov T, Muthén B. Auxiliary Variables in Mixture Modeling: 3-Step Approaches Using Mplus. Mplus Web Notes [Internet]. 2013 April 2014. Available from: www.statmodel.com/examples/webnotes/webnote15.pdf ‎.
67. Dayton C. Latent class scaling analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
70. Muthén L, Muthén B. Mplus User's Guide. Seventh Edition. Los Angeles, CA.: 2012.
72. Jackson P, Williams D. The intersection of race, gender, and SES: Health paradoxes. In: Schulz A, Mullings L, editors. Gender, Race, Class, & Health: Intersectional Approaches. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; 2006. p. 131–62.
76. Ennis S, Rios-Vargas M, Albert N. The Hispanic Population: 2010. United Census Bureau, 2011.
88. Rouse C, Brooks-Gunn J, McLanahan S. School Readiness: Closing racial and ethnic gaps. Washington, DC: Brookings Press, 2005.

Race, Trauma, and Social Justice

Racism has a long and complicated history in the United States. Psychological research has shown that racism and racial discrimination—at both the interpersonal and systemic levels—are barriers to human development and psychological wellbeing. This page showcases research on racism, discrimination, and social justice to improve psychological outcomes for underrepresented communities.

Recent Press Release

Calls for Papers

American Psychologist Special Issue

APA Journals Article Spotlights

Children’s books, recent apa press releases.

Psychologists stand against antisemitic hate

Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C.

Statement of APA president marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day

crowd of protesters holding anti-gun rights signs

Anti-Black racism linked to lower support for some gun rights

Browse latest press releases

Calls for papers

Asian American Journal of Psychology

General call for papers

Journal of Latinx Psychology

Journal of Diversity in Higher Education

Journal of Rural Mental Health

Hate crimes and domestic terrorism in rural areas

Browse all calls for papers

Free research summaries of articles published in APA Journals

Workplace racial composition is an important factor for Black parents’ communication of racial socialization messages

A summary of an article by Lorraine E. Scott and Fatima Varner, published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology .

A step toward culturally informed forensic mental health assessments: Improving justice and equity for legal-system-involved people

A summary of an article by Amanda M. Fanniff, Taylor York, and Renee Gutierrez, published in Law and Human Behavior .

Guns and racism: Who do White Americans really perceive gun rights to be for in the United States?

A summary of an article by Gerald D. Higginbotham, David O. Sears, and Lauren Goldstein, published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General .

Innovative theory and methods for the next generation of diversity, equity, and inclusion sciences

A summary of a special issue, guest edited José M. Causadias, Riana Elyse Anderson, Ehri Ryu, Jenn-Yun Tein, and Su Yeong Kim, published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology .

Ethnicity matters: Effects of ethnic-racial socialization for African American and Caribbean Black adolescents

A summary of an article by Farzana Saleem, Sharon Lambert, and Theda Rose, published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology .

How do people of color resist racism?

A summary of an article by Karen L. Suyemoto, Tahirah Abdullah, Danielle Godon-Decoteau, Noor N. Tahirkheli, Natalie Arbid, and Alice A. Frye, published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology .

Anti-Asian stigma: A study on COVID-19’s detrimental effects on Asian Americans

A summary of an article by Mary Bresnahan, Yi Zhu, Anne Hooper, Sarah Hipple, and Lucas Savoie, published in Stigma and Health .

Reimagining clinical psychology from Canadian Psychology

Reimagining clinical psychology as an inclusive science and a diverse and just community

A summary of an article by Vina M. Goghari, published in Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne .

Gendered racism and depression among Black women: Examining the roles of social support and identity

Social support and identity help explain how gendered racism harms Black women’s mental health

A summary of an article by Martinque K. Jones, Seanna Leath, Isis H. Settles, Dominique Doty, and Kathryn Conner, published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology .

Browse more Article Spotlights

APA Journals special issues and sections

Special section: Addressing Racism, Anti-Blackness, and Racial Trauma

This special section of Psychotherapy was organized to highlight research and clinical practices on addressing racism, anti-Blackness, and racial trauma in psychotherapy.

Special issue: The State of Black Leadership: What Can Be Done to Create Sustainable Change

This special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal aims to help human-resource and organizational-development leaders in organizations and consulting psychologists improve the efficacy of the efforts that lead to increasing numbers of Black leaders in senior leadership and executive roles.

Special issue: Racial Justice in the Criminal Justice and Legal Systems

This special issue of Law and Human Behavior showcases innovative research and clinical perspectives that advance theoretical frameworks, inform potential interventions, and illustrate the benefits of a racial justice framework.

Special issue: Innovative Theory and Methods for the Next Generation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sciences

This special issue of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology aims to bring together a collection of articles that advance innovative theory and methods for the next generation of diversity, equity, and inclusion sciences.

Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing

Free articles published in American Psychologist

Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing: Introduction to the Special Issue
American Indian Historical Trauma: Anticolonial Prescriptions for Healing, Resilience, and Survivance
The Impact of Historical Trauma on Health Outcomes for Indigenous Populations in the USA and Canada: A Systematic Review
The Japanese American Wartime Incarceration: Examining the Scope of Racial Trauma
Healing Ethno-Racial Trauma in Latinx Immigrant Communities: Cultivating Hope, Resistance, and Action
Disarming Racial Microaggressions: Microintervention Strategies for Targets, White Allies, and Bystanders
RECASTing Racial Stress and Trauma: Theorizing the Healing Potential of Racial Socialization in Families
A Model of Cumulative Racial–Ethnic Trauma Among Americans of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Descent
Understanding the Link Between Racial Trauma and Substance Use Among American Indians
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in African American and Latinx Adults: Clinical Course and the Role of Racial and Ethnic Discrimination
Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity: Daily Moderation Among Black Youth
Racial Trauma, Microaggressions, and Becoming Racially Innocuous: The Role of Acculturation and White Supremacist Ideology

Navigating Difficult Moments In Teaching Diversity And Social Justice

This essential resource helps educators tackle the most common and challenging dilemmas that arise in today's classroom—such as diversity, privilege, and intersectionality.

Confronting Inequality: How Policies and Practices Shape Children’s Opportunities

This book examines the impact of inequality on children’s health and education, and offers tools to help practitioners address that impact across economic, sociological, and psychological domains.

The Psychology of Prejudice: From Attitudes to Social Action, Second Edition

This second edition presents a significantly updated overview the social, developmental, evolutionary, and personality roots of prejudice, along with contemporary examples of prejudicial attitudes and strategies for combating them.

The Cost of Racism for People of Color: Contextualizing Experiences of Discrimination

In this book, leading scholars examine the felt experience of being the target of racism, with a focus on mental and physical health as the result of particular racist encounters as well as across the lifespan, in addition to group contexts such as education and the workforce.

Browse more APA Books

Mamie Phipps Clark, Champion for Children

This inspiring graphic novel tells the story of groundbreaking psychologist and civil rights activist Mamie Phipps Clark, PhD and her research in the racial identity and development of self in Black children, the work that ultimately played a vital role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

Something Happened to My Dad: A Story About Immigration and Family Separation

In this realistic and empowering tale, Carmen learns that through community and love, she can find strength in herself and maintain her connection with her Papi, who has been detained because of his immigration status.

Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story About Racial Injustice

A story that aims to answer children's questions about traumatic events such as a police shooting, and to help children identify and counter racial injustice in their own lives. Includes an extensive Note to Parents and Caregivers with guidelines for discussing race and racism with children, child-friendly definitions, and sample dialogues.

Lulu the One and Only

Lulu loves her family, but people are always asking, “What are you?” Lulu hates that question. Her brother inspires her to come up with a “power phrase” so she can easily express who she is, not what she is. Includes a Note to Readers from the author, sharing her experience as a multiracial person.

Marvelous Maravilloso: Me And My Beautiful Family

The world is full of different colors...hundreds of colors, everywhere. People are different colors too. Our colors make us beautiful and unique. Mommy says it is part of our culture and the big word diversity—diversidad. Marvelous Maravilloso follows a young girl as she finds joy in the colors of the world all around her, including the colors of her own family. Includes a Note to Parents and Caregivers.

A Terrible Thing Happened

A gently told and tenderly illustrated story for children who have witnessed any kind of violent or traumatic episode, including physical abuse, school or gang violence, accidents, homicide, suicide, and natural disasters.

Cover of There's a Cat in Our Class! (small)

There’s A Cat In Our Class! A Tale About Getting Along

There's a Cat in Our Class! is a kid-friendly exploration of diversity, teaching kids the value of not only accepting but embracing the differences of those around us. Includes a Note to Readers written by Gayle E. Pitman, PhD, that discusses how parents, teachers, and other adults can talk with children about diversity in a way that's meaningful and effective.

Browse more children’s books

APA’s Resources on Bias, Discrimination, and Equity

Read about how APA is addressing the racism pandemic and access the information, resources, and support for behavioral and social scientists, advocates, activists, and community.

Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

> Journals
> Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
> Volume 10 Issue 2
> INTERSECTIONALITY

Article contents

Intersectionality moves as a work-in-progress, intersectionality moves within and across disciplines, intersectionality moves across national boundaries, intersectional moves engage black women, intersectionality moves to engage black men, intersectionality as a social movement, intersectionality.

Mapping the Movements of a Theory1

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2014

Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectionality's movement has limited our ability to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other places to which the theory might be taken. Addressing these questions, this special issue reflects upon the genesis of intersectionality, engages some of the debates about its scope and theoretical capacity, marks some of its disciplinary and global travels, and explores the future trajectory of the theory. To do so, the volume includes academics from across the disciplines and from outside of the United States. Their respective contributions help us to understand how intersectionality has moved and to broaden our sense of where the theory might still go.

Rooted in Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality is a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool. In the 1989 landmark essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term to address the marginalization of Black women within not only antidiscrimination law but also in feminist and antiracist theory and politics. Two years later, Crenshaw ( Reference Crenshaw 1991 ) further elaborated the framework in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” There, she employed intersectionality to highlight the ways in which social movement organization and advocacy around violence against women elided the vulnerabilities of women of color, particularly those from immigrant and socially disadvantaged communities.

In both “Demarginalizing” and “Mapping,” Crenshaw staged a two-pronged intervention. She exposed and sought to dismantle the instantiations of marginalization that operated within institutionalized discourses that legitimized existing power relations (e.g., law); and at the same time, she placed into sharp relief how discourses of resistance (e.g., feminism and antiracism) could themselves function as sites that produced and legitimized marginalization. As a concrete example, Crenshaw described the subtle ways in which the law has historically defined the contours of sex and race discrimination through prototypical representatives, i.e., white women and African American men, respectively. She then demonstrated how this antidiscrimination approach narrowed the scope of institutional transformation, truncated both the understanding of and advocacy around racism and patriarchy, and undermined possibilities for sustaining meaningful solidarity by placing resistance movements at odds with each other.

Since the publications of “Demarginalizing” and “Mapping,” scholars and activists have broadened intersectionality to engage a range of issues, social identities, power dynamics, legal and political systems, and discursive structures in the United States and beyond. This engagement has facilitated intersectionality's movement within and across disciplines, pushing against and transcending boundaries, while building interdisciplinary bridges, and prompting a number of theoretical and normative debates. These movements of intersectionality have left behind a lively and provocative travelogue characterized by adaptation, redirection, and contestation. While no single volume could fully capture this travelogue, the essays that constitute this special issue provide a useful window into how intersectionality has moved and the many different places to which it has travelled. As a prelude to introducing these essays, we highlight six important themes that flow from mapping the movements of intersectionality.

First, paying attention to the movement of intersectionality helps to make clear that the theory is never done, nor exhausted by its prior articulations or movements; it is always already an analysis-in-progress. Put another way, there is potentially always another set of concerns to which the theory can be directed, other places to which the theory might be moved, and other structures of power it can be deployed to examine. This is why Crenshaw ( Reference Crenshaw 1989 ) described her intervention in “Demarginalizing the Intersection” as “provisional,” “one way” to approach the problem of intersectionality. Any analysis must necessarily limit itself to specific structures of power. For example, intersectionality's initial emergence as a product of the juridical erasure of Black women's subjectivity in antidiscrimination law did not interrogate Black men's intersectional marginalization vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. All intersectional moves are necessarily particularized and therefore provisional and incomplete. This is the sense in which a particularized intersectional analysis or formation is always a work-in-progress, functioning as a condition of possibility for agents to move intersectionality to other social contexts and group formations.

Understanding intersectionality as a work-in-progress suggests that it makes little sense to frame the concept as a contained entity. Nor is it productive to anthropomorphize the concept as its own agent replete with specific interests and tasks that reflect its capacity and fundamental orientation. An alternative approach to knowing what intersectionality is is to assess what intersectionality does as a starting point for thinking about what else the framework might be mobilized to do. A work-in-progress understanding of intersectionality invites us to do just that—that is, to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other kinds of work that agents might employ intersectionality to perform.

A second theme that builds on the first is that there is no a priori place for intersectionality in either its discipline of origin, or more broadly in the academy itself. Agents of its movement have sought to adapt, refine, and articulate intersectional projects across multiple disciplines as well as within arenas outside academia altogether. This collection represents only a subset of the disciplines and subfields that have seeded intersectional projects and methods, ranging from law, sociology, and education to history, psychology, and political science.

Third, the movement of intersectionality has not been limited to interdisciplinary travel within the United States, but has encompassed international travel as well. Various academics, advocates, and policy makers have taken up, redeployed, and debated intersectionality within institutional settings and discourses that attend to the global dimensions of history and power.

These international engagements with intersectionality highlight a fourth dimension of intersectionality's movement: an undercurrent of anxiety around the continuing salience of Black women in a theory that reaches beyond their specific intersectional realities. The notion seems to be that Black women are too different to stand in for a generalizable theory about power and marginalization. The travels of intersectionality belie that concern. Actors of different genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations have moved intersectionality to engage an ever-widening range of experiences and structures of power. At the same time, the generative power of the continued interrogation of Black women's experiences both domestically and internationally is far from exhausted, as contributors to this volume also demonstrate.

The final theme we want to mark is the social movement dimensions of intersectionality. Of course, not all who deploy intersectionality perceive themselves to be part of a social movement. The point is that the multiple contexts in which intersectionality is doing work evidences—more than any abstract articulation of the theory—the social change dimension of the concept.

The foregoing themes do not represent the only ways in which intersectionality has moved. We focus on them because they capture important dimensions of the intellectual and political history of intersectionality and thus function as a useful point of departure for introducing the essays that constitute this special issue. In the remainder of this introduction we describe these essays and discuss the extent to which they reflect the various themes highlighted herein.

No particular application of intersectionality can, in a definitive sense, grasp the range of intersectional powers and problems that plague society. This work-in-progress understanding of intersectionality suggests that we should endeavor, on an ongoing basis, to move intersectionality to unexplored places. This is precisely what Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason do in their essay, “Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies.” More particularly, Roberts and Jesudason describe a set of valuable lessons in applying insights from intersectionality theory to radical coalition-building and political change. They illustrate that intersectional analysis can identify and emphasize commonalities and create solidarity between political groups. The authors describe their experiences as leaders of the social justice organization Generations Ahead, employing intersectionality to forge alliances between formerly adverse groups to achieve real political accomplishments. According to Roberts and Jesudason, identifying categorical differences can enhance the potential to build coalitions between movements by acknowledging differences while promoting commonalities. This can lead to mutual acknowledgement of how structures of oppression are related and, therefore, how struggles are linked. They argue that an intersectional lens can reveal, on a given issue and between separate identity groups, perspectives of both privilege and victimhood, and thereby create a connection around shared experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and privilege. Crucially, Roberts and Jesudason's argument suggests that intersectional interventions can facilitate cross-movement building.

Sumi Cho's contribution to this collection, “Post-Intersectionality: The Curious Reception of Intersectionality in Legal Scholarship,” more directly advances an argument based on the work-in-progress conceptualization of intersectionality. Cho's essay highlights the temporality of intersectionality's mobility. She challenges the assumption that simply because intersectional analysis has not yet entered a particular arena, that it cannot enter that arena productively. Schematically, one criticism that Cho examines is the contention that intersectionality cannot do X because it has not heretofore done X. More specifically, the argument claims that because intersectionality originated in an article on race and gender issues (specifically, the Black female experience), it cannot engage experiences outside of that subjectivity. Cho contests this claim both descriptively by arguing that it is not true that intersectionality has focused solely on Black women's experiences, and theoretically by arguing that there is no reason intersectionality cannot engage other categories of power and experience, such as sexuality. According to Cho, “race and gender intersectionality merely provided a jumping off point to illustrate the larger point of how identity categories constitute and require political coalitions.” In other words, intersectionality is not fixed to any particular social position. The theory can and does move.

Cho's article is particularly important in setting the stage for articulating the interface between race and sexuality. Scholars, advocates, and activists have brought intersectional prisms to bear in analyzing the diverging trajectories of equality demands vis-à-vis the constitutional law doctrines that govern race and sexuality. This interface warrants deft analysis in the wake of the Roberts Court's dismantling of race based jurisprudence (e.g, restricting racial remediation under the Voting Rights Act), while simultaneously opening up constitutional protections against some practices that reflect historic biases against LBTQ communities. Equally salient is the problematic assertions that “gay is the new black,” and the ongoing discussions within racial justice movements about the place of sexuality in antiracist politics and vice versa. These developments cry out for intersectional interrogations, not with the goal of finishing an incomplete project but to broaden the range of work that a variety of agents mobilize intersectionality to perform.

Alfredo Artiles' contribution, “Untangling the Racialization of Disabilities: An Intersectionality Critique Across Disability Models,” broadens the reach of intersectionality in precisely the way that Cho's essay suggests. Artiles argues that special education scholarship recognizes the importance of the “racialization of disability,” but that scholars have been slow to frame this racialization as an intersectional project. In explaining the benefits and problems of various models examining disability, Artiles deploys intersectional analysis to reframe problems to make new solutions imaginable. Importantly, Artiles shows how scholars can mobilize intersectionality to go beyond the recognition that disability is racialized to theorize how this racialization is produced.

Intersectionality moves not only in relation to shifting subjects, but it moves more broadly as a prism linking and engaging scholarly subfields, research methodologies, and topical inquiries. Although intersectional projects that foreground categories and their dynamic relationship to power are most readily identified as prototypically intersectional, Leslie McCall and Averil Y. Clarke remind readers that the terrain upon which the prism works need not be so constrained. In “Intersectionality and Social Explanation in Social Science Research,” McCall and Clarke identify aspects of intersectional research that they believe can further develop social explanation in social science research. Focusing on the process of developing social science research, they argue that scholars can and should draw from a wide range of empirical research that is not necessarily defined as intersectional, but which nevertheless enables an intersectional analysis. Illustrating their points by focusing on three areas—fertility, marital homogamy, and classical liberalism—they examine how intersectional prisms constructed over the course of the research cycle can generate new insights from data that are not initially framed through an intersectional prism. They also identify challenges associated with constructing intersectional research within particular subfields and propose ways of facilitating communication across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary divides.

Moving to an intra-disciplinary interrogation of social psychology, Philip Atiba Goff and Kimberly Barsamian Khan reveal how disciplinary conventions that have historically inhibited intersectional knowledge in law are resonant within contemporary research paradigms pertaining to race and gender bias. In “Sexist Racism and Racist Sexism: How Psychological Science Impedes Intersectional Thinking,” the authors argue that social psychology has tended to discount the ways in which race and gender mutually construct each other. Because of this omission, social psychology posits prototypical targets of racism and sexism as Black men and White women, respectively. Goff and Khan's argument parallels the critique of antidiscrimination law that was articulated in “Demarginalizing”—namely, that the prototypical subjects of antidiscrimination protection were Black men (with respect to racism) and White women (with respect to sexism). Drawing examples from experimental social psychology, Goff and Kahn identify how specific methodologies and habits of thought in the sampling, operationalization, and interpretation of data function to marginalize Black women. They draw attention to the potential distortions that non-intersectional methodologies engender, and suggest ways to rethink conventional methods more broadly in order to address the biases embedded within standard research practice.

Intersectionality's domestic life as a prism attuned to localized patterns of thought and action has not impeded its movement into global spheres and international discourses. Intersectionality has moved internationally both as a means to frame dynamics that have been historically distinct within other domestic spheres and also as a way to contest material and political realities that are, by some measures, part of global and transhistorical relations of power. One manifestation of this international movement is the feminist engagement with intersectional discourse in Europe. Although intellectual and political projects have long sought to map the interface between systems of power and their attendant subjects, intersectionality has emerged within European contexts as a useful tool for articulating these interactions. Yet despite its uptake within feminist discourses, intersectionality frequently has been framed as a North American import that does not reflect the significant differences in the historic context, the disciplinary practices, and discursive traditions between the United States and Europe. One important difference that is often cited in this regard pertains to the relative salience of class over race in Europe, and the minimal traction that analogies to race provide for feminists there.

Sirma Bilge's contribution interrogates efforts on the part of some European feminists to distance intersectionality from its association with race in the United States. In “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies,” Bilge explores the discourse around intersectionality that has emerged in several European conferences and texts to highlight argumentative rhetorics that she maintains have neutralized the political potential of intersectionality. These moves include explicit arguments that intersectionality is a feminist project (as distinct from a racial project), a claim that effectively “whiten[s] intersectionality.” Bilge also links the development of intersectionality in Europe to a specifically disciplinary academic feminism that has depoliticized the theory, and to prevailing neoliberal cultures that aim to commodify and manage “diversity.” To challenge these developments, Bilge revisits intersectionality's grounding as a counter-hegemonic and transformative intervention in knowledge production, activism, pedagogy, and non-oppressive coalitions.

Intersectionality's movement in the international arena draws attention to how contextual differences generate alternative engagements with the theory. Caribbean feminists, for example, have deployed intersectionality to delve into historical relations and nation-building outside the metropole. In so doing, they draw attention to alternative ways of conceptualizing intersectional subjects that place some of the more limited conceptualizations of intersectional work in sharp relief. Tracy Robinson shows, for example, that the hierarchies to which intersectionality attends are considerably more robust than the formal regimes of race, gender, and class power that are embodied by the legally imposed classifications of certain subjects. In “The Properties of Citizens: A Caribbean Grammar of Conjugal Categories,” Robinson argues that intersectionality proves productive “for thinking about how conjugality comes into being as a regulatory regime of race, class, and heteropatriachy.” Robinson addresses the continuum of conjugal relationships in the Caribbean to show how hierarchies of conjugality were shaped by the intersection of various influences, including “postcolonial family law reforms, censuses, social science research, population policies, national culture, and everyday interactions.” Through this matrix of influences, marriage was the idealized hetero-patriarchal institution, while common-law marriage (heterosexual cohabitating unions without legal sanction) occupied the middle of the continuum, and visiting relationships (unions without legal sanction and in which partners do not live together) occupied the far end. In revealing how such regimes are intersectionally constituted, Robinson mobilizes intersectionality to capture dynamics of power beyond the more narrow terrain of articulating identities. Robinson's contribution provides a provocative counterpoint to claims that race or some other marker of social marginalization is inoperative simply because the processes of categorization are not formally articulated as such. More broadly, her analysis demonstrates both the importance of understanding colonial legacies through an intersectional prism, and the importance of understanding how intersectionality moves beyond the metropole.

Despite an enormous range of intersectional research addressing concerns of many racial and ethnic groups, genders, sexual orientations, nationalities, disabilities, and so forth, some scholars have criticized intersectionality for focusing “too much” on Black women. Among such critics are those who de-racialize intersectionality as well as those who comfortably work within a paradigm that is sensitive to race but worry that antiracism has been “too concerned” with Blacks. Such arguments imply either that Black women no longer face problems of structural power, or that their subjectivity is too particular to be productive in broader efforts to understand and counter contemporary manifestations of subordination. Three articles in this issue demonstrate that the underlying assumptions of this critique are thoroughly contestable.

In “Public Tales Wag the Dog: Telling Stories about Structural Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Tricia Rose focuses on the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African American single mother from Ohio who was arrested in 2011, charged with a felony, and jailed for sending her two daughters to a predominantly White suburban public school in violation of the township's residency requirements. In examining the public and legal discourse surrounding the case, Rose draws out the intersectional dimensions of the narrative that framed Williams-Bolar as the embodiment of the single Black mother on welfare. Rose names the intersections of gender, economic privilege, spatial containment, systemic educational inequality, and racialized criminalization as the “invisible intersections of colorblind racism.” It is through these converging narratives that Williams-Bolar's protective investment in her children is recast as a symbol of criminalized Black motherhood. Importantly, the backdrop against which Williams-Bolar is framed reflects myriad disadvantages that touch multiple populations. Yet, the potential coalition that might otherwise arise from this convergence of interests is aborted by the unyielding stigma attached to Williams-Bolar, a multiply-marginalized subject. Rose draws attention to how uncontested intersections invisibly construct the stifling terms of social life and also defeat the possibilities of emerging coalitions of resistance. She concludes with an argument about the role of mass media in mobilizing a powerful counter-narrative.

The theme of intersectionality in relation to social control is further amplified in Priscilla Ocen's “Unshackling Intersectionality.” Ocen casts her gaze at prisons, an institutional and social embodiment of racialized punishment that has drawn substantial attention from scholars and advocates over the last decade. Although existing scholarship has understood incarceration as a system of racial control, Ocen charts new territory by deploying intersectionality to draw attention to Black women's vulnerability to the criminal justice system. Ocen argues that “prison operates to discipline, police, and punish deviant gender identity performance in ways that are deeply raced, classed, and animated by heteronormativity.” Ocen describes how the intersection of race, class, and gender render Black women particularly vulnerable to harassment and violence—including being shackled during childbirth—once they are incarcerated. Moreover, negative constructs of Black women, such as the term “welfare queen” and the claim that Black women's households are criminogenic, have legitimated the view “of Black women as pathways to disorder and criminality.” As such, according to Ocen, intersectional prisms on incarceration need not be limited to the specific contours of Black women's vulnerability, but should seek to understand how the convergence of gender, race, and class has constituted fertile ground upon which incarceration became a mass project. “Incarceration became a response to manage Black inequality that was allegedly caused by Black familial pathologies.” Thus, the framing of Black women as non-normative women is a critical site for disrupting the patriarchal underbelly of mass incarceration that entraps both Black men and women. Ocen's essay, together with Rose's, cautions against imperatives to “get beyond” Black women's experiences. Their work reveals not only how crucial intersectionality is to engendering our understanding of race and criminal justice, but how the marginalization of Black women within the media as well as within social justice discourses leads to an under-theorization of the contours of social control.

Further elaborating intersectionality moves, Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati uncover a further iteration of intersectionality, namely “intra-intersectional” discrimination. To illustrate this intra-intersectional distinction, Carbado and Gulati explore the vulnerability of professional Black women to workplace discrimination in “The Intersectional Fifth Black Woman.” Carbado and Gulati employ a narrative of a hypothetical “fifth” Black woman named Tyisha, one of five Black women who interview for an associate position at a law firm. Four of the Black women get hired, but Tyisha does not. Carbado and Gulati discuss how certain performative dynamics perceived by the firm—specifically one's demeanor and other characteristics such as name, accent, hair, political identity, social identity, marital status, residence, and religious affiliation—caused Tyisha to be a victim of discrimination while the other four Black women were not. Specifically, all of the five Black women are ostensibly in the same intersectional group (Black women); however, because Tyisha's performative identity has a stronger “Black racial signification” than the other four Black women, she is not hired based on negative racialized gender perceptions held by the firm. Naming this phenomena “intra-intersectional discrimination,” Carbado and Gulati expand their notion of a “performative conceptualization of race” to encompass its intersectional expressions. Like Rose and Ocen, Carbado and Gulati employ intersectionality not to move beyond Black women's experiences, but to better understand them.

In “Black Male Exceptionalism?: The Problems and Potential of Black Male-Focused Interventions,” Paul Butler challenges a widespread thesis that Black males are more marginalized than Black women and, therefore, deserve more of our attention and aid in countering racial subordination. Butler defines “Black male exceptionalism” as the notion that African American males are at the bottom of almost every index of inequality—exceptionally burdened and marginalized—and therefore should be treated as a distinct group in fashioning racial justice strategies. According to Butler, numerous organizations ranging from traditional civil rights groups like the NAACP to local governments have responded favorably to Black male exceptionalism by structuring how civil rights interventions are framed and how they are funded. Butler contends that the metaphor of “endangered species” is problematic in that it is aggrandizing, victimizing and evokes the notion of animal conservation. Interrogating the claim of Black male exceptionalism through an intersectional lens, Butler questions whether the ideological “monopoly” it holds on racial justice issues is justified. Butler argues that the deep disparities in resourcing social justice interventions for Black men and Black women are not justified and contends that the needs and interests of Black women are as important as those of Black men. He concludes by urging proponents to embrace gender equity as a value in antiracist discourses, beginning with the presumption that Black women should enjoy equal time and equal funding.

The intersectional politics of racial solidarity is also a central theme of Luke Charles Harris's contribution, “The Sounds of Silence: Taking Stock of a Political Travesty.” In his critical examination of the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, Harris presents a clear example of how an uncritical embrace of the endangered Black male narrative can legitimize Black men's claims of racial injustice and discredit similar claims on the part of Black women. This displacement not only contributes to an intraracial discourse that legitimizes certain injustices that are visited upon Black women, but it may also generate consent within the Black community to conservative social policies that are frequently packaged together with such rhetorics.

According to Harris, Clarence Thomas deployed the trope of the endangered Black male to garner support for his nomination and to deflect attention away from Anita Hill's allegation of sexual harassment. More specifically, Thomas claimed that Senate hearings on his nomination, against the backdrop of Hill's allegations, were a form of “high-tech lynching.” Through this deployment of this symbol of racial terrorism, Anita Hill became embattled within the Black community as a race traitor, while Justice Thomas garnered widespread support as a Black man in trouble. “Lost in the bluster of Thomas' use of the metaphor was the reality that no Black man had ever been lynched at the behest of an aggrieved Black woman.” Harris makes clear that “Anita Hill had become persona non grata for many Blacks because they felt that even if her allegations were true she should not have sought to bring a brother down.” Black women were expected “to put loyalty to their race first and foremost, even in cases where they may have been subjected to unprofessional or predatory conduct by Black men.” These demands of solidarity, however, were gendered and unidimensional, a dynamic that Harris elaborates in the subsequent re-enactment of Black women's marginality in Black political rhetoric. Harris does not offer the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to question the historical functions of solidarity, nor does he suggest a fundamental indeterminacy around the political and social interests of the Black community. Instead, Harris challenges us to reimagine a Black political sphere that acknowledges and honors the linked fate of Black men and women.

Together, Harris's and Butler's contribution reveal the work intersectionality can perform in engaging the contemporary contours of Black political discourse as well as Black male subjectivity. An underlying theme of both is that intra-racial political discourse that is silent about or in fact receptive to the marginalization of Black women unduly limits the scope of Black politics and undermines the realizability of a politics that centers the well-being of women as well as men.

The last theme might be framed as the link that draws the collection full circle, connecting the first article that shows how intersectionality was deployed to highlight unexpected coalitions to the last article that imports intersectional analysis to interrogate rhetorics of solidarity that are presumed but not realized. Beyond its role as a thematic book-end, our deployment of intersectionality's engagement with social movement, however, is a theme that appears throughout the collection. When Kimberlé Crenshaw drew upon Black feminist multiplicitous conceptions of power and identity as the analytic lens for intersectionality, she used it to demonstrate the limitations of the single-axis frameworks that dominated antidiscrimination regimes and antiracist and feminist discourses. Yet, consistent with the practical dimensions of Critical Race Theory within which intersectionality was situated, the goal was not simply to understand social relations of power, nor to limit intersectionality's gaze to the relations that were interrogated therein, but to bring the often hidden dynamics forward in order to transform them. Understood in this way, intersectionality, like Critical Race Theory more generally, is a concept animated by the imperative of social change. In various ways, each of the essays in this volume demonstrates this dimension of the theory. They do so by interrogating the inter-locking ways in which social structures produce and entrench power and marginalization, and by drawing attention to the ways that existing paradigms that produce knowledge and politics often function to normalize these dynamics. Our contributors provide a conceptual template—and in some instances, a set of practices—that respond to this dynamic view of power and facilitate more productive efforts to transform these structures.

We began this introduction with the claim that intersectionality is a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool. Mapping intersectionality's movements reveals at least this much. More fundamentally, articulating how intersectionality has moved—and the places to which it has travelled—makes clear that intersectionality is what intersectionality does. Conceptualizing intersectionality in terms of what agents mobilize it to do invites us to look for places in which intersectionality is doing work as a starting point for understanding the work that the theory potentially can—but has not yet been mobilized to—do. In this respect, the essays that constitute this volume are as much a signification of how scholars across the disciplines, inside and outside of the United States, have moved intersectionality as they are a signification on the uncharted terrains to which intersectionality might still move.

The authors acknowledge the editorial assistance of Ezra Young in producing this collection and the support of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, the Critical Race Studies program at UCLA Law School, and the African American Policy Forum. Additional support was provided by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities (MD00508 and MD006923).

This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref .

Google Scholar

View all Google Scholar citations for this article.

Save article to Kindle

To save this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle .

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Volume 10, Issue 2
Devon W. Carbado (a1) , Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (a2) , Vickie M. Mays (a3) and Barbara Tomlinson (a4)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X13000349

Save article to Dropbox

To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox .

Save article to Google Drive

To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive .

Reply to: Submit a response

- No HTML tags allowed - Web page URLs will display as text only - Lines and paragraphs break automatically - Attachments, images or tables are not permitted

Your details

Your email address will be used in order to notify you when your comment has been reviewed by the moderator and in case the author(s) of the article or the moderator need to contact you directly.

You have entered the maximum number of contributors

Conflicting interests.

Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners.

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

Sarah Ganz Blythe appointed director of Harvard Art Museums

Harvard Alumni Day Speaker Courtney B. Vance at the podium.

‘The only way through is with’

John Lowry sitting in a boat on the water.

Why row from Boston to London? Because it’s there.

A reading list on issues <br>of race.

Harvard faculty recommend the writers and subjects that promote context and understanding

Harvard Staff Writer

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

The wave of anger in reaction to George Floyd’s killing has prompted an outpouring of interest on race and race relations across the U.S. Books on these subjects top The New York Times Best Sellers list and Barnes & Noble’s Bestsellers . Amazon’s best-selling book, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism,” by Robin DiAngelo, has sold out.

The Gazette asked Harvard faculty members to discuss the books they recommend for those who want to learn more about the issues and to expand their understanding of systemic racism, white privilege, and the long legacies of slavery and white supremacy in American history.

“The Souls of Black Folk” (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois

Kris Snibbe/Harvard file photo

No one did more to write the African American people into the textual universe of speaking subjects, as agents, than did William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in his canonical work of American literature. “The Souls of Black Folk,” the masterpiece in Du Bois’s considerable oeuvre, has deserved every bit of critical acclaim and explication it has received since its publication in 1903. Du Bois’ signal achievement was to employ two tropes that encapsulated both the history of a people freed from centuries of human bondage, finally, just 38 years before he published his book, railing at the beginning of a new century against the most diabolical attempts to deconstruct the transformations wrought by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and entrap African Americans once again as quasi-citizens stuck forever in the limbo of forms of neo-enslavement.

One was “The Veil,” behind which the social and spiritual life of a people-within-a-people unfolded in the fullest range of complexity of every other branch of human civilization. Another was “double consciousness,” a metaphor with a long history tracing back at least to Emerson, if not beyond, to which Du Bois most probably was introduced by his mentor, William James. Du Bois’s signifying riff on the concept was to insert a “hyphen” as, itself, the liminal space that simultaneously separated yet connected the African American’s dual identity, as “an American” and “as a Negro,” as he put it, “two warring ideals in one dark body.” And third, Du Bois was the first scholar, I believe, to posit as an equal member of the canon of the artifacts of classical world civilization a specific corpus of the African American sacred vernacular form, forged from within the crucible of slavery by the enslaved, composed by “black and unknown bards,” as the poet James Weldon Johnson so aptly put it, in a poetic diction that itself was an astonishingly compelling example of an Africanized refashioning of King James English. Ever the prose-poet himself, Du Bois, Black America’s Victorian sage, dubbed these “The Sorrow Songs,” America’s only truly original and genuinely sublime contributions, he boasted, to the greatest monuments of genius in the long history of civilization.

Du Bois, in other words, gave not only a rhetorical structure to the historical and dynamically unfolding multiple identity of this black nation within a nation, he found metaphors to name key aspects of their liminal cultural and social being. Above all else, he named, with seminal tropes of his own fashioning, the conflicting identities of being black and being American, tropes that would resonate down through the canonical texts in the African American tradition, from James Weldon Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” and Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” through Ralph Ellison’s monumental novel “Invisible Man,” at mid-century, all the way to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “Jazz,” two achievements alone justifying her receipt of the Nobel Prize in literature. Though the subject matter of “Souls” is rooted squarely in a fin-de-siecle discourse of the turn of the 20th century, Du Bois’ analysis, his metaphors, have traveled supremely well across time and through space, remaining desperately relevant today, especially today, as black people continue to confront a systemic, structural racism — a mutation inscribed between the spaces of our Republic’s Founding Documents — that affects them in ways even our most sympathetic allies across the color line can scarcely comprehend without considerable effort. Race relations in our wonderful country would measurably improve if all students were required to read this book.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr. Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Director, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

“The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” (2019) by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Many books are relevant, but two are indispensable for understanding the broken relationship between police forces and urban communities, and public outrage over the killing of George Floyd and other African Americans. Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” describes the creation following slavery of a racist ideology that framed African Americans as dangerous and likely criminals; that mindset animated laws, policies, and aggressive police practices that dehumanize, criminalize, incarcerate, and sometimes lead to the killing of disproportionate numbers of African Americans.

“From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America” (2016) by Elizabeth Hinton

Elizabeth Hinton’s “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime” explains the policy shift soon after passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation during the 1960s from social welfare to criminal justice as a framework for understanding enduring racial inequities, poverty, and unrest. That shift led to the militarization of police departments and the over-policing of urban communities — especially those filled with young, black men — and the destructive, and sometimes fatal, consequences that we see today. Each book provides vital context for understanding the police killings and the protests against them.

— Tomiko Brown-Nagin Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

“The Origin of Others” (2017) by Toni Morrison

On May 30, I finally sat down to Toni Morrison’s “The Origin of Others.” This beautiful little book draws on her Norton Lectures — lectures given at Harvard back in 2016. Why did I pick up the book, that recent day? I think I was trying to make sense of the Central Park Cooper story and the George Floyd story.

“What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? … Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?” These are some of the questions the great Morrison reflected on in her lectures. In her signature ornate and deeply lyrical manner, she examines the persistence of racism, bigotry, and intolerance in a world where we still have to demonstrate that … black lives matter.

Somehow, I had never heard of the story of Isaac Woodard, a black veteran in uniform (he had served four years in the Pacific Theater — had been promoted to sergeant, had earned a Campaign Medal, a WWII Victory Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal) who’d been beaten, thrown in jail, and had his eyes gouged out. The police chief responsible for most of this violence, Linwood Shull, was acquitted of by an all-white jury. There were no iPhones documenting the abuses. But, in her lectures (in the beautiful little book) she brought this story to my attention. As we reflect on Christian Cooper’s “near miss,” George Floyd’s final eight minutes on this earth, and the many violent deaths of black men, women, and children since 1619, let us also take a harder, deeper look into ourselves, let’s ask the tough questions put forth by Toni Morrison.

“White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” (2016) by Carol Anderson

There is another book that I think we all need to read and read again: Carol Anderson’s “White Rage.” It so plainly shows us that whenever African Americans started to make any strides (in education, voting, employment, home ownership), those gains were a threat to the status quo of inequality — those strides sparked incredibly intense and well-organized blowback — all of which leads me to appreciate just how insidious and persistent racial hatred is in the U.S. We have to get smarter, bystanders … we need your help, it is not enough to proclaim that you’re not racist, we need your help.

— Michelle Williams Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Angelopoulos Professor in Public Health and International Development, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Kennedy School

“Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco” (2019) by Savannah Shange

Right now, I’m reading a book that I appreciate so much. Shange’s “Progressive Dystopia” is a great ethnographic study that brings together anti-blackness and critical race and ethnic studies theories. It explores race, abolition, criminalization, and policing in the context of education. The role of race scholars, or any scholar, is to point out that what might appear to be a photograph is really the tip of an iceberg, that there are actually deep-seated structural practices, contexts, histories that might not be visible to some, but that are still present in that moment.

“Progressive Dystopia” speaks to our time in a way that is so useful because it points to the body of the iceberg. Shange is not only an amazing storyteller, her work forces us to think about the carceral state beyond just prisons to show that also happens in school systems with black youth. It’s not just when black bodies walk down the street that these carceral exchanges happen; they also happen in something as mundane and everyday as our schools. This is not about just Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, or Tony McDade, but it’s about the carceral and policing that black people weather in many other institutional experiences before we even step out of our houses and walk down the pavement. It’s an accumulated set of experiences of being policed and criminalized because you’re black.

The book also discusses the abolition of the carceral state across our institutions, and how abolition can be a practice and a worldview espoused by some of the most dynamic activists of this time, including black teenagers who have an abolitionist ethos. Black youth are not just the objects of anti-black carcerality. They are dynamically well-suited to craft ideas that don’t just respond to liberal ideas of educational reform, but reimagine what education and our society can be. Abolition emerges as a generative and not just a deconstructive project. I deeply appreciate that Shange allows us as readers to be taught by them.

This revolution we’re seeing right now is being taken up all over the country, by black people, people of color comrades, white allies, anti-racists, and new dissidents who are protesting a certain kind of ethics. People are refuting police murders as well as other forms of state abandonment and disposals. “Progressive Dystopia,” which does an amazing job of showing how the carceral state that is so integrated into so many aspects of black life, helps us to better understand the substance of rage on display this moment. When people say they’re fed up, a single event can light a fuse, but the substance of the explosive, if you will, are these accumulated experiences of carcerality and what Wendy Brown calls sacrificial citizenship — experiences that have extended their reach into the lived social realities of African Americans and more and more groups in American society writ large.

— Todne Thomas Assistant Professor of African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

“Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (2016) by Arlie Hochschild

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

A genuine effort to understand the viewpoints of decent, sane, often thoughtful supporters of the Tea Party and Trump — the people I don’t know very well outside of newspaper stories. Many students in my “Race in a Polarized America” course this spring voted it the best reading of the semester.

“Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy” (2006) by Diana Mutz

Mutz’s “Hearing the Other Side” is a careful political science analysis of a basic political conundrum: We seem to be able to have either deeply committed political or social activists, or thoughtful, deliberative discussions among people who disagree with each other — but not both. How can a democracy thrive in that sort of situation, and how might we alleviate it (if we should)?

— Jennifer Hochschild Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University Professor of African and African American Studies Harvard College Professor

City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771‒1965” (2017) by Kelly Lytle Hernández

Photo by Ilene Perlman

In her trenchant and arresting book, “City of Inmates,” UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reveals the roots of mass incarceration in Los Angeles, the largest urban site of human confinement in the nation. By tracing practices of policing and jailing across discrete historical moments narrated as six stories, she demonstrates that Ronald Reagan’s War on Crime in the 1980s greatly expanded — but did not create — the phenomenon of racially targeted incarceration. Noting that African Americans and Native Americans today face the highest rates of death at the hands of police and the highest rates of confinement across the nation, Hernández digs to uncover why. She relies on what she calls a “rebel archive” comprised of songs, coded letters, political notices, maps, and more created by those who challenged forced labor, violent policing, and the targeting of marginalized groups.

Hernández begins her study in the colonial period, revealing how Spanish elites founded the city of Los Angeles in 1781 and immediately built a jail in the indigenous territory of the Tongva-Gabrielino tribe. Those who would fill the jail were not Spanish newcomers or their descendants, but rather indigenous people whose everyday actions (such as mobility on the landscape) were increasingly criminalized. In America in the 19th century, Hernández reveals that city officials targeted nonconformist white men defined as “vagrants” and “hobos” for intense policing and jailing, forcing them into a convict labor system that built the city’s early infrastructure. Hernández then covers the rising confinement of Mexican Americans after the U.S. war with Mexico and the definition of immigration as a crime to be managed by detention. She pursues her question through the 1960s, showing that as greater numbers of African Americans migrated westward in the 20th century, they became the next targets of aggressive policing. Following the killing of an unarmed young black man by LAPD officers in 1927, the black community in LA began a long tradition of protesting police brutality. The failure of the city to change its policing practices boiled over into the Watts Rebellion of 1965.

Hernández asserts that a powerful yet unexpected through line connects these varied stories of policing and incarceration across the sweep of nearly two centuries: the need for a dominant settler colonial population to “eliminate” or, alternatively, to control indigenous, racialized, and unorthodox groups in order to secure land as well as access to cheap labor. With a micro focus on one of the country’s most racially diverse and highly carceral cities, Hernández argues that American policing and jailing stem from an agenda of territorial conquest and the sequestering and exploitation of groups relegated to the margins of society.

— Tiya Miles Professor of History, Harvard University Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

“Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945‒2006,” (Third Edition 2007) by Manning Marable

Beginning with the legacy of post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments, Marable offers an inspiring, sweeping, and detailed history of African American social protest movements. He is ever mindful of ideological diversity among black Americans even as he highlights the strong bonds of solidarity that have sustained us. He draws lessons from the successes and failures of these movements, lessons that, I believe, could be useful in this moment of reckoning and insurgency. As he says in the preface, “Any oppressed people who abandon the knowledge of their own protest history, or who fail to analyze its lessons, will only perpetuate their domination by others.” These lessons concern not only political strategy and tactics but also fundamental moral ideals and the ethics of resistance. The book is a work of social and political theory rooted in deep historical analysis, and offers a powerful vision of a multiracial democracy. Ultimately, Marable calls for, and hopes for, a “third reconstruction” to bring about genuine political empowerment and economic justice for black Americans.

— Tommie Shelby Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy, Harvard University

“Racism: A Short History” (2015, original ed. 2002) by George Fredrickson

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

Unfortunately, there is nothing exceptional about the brutal execution of George Floyd. In the Americas, I have been saying repeatedly in the last few days, the country where the largest number of people of African descent die at the hands of the police is not the U.S.: It is Brazil. What informs these episodes of racialized violence, the criminalization of people of African descent, across national boundaries? How do we make sense of the enduring power of white supremacist ideologies and practices? Why do we classify people to begin with? Those trying to understand how certain bodies of Western knowledge sustain these practices, how they anchor contemporary understandings of human difference according to race, will find initial answers in this volume.

— Alejandro de la Fuente Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Harvard University Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

“When Police Kill” (2017) by Franklin E. Zimring

Zimring’s “When Police Kill” is a groundbreaking, fact-based analysis, including trends over time, of the high use of deadly force by police in the U.S., including lethal force against African Americans and Native Americans. Zimring’s comprehensive study also includes an interesting comparative analysis of why police killings are so much more numerous in the U.S. than in other modern nations. Finally, he discusses how to address this problem systematically by detailing clear policy prescriptions for federal, state, and local governments.

— William Julius Wilson Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor Emeritus Department of Sociology, Harvard University

“Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment” (2018) by Angela Davis

“Policing the Black Man” is an excellent resource because it addresses from a variety of perspectives — historical, sociological, legalistic — a gamut of issues that are currently at the forefront of public attention. It addresses, for instance, why is blackness is so closely associated with criminality in the American mind? Why has identifying, much less uprooting, invidious racial discrimination by police, prosecutors, jurors, and judges proven to be so difficult? Hauntingly, in light of the impending trials of police associated with the killing of George Floyd, “Policing the Black Man” offers sobering instruction regarding ongoing challenges in bringing to account even flagrant, violent, illicit abuse by law enforcement officers.

— Randall Kennedy Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Share this article

More than a planetary fender-bender

New study finds Earth collided with dense interstellar cloud, possibly affecting life on planet

Alzheimer’s disease indicators track with biological changes in brain, study finds

Researchers see self-reported memory loss may be early, preclinical warning

Finding right mix on campus speech policies

Legal, political scholars discuss balancing personal safety, constitutional rights, academic freedom amid roiling protests, cultural shifts

Negative Racial Stereotypes and Their Effect on Attitudes Toward African-Americans

Stereotypes: negative racial stereotypes and their effect on attitudes toward african-americans.

by Laura Green Virginia Commonwealth University

As human beings, we naturally evaluate everything we come in contact with. We especially try to gain insight and direction from our evaluations of other people. Stereotypes are "cognitive structures that contain the perceiver's knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about human groups" (Peffley et al., 1997, p. 31). These cognitive constructs are often created out of a kernel of truth and then distorted beyond reality (Hoffmann, 1986). Racial stereotypes are constructed beliefs that all members of the same race share given characteristics. These attributed characteristics are usually negative (Jewell, 1993).

This paper will identify seven historical racial stereotypes of African-Americans and demonstrate that many of these distorted images still exist in society today. Additionally, strategies for intervention and the implications of this exploration into racial stereotypes will be presented.

Description of the Problem

The racial stereotypes of early American history had a significant role in shaping attitudes toward African-Americans during that time. Images of the Sambo, Jim Crow, the Savage, Mammy, Aunt Jemimah, Sapphire, and Jezebelle may not be as powerful today, yet they are still alive.

One of the most enduring stereotypes in American history is that of the Sambo (Boskin, 1986). This pervasive image of a simple-minded, docile black man dates back at least as far as the colonization of America. The Sambo stereotype flourished during the reign of slavery in the United States. In fact, the notion of the "happy slave" is the core of the Sambo caricature. White slave owners molded African-American males, as a whole, into this image of a jolly, overgrown child who was happy to serve his master. However, the Sambo was seen as naturally lazy and therefore reliant upon his master for direction. In this way, the institution of slavery was justified. Bishop Wipple's Southern Diary, 1834-1844, is evidence of this justification of slavery, "They seem a happy race of beings and if you did not know it you would never imagine that they were slaves" (Boskin, 1989, p. 42). However, it was not only slave owners who adopted the Sambo stereotype (Boskin, 1989). Although Sambo was born out of a defense for slavery, it extended far beyond these bounds. It is essential to realize the vast scope of this stereotype. It was transmitted through music titles and lyrics, folk sayings, literature, children's stories and games, postcards, restaurant names and menus, and thousands of artifacts (Goings, 1994). White women, men and children across the country embraced the image of the fat, wide-eyed, grinning black man. It was perpetuated over and over, shaping enduring attitudes toward African-Americans for centuries. In fact, "a stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost a biological fact" (Boskin, 1986, p. 12).

The stereotyping of African-Americans was brought to the theatrical stage with the advent of the blackface minstrel (Engle, 1978). Beginning in the early 19th century, white performers darkened their faces with burnt cork, painted grotesquely exaggerated white mouths over their own, donned woolly black wigs and took the stage to entertain society. The character they created was Jim Crow. This "city dandy" was the northern counterpart to the southern "plantation darky," the Sambo (Engle, 1978 p. 3).

Performer T.D. Rice is the acknowledged "originator" of the American blackface minstrelsy. His inspiration for the famous minstrel dance-and-comedy routine was an old, crippled, black man dressed in rags, whom he saw dancing in the street (Engle, 1978). During that time, a law prohibited African-Americans from dancing because it was said to be "crossing your feet against the lord" (Hoffmann, 1986, video). As an accommodation to this law, African-Americans developed a shuffling dance in which their feet never left the ground. The physically impaired man Rice saw dancing in this way became the prototype for early minstrelsy (Engle 1978). In 1830, when "Daddy" Rice performed this same dance, "...the effect was electric..." (Bean et al., 1996, p. 7). White actors throughout the north began performing "the Jim Crow" to enormous crowds, as noted by a New York newspaper. "Entering the theater, we found it crammed from pit to dome..." (Engle, 1978, p. xiv). This popularity continued, and at the height of the minstrel era, the decades preceding and following the Civil War, there were at least 30 full-time blackface minstrel companies performing across the nation (Engle, 1978).

The "foppish" black caricature, Jim Crow, became the image of the black man in the mind of the white western world (Engle, 1978). This image was even more powerful in the north and west because many people never had come into contact with African-American individuals. It has been argued that "[t]he image of the minstrel clown has been the most persistent and influential image of blacks in American history" (Engle, 1978, p. xiv). Words from the folk song "Jim Crow," published by E. Riley in 1830, further demonstrate the transmission of this stereotype of African-Americans to society: "I'm a full blooded niggar, ob de real ole stock, and wid my head and shoulder I can split a horse block. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, eb'ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow" (Bean et al., 1997, p. 11).

The method of representing African-Americans as "shuffling and drawling, cracking and dancing, wisecracking and high stepping" buffoons evolved over time (Engle, 1978, p. xiv). Self-effacing African-American actors began to play these parts both on the stage and in movies. Bert Williams was a popular African-American artist who performed this stereotype for white society. The response was also wildly enthusiastic as 26 million Americans went to the movies to see Al Jolson in the "Jazz Singer" (Boskin 1986).

Movies were, and still are, a powerful medium for the transmission of stereotypes. Early silent movies such as "The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon" in 1904, "The Slave" in 1905, "The Sambo Series" 1909-1911 and "The Nigger" in 1915 offered existing stereotypes through a fascinating new medium (Boskin, 1986). The premiere of "Birth of a Nation" during the reconstruction period in 1915 marked the change in emphasis from the happy Sambo and the pretentious and inept Jim Crow stereotypes to that of the Savage. In this D.W. Griffith film, the Ku Klux Klan tames the terrifying, savage African-American through lynching. Following emancipation, the image of the threatening brute from the "Dark Continent" was revitalized. Acts of racial violence were justified and encouraged through the emphasis on this stereotype of the Savage. The urgent message to whites was, we must put blacks in their place or else (Boskin, 1986).

Old themes about African-Americans began to well up in the face of the perceived threat. Beliefs that blacks were "mentally inferior, physically and culturally unevolved, and apelike in appearance" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 795) were supported by prominent white figures like Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson. Theodore Roosevelt publicly stated that "As a race and in the mass [the Negroes] are altogether inferior to whites" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 796). The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1884 stated authoritatively that "...the African race occupied the lowest position of the evolutionary scale, thus affording the best material for the comparative study of the highest anthropoids and the human species" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 795). This idea of African-Americans as apelike savages was exceptionally pervasive. For example, in 1906, the New York Zoological Park featured an exhibit with an African-American man and a chimpanzee. Several years later, the Ringling Brothers Circus exhibited "the monkey man," a black man was caged with a female chimpanzee that had been trained to wash clothes and hang them on a line (Plous & Williams, 1995).

Scientific studies were conducted to establish the proper place of the African-American in society. Scientists conducted tests and measurements and concluded that blacks were savages for the following reasons: "(a) The abnormal length of the arm...; (b) weight of brain... [Negro's] 35 ounces, gorilla 20 ounces, average European 45 ounces; (c) short flat snub nose; (d) thick protruding lips; (e) exceedingly thick cranium; (f) short, black hair, eccentricity elliptical or almost flat in sections, and distinctly woolly; and (g) thick epidermis" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 796). In addition to these presumed anatomical differences, African-Americans were thought to be far less sensitive to pain than whites. For example, black women were thought to experience little pain with childbirth and "...bear cutting with nearly...as much impunity as dogs and rabbits" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 796). These stereotypes of the animal-like savage were used to rationalize the harsh treatment of slaves during slavery as well as the murder, torture and oppression of African-Americans following emancipation. However, it can be argued that this stereotype still exists today.

There were four stereotypes for female African-Americans, the Mammy, Aunt Jemimah, Sapphire, and Jezebelle. The most enduring of these is the Mammy. Although this stereotype originated in the South, it eventually permeated every region. As with the Sambo, the Mammy stereotype arose as a justification of slavery.

The Mammy was a large, independent woman with pitch-black skin and shining white teeth (Jewell, 1993). She wore a drab calico dress and head scarf and lived to serve her master and mistress. The Mammy understood the value of the white lifestyle. The stereotype suggests that she raised the "massa's" children and loved them dearly, even more than her own. Her tendency to give advice to her mistress was seen as harmless and humorous. Although she treated whites with respect, the Mammy was a tyrant in her own family. She dominated her children and husband, the Sambo, with her temper. This image of the Mammy as the controller of the African-American male, was used as further evidence of his inferiority to whites (Jewell, 1993).

Because Mammy was masculine in her looks and temperament, she was not seen as a sexual being or threat to white women (Jewell, 1993). This obese, matronly figure with her ample bosom and behind was the antithesis of the European standard of beauty. Because she was non-threatening to whites, Mammy was considered "...as American as apple pie" (Jewell, 1993, p. 41).

The Mammy stereotype was presented to the public in literature and movies. Possibly the most outstanding example is the Mammy role played by Hattie McDaniel in "Gone with the Wind" (Goings, 1994). The book, published in 1936 by Margaret Mitchell, helped to keep the mythical past of African-Americans in the old South alive. The large number of people whose attitudes were shaped by this portrayal is demonstrated through its phenomenal sales record. The Bible is the only book that rivals "Gone with the Wind" in total sales. Additionally, the movie version remains one of the biggest box-office successes in history. Mitchell's characters simultaneously won the hearts of Americans and fixed stereotypes of African-Americans in their minds (Goings, 1994).

Aunt Jemimah

The stereotype of Aunt Jemimah evolved out of the Mammy image (Jewell, 1993). She differs from Mammy in that her duties were restricted to cooking. It was through Aunt Jemimah that the association of the African-American woman with domestic work, especially cooking, became fixed in the minds of society. As a result, hundreds of Aunt Jemimah collectibles found their way into the American kitchens. These black collectibles included grocery list holders, salt and pepper shakers, spoon holders, stovetop sets, flour scoops, spatulas, mixing bowls, match holders, teapots, hot-pad holders, and much more (Goings, 1994). Perhaps Aunt Jemimah's most famous image is in the pancake advertisement campaign. In St. Joseph, Mo., in 1889, Chris Rutt chose "Aunt Jemimah" as the name for his new self-rising pancake mix, because "it just naturally made me think of good cooking." Obviously, others agreed because the campaign was an instant success. Rutt sold his company to Davis Milling Co., which chose Nancy Green as the Aunt Jemimah products spokesperson. This character developed a loyal following of both blacks and whites. To these people, Aunt Jemimah had become reality. Her face still can be found on the pancake boxes today. Although her image has changed slightly, the stereotype lives on (Goings, 1994).

Sapphire was a stereotype solidified through the hit show "Amos 'n' Andy" (Jewell, 1993). This profoundly popular series began on the radio in 1926 and developed into a television series, ending in the 1950s (Boskin, 1986). This cartoon show depicted the Sapphire character as a bossy, headstrong woman who was engaged in an ongoing verbal battle with her husband, Kingfish (Jewell, 1993). Sapphire possessed the emotional makeup of the Mammy and Aunt Jemimah combined. Her fierce independence and cantankerous nature placed her in the role of matriarch. She dominated her foolish husband by emasculating him with verbal put-downs. This stereotype was immensely humorous to white Americans. Her outrageous "...hand on the hip, finger-pointing style..." helped carry this show through 4,000 episodes before it was terminated due to its negative racial content (Jewell, 1993, p. 45).

The final female stereotype is Jezebelle, the harlot. This image of the "bad Black girl" represented the undeniable sexual side of African-American women (Jewell, 1993). The traditional Jezebelle was a light-skinned, slender Mulatto girl with long straight hair and small features. She more closely resembled the European ideal for beauty than any pre-existing images. Where as the Mammy, Aunt Jemimah and Sapphire were decidedly asexual images, this stereotype was immensely attractive to white males. The creation of the hyper-sexual seductress Jezebelle served to absolve white males of responsibility in the sexual abuse and rape of African-American women. Black women in such cases were said to be "askin' for it" (Goings, 1994, p. 67).

Stereotypes today

Although much has changed since the days of Sambo, Jim Crow, the Savage, Mammy, Aunt Jemimah, Sapphire and Jezebelle, it can be argued convincingly that similar stereotypes of African-Americans exist in 1998. Author Joseph Boskin states that "...there should be little doubt that aspects of Sambo live on in the White mind and show through the crevices of American culture in subtle and sophisticated ways" (Boskin, 1986, p. 15). However, the predominant modern stereotypes are the violent, brutish African-American male and the dominant, lazy African-American female - the Welfare Mother (Peffley Hurwitz & Sniderman, 1997). Recent research has shown that whites are likely to hold these stereotypes especially with respect to issues of crime and welfare. As political and legislative decisions still are controlled by white males, these negative biases are often expressed through policy formation. There is an obvious trend in this society to discriminate against and deny access to social institutions to African-Americans (Jewell, 1993). A 1997 study conducted by Peffley et al indicated that whites who hold negative stereotypes of African-Americans judge them more harshly than they do other whites when making hypothetical decisions about violent crimes and welfare benefits.

Plous & Williams (1995) were interested in measuring the extent to which whites still hold the racial stereotypes formed in the days of "American Slavery"; however, they noted a lack of current data on this subject. National public opinion surveys do not measure racial stereotypes, yet these authors found some research that indicated that there has been a steady decline in the belief that whites are more intelligent than blacks. Plous & Williams suspected there was reason to doubt this conclusion and conducted their own survey on the current existence of stereotypes. Findings revealed that 58.9 percent of black and white subjects endorsed at least one stereotypical difference in inborn ability. Additionally, whites are 10 times more likely to be seen as superior in artistic ability and abstract thinking ability; and African-Americans were 10 times more likely to be seen as superior in athletic ability and rhythmic ability. Further, 49 percent of subjects endorsed stereotypical differences in physical characteristics such as blacks experience less physical pain that whites and have thicker skulls and skin. Interestingly, African-Americans and those subjects without a high school degree were more likely than others to endorse racial stereotypes (Plous & Williams, 1995). This finding shows how individuals internalize negative self-stereotypes.

Some recent incidents indicating the continued existence of racial stereotypes were noted in the news (Plous & Williams, 1995). In 1991 the Los Angeles police officers who beat African-American Rodney King referred to a domestic dispute among African-Americans as "right out of 'Gorillas in the Mist'" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 812). Similarly, in 1992, the director of Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration resigned after "likening inner-city youths to monkeys in the jungle" (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 812 ).

Conclusion and Implications

It is important to gauge accurately the level and nature of prejudice and stereotyping of African-Americans in contemporary society if one is to intervene effectively in these areas (Plous & Williams, 1995). However, in order to do this, society as a whole must come to terms with the fact that stereotypes and oppression still exist today. We have made enormous progress since the days of slavery and the stereotypes that supported it. Yet it seems that many people are unaware of the remaining stereotypes, negative attitudes, and oppression of African-Americans. Because stereotypes are so often accepted as the truth, defining the problem is a crucial step of intervention.

It is also important to explore how stereotypes are formed and dispelled in order to intervene in the problem. Many people develop expectations based on their beliefs and are inclined to ignore or reject information that is inconsistent with these beliefs. These individuals look for information that supports stereotypes. Therefore, encouraging people to recognize information that is consistent with stereotypes may be helpful in dispelling damaging stereotypes within society.

It is, then, essential to provide people with information that challenges stereotypes. Because the media's portrayal of African-Americans has been and still is conducive to the formation of stereotypes, interventions in this area are a good place to start. Currently, African-Americans are over-represented as sports figures (Peffley et al, 1997). Reevaluation of the content of television commercials, magazine advertisements, movies, plays, cultural events, museum exhibits, and other media reveals where African-American representation needs to be increased. There is nothing wrong with the image of the African-American athlete. However, it is the portrayal of this image at the exclusion of other positive images that leads to stereotyping (Hoffmann, 1986).

Finally, educating people about damaging, inaccurate stereotypes is recommended. Small focus groups involving individuals of different races could be organized through agencies, schools, universities or churches. Discussion of racial stereotypes and attitudes in a safe format would allow people to explore and possibly discard stereotypes. Individuals can reassess their own prejudices and biases and effect a change within themselves. Through a non-judgmental process of exploration, the possibility that people who believe and perpetuate stereotypes do so not out of hate but as a means of protecting themselves can be considered. They may do so out of ignorance, habit or fear rather than maliciousness. By suspending our disbelief and seeing each person as an individual rather than through the eyes of a preconceived stereotype, we can begin this change on the individual level. As a result, resolution on the community and societal levels can occur.

Anderson, M. L., & Collins, P. H. (1995). Race, class, and gender: an anthology. 2nd. ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Beane, A., Hatch, J., & McNamara, B. (1996). Inside the minstrel mask: Readings in nineteenth century blackface minstrelsy. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Boskin, J. (1986). Sambo: The rise and demise of an American jester. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cassuto, L. (1997). The inhuman race: The racial grotesque in American literature and culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cheang, S.L. (1989). Color schemes: America's washload in four cycles. New York: The Kitchen.

Day, P.J. (1997). A new history of social welfare. 2nd Ed.. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Engle, G. D. (1978). This grotesque essence: Plays from the American minstrel stage. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University.

Goings, K. W. (1994). Mammy and uncle Mose: Black collectibles and American stereotyping. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Halloran, J. D. (1967). Attitude formation and change. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Haverly, J. (1969). American humorists series: Negro minstrels, a complete guide. New Jersey: Literature House.

Hurwitz, J., Peffley, M., & Sniderman, P. (1997). Racial stereotypes and whites' political views of blacks in the context of welfare and crime. American Journal of Political Science. 41, 30-60.

Jewell, S.K. (1993). From mammy to miss America and beyond: Cultural images and the shaping of US policy. New York: Routledge.

Mueller, D. J. (1986). Measuring social attitudes: A handbook for researchers and practitioners. New York: Teachers College Press.

Pieterse, J. N. (1992). White on black: images of Africa and blacks in western popular culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

McGraw Hill. (1967). Scales for the measurement of attitudes.

Plous, S. and Williams, T. (1995). Racial stereotypes from the days of American slavery: a continuing legacy. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 25, 795-817.

Roorbach, O. (1968). American humorists series: Minstrel gags and end men's handbook. 1968. New Jersey: Literature House.

Smith, J. D. (1993). Anti-abolition tracts and anti-black stereotypes: General statements of the Negro problem. Vol 1. New York: Garland Publishing.

Smith, J.D. (1993). The "benefits" of slavery: The proslavery argument, part II. Vol 4. New York; Garland Publishing.

Townsend, C. (1969). American humorists series: Negro minstrels. New Jersey: Literature House.

Witke, C. (1968). Tambo and Bones: A history of the American minstrel stage. 2nd. ed. New York: Greenwood Press.

Page maintained by Student Affairs Communications Office .

Jim Crow Museum

1010 Campus Drive Big Rapids, MI 49307 [email protected] (231) 591-5873

Writing About Race, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Disability

View in pdf format.

As language evolves alongside our understanding of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability, it is important for writers to make informed choices about their language and to take responsibility for those choices. Accurate language is important in writing about people respectfully and in crafting effective arguments your audience can trust. This handout includes writing practices and language tips to help you discuss various groups of people respectfully and without perpetuating stereotypes.

Best Practices

Use people-first language. Use terms that focus on people rather than on the method of categorization to ensure your language is not dehumanizing. For example, use “people with mental illness” rather than “the mentally ill,” “people with disabilities” rather than “disabled people,” and “enslaved peoples” rather than “slaves.”
Don’t use adjectives as nouns. Using adjectives as nouns is not only grammatically incorrect, it is often demeaning to the people you are describing. For example, use “Black people,” not “Blacks.”
Avoid terms that imply inferiority or superiority. Replace terms that evaluate or might imply inferiority/superiority with non-judgmental language. For example, use “low socioeconomic status” rather than “low class,” or “historically marginalized population” rather than “minority.”
Be specific. When these descriptors are relevant, be as specific as possible to avoid inaccurate or generalized statements. For example, use “Dominicans” rather than “Hispanics,” or “people who use wheelchairs” rather than “people with disabilities.”

Writing About Race and Ethnicity

When writing about race and ethnicity, use the following tips to guide you:

Capitalize racial/ethnic groups, such as Black, Asian, and Native American. Depending on the context, white may or may not be capitalized.
African Americans migrated to northern cities. (noun)
African-American literature. (adjective)
The terms Latino/Latina/Latin are used mostly in the US to refer to US residents with ties to Latin America .

Umbrella Terms

Avoid the term “minority” if possible. “Minority” is often used to describe groups of people who are not part of the majority. This term is being phased out because it may imply inferiority and because minorities often are not in the numerical minority. An alternative might be “historically marginalized populations.” If it is not possible to avoid using “minority,” qualify the term with the appropriate specific descriptor: “religious minority” rather than “minority.”
Note that the terms “people of color” and “non-white” are acceptable in some fields and contexts but not in others. Check with your professor if you’re uncertain whether a term is acceptable.

Writing About Socioeconomic Status

When writing about socioeconomic status, use the following tips to guide you:

“Avoid using terms like “high class” or “low class,” or even “upper class” or “lower class,” because they have been used historically in an evaluative way. Also avoid “low brow” and “high brow.” Instead, if you must incorporate adjectives like “high” or “low,” use the term “high” or “low socioeconomic status” to avoid judgmental language.
The word “status” (without the qualifier of “socioeconomic”) is not interchangeable with “class” because “status” can refer to other measures such as popularity.
When possible, use specific metrics: common ones include level of educational attainment, occupation, and income.Use specific language that describes what is important to the analysis.
Be aware of numbers: there are no distinct indicators of “high” and “low,” but there are percentages that make it easy to determine, via income bracket for example, where on a range an individual falls.

General Guidelines

When writing about disability, use the following tips to guide you:

uses a wheelchair rather than confined to a wheelchair
diagnosed with bipolar disorder rather than suffers from bipolar disorder
person with a physical disability rather than physically challenged
Do not use victimizing language such as afflicted, restricted, stricken, suffering, and unfortunate.
Do not call someone ‘brave’ or ‘heroic’ simply for living with a disability.
Avoid the term “handicapped,” as some find it insensitive. Note that it is widely used as a legal term in documents, on signs, etc.
Do not use disabilities as nouns to refer to people. For example, use “people with mental illnesses” not “the mentally ill.”
Avoid using the language of disability as metaphor, which stigmatizes people with disabilities, such as lame (lame idea), blind (blind luck), paralyzed (paralyzed with indecision), deaf (deaf ears), crazy, insane, moron, crippling, disabling, and the like.
Capitalize a group name when stressing the fact that they are a cultural community (e.g. Deaf culture); do not capitalize when referring only to the disability.

Referring to people without disabilities

Use “people without disabilities,” or “neurotypical individuals” for mental disabilities. The term “able-bodied” may be appropriate in some disciplines. Do not use terms like “normal” or “healthy” to describe people without disabilities.

Writing with Outdated/Problematic Sources

When analyzing or referencing a source that uses harmful language (slurs, violent rhetoric, etc.), either:

Explain that the author or character uses harmful language without stating it verbatim. For example: “The author uses an ableist slur when discussing [context of the quote], indicating that [analysis].”
Acknowledge its offensive nature in your analysis if you must quote the harmful language verbatim.

Do not change the quote or omit harmful language without acknowledging it. If you must use outdated and problematic sources, it is best to acknowledge any harmful language or rhetoric and discuss how it impacts the use and meaning of the text in your analysis.

Note that if you do need to use dated terminology in discussing the subjects in a historical context, continue to use contemporary language in your own discussion and analysis.

If you are still unsure of what language to use after reading this, consult your professor, classmates, writing center tutors, or current academic readings in the discipline for more guidance.

As we have noted, language is complex and constantly evolving. We will update this resource to reflect changes in language use and guidelines. We also welcome suggestions for revisions to this handout. Please contact the Writing Center with any questions or suggestions.

Thank you to the following people who contributed to earlier versions of this resource: Emma Bowman ’15, Krista Hesdorfer ’14, Jessica LeBow ’15, Rohini Tashima ’15, Sharon Williams, Amit Taneja, Phyllis Breland, and Professors Jessica Burke, Dan Chambliss, Christine Fernández, Todd Franklin, Cara Jones, Esther Kanipe, Elizabeth Lee, Celeste Day Moore, Andrea Murray, Kyoko Omori, Ann Owen, and Steven Wu.

Adapted from prior Writing Center resource “Writing about Race, Ethnicity, Social Class, and Disability.”

Tutor Appointments

Peer tutor and consultant appointments are managed through TracCloud (login required). Find resources and more information about the ALEX centers using the following links.

Office / Department Name

Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center

Contact Name

Jennifer Ambrose

Writing Center Director

Help us provide an accessible education, offer innovative resources and programs, and foster intellectual exploration.

Site Search

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications
Our Methods
Short Reads
Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Race in America 2019

3. The role of race and ethnicity in Americans’ personal lives

Table of contents.

Majorities of whites, blacks and Hispanics say race relations are bad
Majority of Americans say Trump has made race relations worse
For the most part, Americans see positive intergroup relations
No consensus on best approach to improving race relations
Opinions about the amount of attention paid to race vary across racial and ethnic groups
Majority of Americans say racial discrimination is overlooked
One-in-five black adults say all or most whites in the U.S. are prejudiced against black people
Across racial and ethnic groups, similar shares say they hear racist or racially insensitive comments from friends or family
Seven-in-ten say a white person using the N-word is never acceptable; about four-in-ten say it’s never acceptable for blacks
Majorities see advantages for whites, disadvantages for blacks
Many see racial discrimination and less access to good schools or jobs as major reasons blacks may have a harder time getting ahead
Most agree blacks are treated less fairly than whites by police and justice system
Plurality says country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites
Most say legacy of slavery affects black people’s position in society a great deal or fair amount
Blacks more likely than other groups to say their race has hurt their ability to succeed; whites most likely to say their race has helped
Majorities of blacks, Asians and Hispanics say they have faced discrimination
Most blacks say their family talked to them about challenges they might face because of their race
Most blacks see their race as central to their overall identity
Acknowledgments
Methodology

In addition to their different assessments of the current state of race relations and racial inequality in the United States, Americans across racial and ethnic groups also see race and ethnicity playing out differently in their personal lives. On balance, blacks are more likely to say their race has hurt, rather than helped, their ability to get ahead. Among whites, Hispanics and Asians, more say their race or ethnicity has been an advantage than an impediment.

Blacks are also far more likely than other groups to say their race is very or extremely important to how they think about themselves, but half or more Hispanics and Asians also say their racial or ethnic background is central to their overall identity; only 15% of whites say the same.

This chapter also looks at personal experiences with discrimination and the extent to which people of different backgrounds say their family talked to them about challenges or advantages they might face because of their race and ethnicity when they were growing up.

About half of blacks say being black has hurt their ability to get ahead

About half of black Americans say being black has hurt their ability to get ahead, including 18% who say it has hurt a lot; 17% say being black has helped them at least a little, while 29% say it has neither hurt nor helped their ability to get ahead. In contrast, roughly four-in-ten or more whites, Hispanics and Asians say their race or ethnicity hasn’t had much impact on their ability to get ahead – and to the extent that it has, more say it has helped than say it has hurt.

Whites are especially likely to say their race has given them some advantages: 45% say being white has helped them get ahead at least a little, while 50% say it has neither helped nor hurt and just 5% say being white has hurt their ability to get ahead. Three-in-ten Hispanics say being Hispanic has helped them, while 37% of Asians say the same about their racial background. About a quarter of each say being Hispanic or Asian, respectively, has hurt their ability to get ahead at least a little.

Among whites, Democrats much more likely than Republicans to say being white has helped them

Among whites, education and partisanship are linked to views of white advantage in their own life. Six-in-ten white college graduates say being white has helped their ability to get ahead, compared with 39% of whites with some college and 35% of those with less education. And while 66% of white Democrats and Democratic leaners say their race has helped at least a little, only 29% of white Republicans say the same. Most white Republicans say being white has neither helped nor hurt.

Education is also a factor in how blacks assess the impact their race has had on their ability to succeed. About six-in-ten blacks with at least some college experience (57%) say being black has hurt, compared with 47% of blacks with a high school diploma or less education.

The survey also asked whether factors such as gender, family finances and hard work helped or hurt people’s ability to get ahead. Overall, Americans are far more likely to point to their own hard work than to any other attribute as having helped their ability to get ahead.

Across racial and ethnic groups, about half of men say their gender has helped them at least a little. White and black women are more likely to say their gender has been an impediment than an advantage, while Hispanic women are more divided. White women (44%) are more likely than black (38%) or Hispanic (32%) women to say their gender has hurt at least a little.

Blacks and Asians are more likely than whites and Hispanics to say they have faced discrimination

About three-quarters of blacks and Asians (76% of each) say they have experienced discrimination or have been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity at least from time to time; 58% of Hispanics say the same. Most whites (67%) say they have never experienced this.

Blacks with at least some college experience are more likely than those with less education to say they have experienced racial discrimination, but majorities in both groups say this has happened to them (81% and 69%, respectively). Among Hispanics, 63% of those with some college or more – vs. 54% of those with less education – say they have faced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity.

Most blacks say people have acted as if they were suspicious of them or as if they thought they weren’t smart

Asked about specific situations they may have faced because of their race or ethnicity, 65% of blacks say someone has acted as if they were suspicious of them, and 60% say someone has acted as if they thought they weren’t smart. About half say they have been subject to slurs or jokes (52%) or that they have been treated unfairly by an employer in hiring, pay or promotions (49%), while about four-in-ten say they have been unfairly stopped by police (44%) or feared for their personal safety (43%) because of their race or ethnicity.

Blacks are more likely than whites, Hispanics and Asians to say they have faced most of these situations. Asians are more likely than other groups to say they’ve been subject to slurs or jokes because of their race or ethnicity (61% of Asians say this has happened to them), while whites are the most likely to say someone assumed they were racist or prejudiced (45%).

Most blacks say someone has acted suspicious of them or as if they weren’t smart

Within racial and ethnic groups, experiences differ significantly by gender. Among blacks and Hispanics, larger shares of men than women say they have been unfairly stopped by police, been subject to slurs or jokes, or that people have acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity. Hispanic men are also more likely than Hispanic women to say they have been treated unfairly in employment situations.

Blacks with at least some college experience are more likely than those with less education to say they have faced certain situations because of their race. For example, 67% of blacks with some college or more education say people have acted as if they thought they weren’t smart because of their race or ethnicity; 52% of blacks with a high school diploma or less education say the same. And while about six-in-ten blacks in the more educated group (58%) say they have been subject to slurs or jokes, 45% of blacks who didn’t attend college say this has happened to them.

Many of these experiences are also more common among Hispanics who were born in the U.S. than among those who were born in another country.

More than six-in-ten blacks say their family talked to them about possible challenges

More than six-in-ten black adults (64%) say that, when they were growing up, their family talked to them about challenges they might face because of their race or ethnicity at least sometimes (32% say this happened often). In contrast, about nine-in-ten whites (91%), as well as 64% of Hispanics and 56% of Asians, say their family rarely or never had these types of conversations when they were growing up.

Black men and women, as well as blacks across age groups, are about equally likely to say their family talked to them about challenges they might face because of their race or ethnicity. Seven-in-ten blacks with at least some college experience say their family had these types of conversations at least sometimes, compared with 57% of those with a high school diploma or less education.

Across racial and ethnic groups, majorities say their family rarely or never had conversations about advantages they might have because of their race or ethnicity, but blacks (32%), Hispanics (26%) and Asians (26%) are more likely than whites (11%) to say these conversations took place at least sometimes when they were growing up. About two-in-ten white adults younger than 30 (22%) say their family talked to them about advantages they might have, compared with about one-in-ten whites ages 30 and older.

Blacks are more likely than other groups to see their race or ethnicity as central to their identity

About three-quarters of black adults (74%) say being black is very important to how they think about themselves, including 52% who say it is extremely important. About six-in-ten Hispanics (59%) say being Hispanic is extremely or very important to their identity, and 56% of Asians say the same about being Asian. In contrast, only 15% of whites say being white is as important to their identity; 19% of whites say it is moderately important, while 18% say it’s only a little important and about half (47%) say their race is not at all important to how they think about themselves.

Among blacks and whites, those younger than 30 see their race as less central to their identity than their older counterparts. Still, majorities of blacks – and relatively small shares of whites across age groups – say their race is extremely or very important to how they think about themselves.

Hispanics born in another country (65%) are more likely than those born in the U.S. (52%) to say being Hispanic is at least very important to their overall identity.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivery Saturday mornings

Sign up for The Briefing

Weekly updates on the world of news & information

Race & Ethnicity
Race Relations
Racial Bias & Discrimination

What the data says about crime in the U.S.

#blacklivesmatter turns 10, how black americans view the use of face recognition technology by police, ai and human enhancement: americans’ openness is tempered by a range of concerns, americans’ trust in scientists, other groups declines, most popular, report materials.

Interactive Who shares your views on race?
American Trends Panel Wave 43

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 | Media Inquiries

Research Topics

Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Criminal Justice
Environment
Politics & Government
Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

‘Horse race’ reporting of elections can harm voters, candidates, news outlets: What the research says

Our updated roundup of research looks at the consequences of one of the most common ways journalists cover elections — with a focus on who’s in the lead and who’s behind instead of policy issues.

horse race reporting research elections politics

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource October 23, 2023

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/horse-race-reporting-election/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

This collection of research on horse race reporting, originally published in September 2019 and periodically updated, was last updated on Oct. 23, 2023 with recent research on third-party political candidates, probabilistic forecasting and TV news coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

When journalists covering elections focus primarily on who’s winning or losing instead of policy issues –what’s known as horse race coverage — voters, candidates and the news industry itself suffer, a growing body of research suggests.

Media scholars have studied horse race reporting for decades to better understand the impact of news stories that frame elections as a competitive game, relying heavily on public opinion polls and giving the most positive attention to frontrunners and underdogs who are gaining support. It’s a common strategy for political news coverage in the U.S. and other parts of the globe.

Thomas E. Patterson , professor of government and the press at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, says U.S. election coverage often does not delve into policy issues and candidates’ stances on them. In fact, policy issues accounted for 10% of news coverage about the 2016 presidential election that Patterson examines in his December 2016 working paper, “ News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters .” The bulk of the reporting concentrated on who was winning and losing and why.

When he looked at how CBS and Fox News covered the 2020 presidential election in their evening newscasts, he found similar patterns. For example, three-fourths of the stories the CBS Evening News ran on Democratic candidate Joe Biden focused on the horse race, as did a third of its stories about Republican candidate Donald Trump, Patterson writes in his December 2020 working paper, “ A Tale of Two Elections: CBS and Fox News’ Portrayal of the 2020 Presidential Campaign .”

In both papers, Patterson notes this type of reporting can help some candidates while hurting others.

“[These reports] tend to be a source of positive news for the candidate who’s ahead in the race, except when that candidate is slipping in the polls,” he writes in his 2020 analysis. “Speculation about the reasons for the decline then drive the story, and there’s nothing positive about that narrative.”

Dozens of academic studies chronicle the dangers of horse race journalism. Scholars find it’s associated with:

Distrust in politicians.
Distrust of news outlets.
An uninformed electorate.
Inaccurate reporting of opinion poll data.

Studies also indicate horse race reporting can:

Shortchange female candidates, who tend to focus on policy issues to build their credibility.
Give novel or unusual candidates an edge.
Hurt third-party candidates, who often are overlooked or ignored by newsrooms because their chances of winning are usually quite slim compared with Republican and Democratic candidates.

In recent years, scholars have begun investigating the impact of a relatively new type of horse race journalism: probabilistic forecasting . Some newsrooms have the resources and expertise to conduct sophisticated analyses of data collected from multiple opinion polls to more precisely predict candidates’ chances of winning. This allows news outlets to present polling data as the percentage likelihood that one candidate will win over another candidate.

The research to date indicates probabilistic forecasting can confuse voters and possibly lead them to believe an election outcome is more certain than it actually is. Researchers worry that will affect voter turnout — when people doubt their votes will make a difference, many might not bother turning in a ballot.

Part of the problem is some voters misinterpret probabilistic forecasting, researchers explain in a January 2023 study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. They don’t understand the difference between a candidate’s probability of winning and their predicted vote share.

“A vote share of 60% is a landslide win, but a win probability of 60% corresponds to an essentially tied election,” write the researchers, led by Andrew Gelman , a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University.

Research to help journalists understand the pitfalls of horse race reporting

Journalists wanting to know more about the consequences of horse race reporting, keep reading. Below, we’ve gathered and summarized academic studies that examine the topic from various angles. For additional context, we included several studies that look at how journalists use — and sometimes misuse — opinion polls. We’ll update this roundup of research periodically, as new studies are released.

If you need help reporting on polls, please read our tip sheet on questions journalists should ask when covering them and our tip sheet on interpreting margins of error .

Also, because it’s unlikely newsrooms will stop covering elections as a competitive game, we created a tip sheet to help them improve. Check out “‘ Horse Race’ Coverage of Elections: What to Avoid and How to Get It Right .”

The consequences of horse race reporting

The Polls and the U.S. Presidential Election in 2020 … and 2024 Arnold Barnett and Arnaud Sarfati.Statistics and Public Policy, May 2023.

This study looks at how accurately FiveThirtyEight , which aggregates opinion polls and publishes news stories about the results, predicted the outcomes of America’s 2020 presidential election. The authors find it “did an excellent job” predicting who would win in each state but underestimated Donald Trump’s vote share by state by a “modest” amount.

Once a standalone news site, FiveThirtyEight, which recently became 538, was incorporated into ABC News’ website after the news organization acquired it in 2018.

The authors note it’s important to gauge how accurately predictions were made because voters’ perceptions of how polls performed in the most recent presidential election can have consequences for the next one. The accuracy of 2024 presidential polls “is already a live issue at the start of 2023,” write the authors, Arnold Barnett , a professor of management science and statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Arnaud Sarfati , a graduate student at MIT at the time the paper was written.

“If such polls — as distilled by a respected aggregator like FiveThirtyEight — are viewed as trustworthy, they could affect the intensity of pressure on Joe Biden to retire,” Barnett and Sarfati write. “They could influence Republican voters in state primaries who wonder whether Donald Trump could plausibly win reelection. The potential candidacies of Democrats like Amy Klobuchar or Republicans like Ron DeSantis could rise or fall with their standings in voter surveys.”

The analysis finds FiveThirtyEight underestimated Trump’s vote share in each state by an average of 1.90 percentage points. Trump outperformed FiveThirtyEight’s estimates in both heavily Democratic states and heavily Republican states.

Barnett and Sarfati write that “it is concerning that, for the second election in a row, the polls underestimated the support for Donald Trump and FiveThirtyEight did not devise an appropriate adjustment for the downward bias.”

A possible reason for the shortfall, according to the authors: Trump supporters might have been more likely to refuse to participate in voter surveys than Trump opponents.

“While one hopes that lessons from 2020 will avoid the problem in 2024, there is no certainty that this will be the case,” Barnett and Sarfati write.

Information, Incentives, and Goals in Election Forecasts Andrew Gelman, Jessica Hullman, Christopher Wlezien and George Elliott Morris. Judgment and Decision Making, January 2023.

In this paper, scholars offer a highly technical analysis of probabilistic forecasts of elections in the U.S. and how they are communicated to the public. They also make recommendations aimed at helping the public understand how these forecasts are made and how results should be interpreted.

The scholars point out that “forecasters have some responsibility to take into account what readers may do with a visualization or statement of forecast predictions.” They suggest researchers and news outlets work together to figure out the best ways to present this information to the public.

“Designing a forecast without any thought to how it may play into readers’ decisions seems both impractical and potentially unethical,” write the four researchers: Gelman, of Columbia University; Jessica Hullman , an associate professor of computer science at Northwestern University; Christopher Wlezien , a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin; and George Elliott Morris , the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News.

“In general, we think that more collaboration between researchers invested in empirical questions around uncertainty communication and journalists developing forecast models and their displays would be valuable,” they add.

The authors suggest researchers and journalists work together to improve election predictions and news outlets’ methods of communicating results. If that information is well presented and explained, the public’s ability to interpret forecasts correctly could develop over time, they write.

“Naturally, adding too much information risks overwhelming readers,” they add. “The majority spend only a few minutes on the websites, and may feel overwhelmed by concepts such as correlation that forecasters will view as both simple and important, but are largely beside the point of the overall narrative of the forecast. Still, increasing readers’ literacy about model assumptions could happen in baby steps: a reference to a model assumption in an explanatory annotation on a high level graph, or a few bullets at the top of a forecast display describing information sources to whet a reader’s appetite.”

Third-Party Candidates, Newspaper Editorials, and Political Debates John F. Kirch. Newspaper Research Journal, May 2022.

News outlets exclude or limit coverage of third-party political candidates, even when those candidates are legitimate contenders, suggests this analysis of editorials in the Washington Post and 12 other newspapers that report on Virginia politics.

When Towson University journalism professor John Kirch looked at how these newspapers’ editorial staff characterized candidates in the 2013 gubernatorial race in Virginia, he discovered they often excluded Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis. He was mentioned in 28.8% of all editorials that ran between Sept. 4, 2013 and Nov. 6, 2013. The Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, appeared in 91.9% of editorials and the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, appeared in 73.9%.

The Washington Post did not mention Sarvis at all during that period.

Kirch writes that Virginia’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign makes for a good case study because Sarvis was a candidate with strong academic and professional credentials who had run as a Republican for a state senate seat in 2011.

“He ran against two highly unpopular major-party candidates, whose approval ratings were below 50% for most of the campaign,” Kirch writes. “And Sarvis was a serious candidate, which is defined in this study as one who received at least 5% support in the polls, the threshold used by the federal government to determine whether a candidate is eligible for public financing. If ever there was a gubernatorial campaign in which newspaper editorials would consider endorsing or advocating for a third-party candidate’s inclusion in debates, it is the Virginia race.”

When the newspapers’ editorials did mention Sarvis, they sometimes labeled him as a long shot, a spoiler or a protest vote rather than a serious competitor. They never mentioned his education or career as an economist, mathematician or businessman. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate was identified as the former head of the Democratic Party in 25.6% of the editorials in which he appeared and identified by his occupation as a businessman in 18.3%. The Republican candidate was described as the state’s attorney general in 55.9% of the editorials in which he appeared.

However, one of the 13 newspapers examined endorsed Sarvis for governor — the Register & Bee in Danville, Virgina. Four others advocated for him to be included in the gubernatorial debates while the editorials of nine newspapers ignored his exclusion from the debates.

Kirch blames horse race coverage as “a factor in why minor parties are ignored, with scholarship showing that third-party candidates are left on the sidelines because they rarely meet the metrics the news media use to measure the contest aspects of a campaign, such as fundraising abilities and poll support.”

Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public Sean Jeremy Westwood, Solomon Messing and Yphtach Lelkes. The Journal of Politics, 2020.

This paper examines problems associated with probabilistic forecasting — a type of horse race journalism that has grown more common in recent years. These forecasts “aggregate polling data into a concise probability of winning, providing far more conclusive information about the state of a race,” write authors Sean Jeremy Westwood , an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, Solomon Messing , a senior engineering manager at Twitter, and Yphtach Lelkes , an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers find that probabilistic forecasting discourages voting, likely because people often decide to skip voting when their candidate has a very high chance of winning or losing. They also learned this type of horse race reporting is more prominent in news outlets with left-leaning audiences, including FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times and HuffPost.

Westwood, Messing and Lelkes point out that probabilistic forecasting might have contributed to Clinton’s loss of the 2016 presidential election. They write that “forecasts reported win probabilities between 70% and 99%, giving Clinton an advantage ranging from 20% to 49% beyond 50:50 odds. Clinton ultimately lost by 0.7% in Pennsylvania, 0.2% in Michigan, 0.8% in Wisconsin, and 1.2% in Florida.”

The Consequences of Strategic News Coverage for Democracy: A Meta-Analysis Alon Zoizner. Communication Research, 2021.

This paper examines what was known about the consequences of horse race journalism at the time it was written. Although the paper first appeared on the Communication Research journal’s website in 2018, it wasn’t published in an issue of the journal until 2021. In the academic article, Alon Zoizner , an assistant professor of communication at the University of Haifa, Israel, analyzes 32 studies published or released from 1997 to 2016 that examine the effects of “strategic news” coverage. He describes strategic news coverage as the “coverage of politics [that] often focuses on politicians’ strategies and tactics as well as their campaign performance and position at the polls.”

Among the key takeaways: This type of reporting elevates the public’s cynicism toward politics and the issues featured as part of that coverage.

“In other words,” Zoizner writes, “this coverage leads to a specific public perception of politics that is dominated by a focus on political actors’ motivations for gaining power rather than their substantive concerns for the common good.”

He adds that young people, in particular, are susceptible to the effects of strategic news coverage because they have limited experience with the democratic process. They “may develop deep feelings of mistrust toward political elites, which will persist throughout their adult lives,” Zoizner writes.

His analysis also reveals that this kind of reporting results in an uninformed electorate. The public receives less information about public policies and candidates’ positions on important issues.

“This finding erodes the media’s informative value because journalists cultivate a specific knowledge about politics that fosters political alienation rather than helping citizens make rational decisions based on substantive information,” the author writes. Framing politics as a game to be won “inhibits the development of an informed citizenship because the public is mostly familiar with the political rivalries instead of actually knowing what the substantive debate is about.”

Another important discovery: Strategic news coverage hurts news outlets’ reputations. People exposed to it “are more critical of news stories and consider them to be less credible, interesting, and of low quality,” Zoizner explains. “Strategic coverage will continue to be a part of the news diet but in parallel will lead citizens to develop higher levels of cynicism and criticism not only toward politicians but also toward the media.”

News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences Thomas E. Patterson. Harvard Kennedy School working paper, 2016.

Horse race reporting gave Donald Trump an advantage during the 2016 presidential primary season, this working paper finds. Nearly 60% of the election news analyzed during this period characterized the election as a competitive game, with Trump receiving the most coverage of any candidate seeking the Republican nomination. In the final five weeks of the primary campaign, the press gave him more coverage than Democratic frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

“The media’s obsession with Trump during the primaries meant that the Republican race was afforded far more coverage than the Democratic race, even though it lasted five weeks longer,” writes Patterson , who looked at election news coverage provided by eight major print and broadcast outlets over the first five months of 2016. “The Republican contest got 63 percent of the total coverage between January 1 and June 7, compared with the Democrats’ 37 percent — a margin of more than three to two.”

Patterson’s paper takes a detailed look at the proportion and tone of coverage for Republican and Democratic candidates during each stage of the primary campaign. He notes that the structure of the nominating process lends itself to horse race reporting. “Tasked with covering fifty contests crammed into the space of several months,” he writes, “journalists are unable to take their eyes or minds off the horse race or to resist the temptation to build their narratives around the candidates’ position in the race.”

Patterson explains how horse race journalism affects candidates’ images and can influence voter decisions. “The press’s attention to early winners, and its tendency to afford them more positive coverage than their competitors, is not designed to boost their chances, but that’s a predictable effect,” he writes. He points out that a candidate who’s performing well usually is portrayed positively while one who isn’t doing as well “has his or her weakest features put before the public.”

Patterson asserts that primary election coverage is “the inverse of what would work best for voters.” “Most voters don’t truly engage the campaign until the primary election stage,” he writes. “As a result, they enter the campaign nearly at the point of decision, unarmed with anything approaching a clear understanding of their choices. They are greeted by news coverage that’s long on the horse race and short on substance … It’s not until later in the process, when the race is nearly settled, that substance comes more fully into the mix.”

What Predicts the Game Frame? Media Ownership, Electoral Context, and Campaign News Johanna Dunaway and Regina G. Lawrence. Political Communication, 2015.

Corporate-owned and large-chain newspapers were more likely to publish stories that frame elections as a competitive game than newspapers with a single owner, according to this study. The authors find that horse race coverage was most prevalent in close races and during the weeks leading up to an election.

Researchers Johanna Dunaway , an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, and Regina G. Lawrence , associate dean of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in Portland, looked at print news stories about elections for governor and U.S. Senate in 2004, 2006 and 2008. They analyzed 10,784 articles published by 259 newspapers between Sept. 1 and Election Day of those years.

Their examination reveals that privately-owned, large-chain publications behave similarly to publications controlled by shareholders. “We expected public shareholder-controlled news organizations to be most likely to resort to game-framed news because of their tendency to emphasize the profit motive over other goals; in fact, privately owned large chains are slightly more likely to use the game frame in their campaign news coverage at mean levels of electoral competition,” Dunaway and Lawrence write.

They note that regardless of a news outlet’s ownership structure, journalists and audiences are drawn to the horse race in close races. “Given a close race, newspapers of many types will tend to converge on a game-framed election narrative and, by extension, stories focusing on who’s up/who’s down will crowd out stories about the policy issues they are presumably being elected to address,” the authors write. “And, as the days-’til-election variable shows, this pattern will intensify across the course of a close race.”

Gender Bias and Mainstream Media Meredith Conroy. Chapter in the book Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency, 2015.

In this book chapter, Meredith Conroy , an associate professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, draws on earlier research that finds horse race coverage is more detrimental to women than men running for elected office. She explains that female candidates often emphasize their issue positions as a campaign strategy to bolster their credibility.

“If the election coverage neglects the issues, women may miss out on the opportunity to assuage fears about their perceived incompetency,” she writes. She adds that when the news “neglects substantive coverage, the focus turns to a focus on personality and appearance.”

“An overemphasis on personality and appearance is detrimental to women, as it further delegitimizes their place in the political realm, more so than for men, whose negative traits are still often masculine and thus still relevant to politics,” she writes.

Contagious Media Effects: How Media Use and Exposure to Game-Framed News Influence Media Trust David Nicolas Hopmann, Adam Shehata and Jesper Strömbäck. Mass Communication and Society, 2015.

How does framing politics as a strategic game influence the public’s trust in journalism? This study of Swedish news coverage suggests it lowers trust in all forms of print and broadcast news media — except tabloid newspapers.

The authors note that earlier research indicates people who don’t trust mainstream media often turn to tabloids for news. “By framing politics as a strategic game and thereby undermining trust not only in politics but also in the media, the media may thus simultaneously weaken the incentives for people to follow the news in mainstream media and strengthen the incentives for people to turn to alternative news sources,” write the authors, David Nicolas Hopmann , an associate professor at University of Southern Denmark, Adam Shehata , a senior lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, and Jesper Strömbäck , a professor at the University of Gothenburg.

The three researchers analyzed how four daily newspapers and three daily “newscasts” covered the 2010 Swedish national election campaign. They also looked at the results of surveys aimed at measuring people’s attitudes toward the Swedish news media in the months leading up to and immediately after the 2010 election. The sample comprised 4,760 respondents aged 18 to 74.

Another key takeaway of this study: The researchers discovered that when people read tabloid newspapers, their trust in them grows as does their distrust of the other media. “Taken together, these findings suggest that the mistrust caused by the framing of politics as a strategic game is contagious in two senses,” they write. “For all media except the tabloids, the mistrust toward politicians implied by the framing of politics as a strategic game is extended to the media-making use of this particular framing, whereas in the case of the tabloids, it is extended to other media.”

How journalists use opinion polls

Transforming Stability into Change: How the Media Select and Report Opinion Polls Erik Gahner Larsen and Zoltán Fazekas. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2020.

This paper demonstrates journalists’ difficulty interpreting public opinion polls. It finds news outlets often reported changes in voter intent when no statistically significant change had actually occurred.

The authors write that they examined political news in Denmark because news outlets there provide relatively neutral coverage and don’t have partisan leanings. They looked at news coverage of polls of voter intent conducted by eight polling firms for eight political parties from 2011 to 2015. Their analysis focuses on 4,147 news articles published on the websites of nine newspapers and two national TV companies.

The researchers learned that journalists tended to report on polls they perceived as showing the largest changes in public opinion. Single outlier polls also got a lot of attention. Not only did many news articles erroneously report a change in public opinion, they often quoted politicians reacting as though a change had occurred, potentially misleading audiences further. Journalists also avoided reporting information on the margin of error for the poll results.

In most cases, the news stories should have been about stability in public opinion, note the authors, Erik Gahner Larsen , senior scientific adviser at the Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, and Zoltán Fazekas , an associate professor of business and politics at Copenhagen Business School.

“However, 58 percent of the articles mention change in their title,” they write. “Furthermore, while 82 percent of the polls have no statistically significant changes, 86 percent of the articles does not mention any considerations related to uncertainty.”

The ‘Nate Silver Effect’ on Political Journalism: Gatecrashers, Gatekeepers, and Changing Newsroom Practices Around Coverage of Public Opinion Polls Benjamin Toff. Journalism, 2019.

This study, based on in-depth interviews with 41 U.S. journalists, media analysts and public opinion pollsters, documents changes in how news outlets cover public opinion. It reveals, among other things, “evidence of eroding internal newsroom standards about which polls to reference in coverage and how to adjudicate between surveys,” writes the author, Benjamin Toff , an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Toff notes that journalists’ focus on polling aggregator websites paired with the growing availability of online survey data has resulted in an overconfidence in polls’ ability to predict election outcomes — what one reporter he interviewed called the “Nate Silver effect.”

Both journalists and polling professionals expressed concern about journalists’ lack of training and their reliance on poll firms’ reputations as evidence of poll quality rather than the poll’s sampling design and other methodological details. Toff, who completed the interviews between October 2014 and May 2015, points out that advocacy organizations can take advantage of the situation to get reporters to unknowingly disseminate their messages.

The study also finds that younger journalists and those who work for online news organizations are less likely to consider it their job to interpret polls for the public. One online journalist, for example, told Toff that readers should help determine the reliability of poll results and that “in a lot of ways Twitter is our ombudsman.”

Toff calls on academic researchers to help improve coverage of public opinion, in part by offering clearer guidance on best practices for news reporting. “The challenge of interpreting public opinion is a collective one,” he writes, “and scholarship which merely chastises journalists for their shortcomings does not offer a productive path forward.”

News Reporting of Opinion Polls: Journalism and Statistical Noise Yosef Bhatti and Rasmus Tue Pedersen. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 2016.

This paper, which also looks at news coverage of opinion polls in Denmark, finds that Danish journalists don’t do a great job reporting on opinion polls. Most journalists whose work was examined don’t seem to understand how a poll’s margin of error affects its results. Also, they often fail to explain to their audiences the statistical uncertainty of poll results, according to the authors, Yosef Bhatti of Roskilde University and Rasmus Tue Pedersen of the Danish Center for Social Science Research.

The two researchers analyzed the poll coverage provided by seven Danish newspapers before, during and after the 2011 parliamentary election campaign — a 260-day period from May 9, 2011 to Jan. 23, 2012. A total of 1,078 articles were examined.

Bhatti and Pedersen find that journalists often interpreted two poll results as different from each other when, considering the poll’s uncertainty, it actually was unclear whether one result was larger or smaller than the other. “A large share of the interpretations made by the journalists is based on differences in numbers that are so small that they are most likely just statistical noise,” they write.

They note that bad poll reporting might be the result of journalists’ poor statistical skills. But it “may also be driven by journalists’ and editors’ desires for interesting horse race stories,” the authors add. “Hence, the problem may not be a lack of methodological skills but may also be caused by a lack of a genuine adherence to the journalistic norms of reliability and fact-based news. If this is the case, unsubstantiated poll stories may be a more permanent and unavoidable feature of modern horse race coverage.”

About The Author

Denise-Marie Ordway

IMAGES

Essays on Race and Empire
📌 Race and Identity Essay Example
RACE Strategy for Essays
The Concept of Race Free Essay Example
📚 Free Essay: Experiences with Race and Assimilation
Reflective Essay

VIDEO

History of the Roman Empire audiobook
History of the Roman Empire audiobook
History of the Roman Empire audiobook
History of the Roman Empire audiobook
Pathological Lying, Accusation, and Swindling -- A Study in Forensic Psychology
The Coming Race audiobook

COMMENTS

Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological
The term racism is often used synonymously with prejudice (biased feelings or affect), stereotyping (biased thoughts and beliefs, flawed generalizations), discrimination (differential treatment or the absence of equal treatment), and bigotry (intolerance or hatred). This practice implicitly conceptualizes racism as a set of basic social-psychological processes underlying the psychologies of ...
PDF Racism, Sociology of
Abstract. The sociology of racism is the study of the relationship between racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequality. While past scholarship emphasized overtly racist attitudes and policies, contemporary sociology considers racism as individual- and group-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of ...
The Numbers Don't Speak for Themselves: Racial Disparities and the
Compared with Whites, African Americans are 2 times more likely to die as infants, 3.6 times more likely to experience childhood poverty, and 2 times more likely to have not completed high school (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017; National Center for Education Statistics, 2017; Patten & Krogstad, 2015).Disturbing as these disparities are, they are not as extreme as disparities ...
The Meaning of "Racism"
Abstract. This article explores the meanings of racism in the sociology of race/ethnicity and provides a descriptive framework for comparing theories of racism. The authors argue that sociologists use racism to refer to four constructs: (1) individual attitudes, (2) cultural schema, and two constructs associated with structural racism: (3 ...
Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century
Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the ...
Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century
A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending ...
Race, Ethnicity, and Nation
Politics and Society, 27 (1), 5-38. The term "race" refers to groups of people who have differences and similarities in biological traits deemed by society to be socially significant, meaning that people treat other people differently because of them. Meanwhile, ethnicity refers to shared cultural practices, perspectives, and distinctions ...
Critical philosophy of race: essays
Extract. Robert Bernasconi's Critical Philosophy of Race: Essays is a compilation of fifteen essays that offer a rare insight into what is now seen as a new subfield in the philosophy of race. It'll be important not only for its novelty but for its courageous attempt to establish this new area of study, especially considering the active attempts to discredit it.
Research on Race and Racism: Journal of Social Issues: Vol 75, No 4
SECTION I: BELIEFS ABOUT RACE AND RACISM. no. I Don't See Race (or Conflict): Strategic Descriptions of Ambiguous Negative Intergroup Contexts. Francine Karmali, Kerry Kawakami, Elysia Vaccarino, Amanda Williams, Curtis Phills, Justin P. Friesen, Pages: 1002-1034; First Published: 20 September 2019;
Full article: Resisting racism in everyday life: from ignoring to
We understand the notion of race and racism as social constructs (Dixon and Telles Citation 2017) and floating signifiers (Laclau Citation ... The bottom-up resistance from "ordinary" people has been under-attended in the scholarly literature on antiracism (Aquino Citation 2020). Rather than treating racism as a fixed "objective reality ...
Discourses about race in the United States: A thematic analysis of
These findings contribute to evolving scholarly understanding of race in the United States, with implications for informing initiatives to promote race relations and reduce experiences of discrimination for individuals of color. ... We addressed these research questions by analyzing individual submissions of six-word essays and explanations in ...
Full article: Is race still relevant? Student perceptions and
The naïve. We call the first student discourse of racism the naïve, which refers to those who do not believe issues of race and racism are relevant in contemporary society, especially in the UK.More specifically, racial inequality, prejudice and discrimination are considered to be lessons of history rather than an active or on-going concern.
Critical Philosophy of Race: Essays
Abstract. The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either to miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow.
Advancing racial and ethnic equity in health
First, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are fundamental determinants of health globally. The misclassification of race as a biological (rather than social) construct continues to compound health disparities. Four research papers show how discrimination leads to poorer health outcomes and quality of care.
Race (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
1. History of the Concept of Race. The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there is less agreement regarding whether racism, even absent a developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism Reading List
Race Matters contains Cornel West's most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh ...
Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism
Critical Race Theory concepts adapted from Delgado and Stefancic. 5. Critical Race Theory offers the field of public health a new paradigm for investigating the root causes of health disparities. Based on race equity and social justice principles, Critical Race Theory encourages the development of solutions that bridge gaps in health, housing ...
Understanding the Influence of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Class on
Introduction. The US racial/ethnic academic achievement gap is a well-documented social inequality [].National assessments for science, mathematics, and reading show that White students score higher on average than all other racial/ethnic groups, particularly when compared to Black and Hispanic students [2, 3].Explanations for these gaps tend to focus on the influence of socioeconomic ...
Race, Trauma, and Social Justice
Psychological research has shown that racism and racial discrimination—at both the interpersonal and systemic levels—are barriers to human development and psychological wellbeing. This page showcases research on racism, discrimination, and social justice to improve psychological outcomes for underrepresented communities. expand all.
PDF Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment
The United States is generally a far more punitive society to-day than it was just three decades ago. This change has been marked or designated with several different labels. These designations include the emergence of a "prison industrial complex," of a "carceral state," or the "mass incarceration society.".
PDF Sociology of Racism
As such, race became understood as a biological, or natural, categorization system of the human species. As Western colonialism and slavery expanded, the concept was used to justify and prescribe exploitation, domination, and violence against peoples racialized as non-white. Today, race often maintains its "natural" connotation in folk
Full article: Introduction to "Racial Inequality and Education
Race figures prominently in the opportunity gap mentioned by Putnam, and evidence shows that widening gaps in wealth and opportunity have a profound impact on educational achievement. For the last 16 years, federal education policy has been focused on reducing racial gaps in academic achievement; however, closing opportunity gaps has been a ...
INTERSECTIONALITY
Rooted in Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality is a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool. In the 1989 landmark essay "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the ...
A reading list on issues of race
The wave of anger in reaction to George Floyd's killing has prompted an outpouring of interest on race and race relations across the U.S. Books on these subjects top The New York Times Best Sellers list and Barnes & Noble's Bestsellers.Amazon's best-selling book, "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism," by Robin DiAngelo, has sold out.
Race and Social Emotional Learning for Black Students in Urban
A developmental scientist and identity scholar, Rogers directs the Development of Identities in Cultural Environments (DICE) research lab and conducts research on the ways in which young people understand their multiple identities and develop resistance strategies to negotiate societal stereotypes and inequalitites.
Negative Racial Stereotypes and Their Effect on Attitudes Toward
Racial stereotypes are constructed beliefs that all members of the same race share given characteristics. These attributed characteristics are usually negative (Jewell, 1993). This paper will identify seven historical racial stereotypes of African-Americans and demonstrate that many of these distorted images still exist in society today.
Writing About Race, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Disability
When writing about socioeconomic status, use the following tips to guide you: "Avoid using terms like "high class" or "low class," or even "upper class" or "lower class," because they have been used historically in an evaluative way. Also avoid "low brow" and "high brow.". Instead, if you must incorporate adjectives ...
3. The role of race and ethnicity in Americans' personal lives
Most blacks see their race as central to their overall identity. About three-quarters of black adults (74%) say being black is very important to how they think about themselves, including 52% who say it is extremely important. About six-in-ten Hispanics (59%) say being Hispanic is extremely or very important to their identity, and 56% of Asians ...
The consequences of horse race reporting: What the research says
Dozens of academic studies chronicle the dangers of horse race journalism. Scholars find it's associated with: Distrust in politicians. Distrust of news outlets. An uninformed electorate. Inaccurate reporting of opinion poll data. Studies also indicate horse race reporting can:

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Article contents

Updated in this version

Introduction: Three Variations on a Theme

Race: Biology as Destiny

Ethnicity: Group Divisions Rooted in Culture

The Continuing Significance of the Nation

Globalization and Populist Nationalism

Further Reading

Related Articles

Sign in through your institution

Critical Philosophy of Race: Essays

Personal account

Institutional access

IP based access

Society Members

Sign in through society site

Sign in using a personal account

Viewing your signed in accounts

Signed in but can't access content

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Bibliography

1. History of the Concept of Race

Support SEP

In This Section

The New Jim Crow

One Person, No Vote

The Fire Next Time

White Fragility

Never Caught

How to Be Less Stupid About Race

The Broken Heart of America

How to Be an Antiracist

The Condemnation of Blackness

The Color of Law

Courageous Conversations About Race

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

Race Matters

Charleston Syllabus

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence

The Sum of Us

Select Community Organizations, provided by the IARA

Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project

Maya Sen & Matthew Blackwell's "Deep Roots"

Fairness & Justice

Justice Matters Podcast

Anti-Racism Book & Film Club

Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis

Race Consciousness

Contemporary Mechanisms

Centering in the Margins

APPLICATION OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Conceptual Model

Analyses and Interpretations

CONCLUSIONS

Acknowledgments

Understanding the Influence of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Class on Inequalities in Academic and Non-Academic Outcomes among Eighth-Grade Students: Findings from an Intersectionality Approach

Introduction

Ethics Statement

Outcome Variables.

Individual and Contextual Disadvantage Variables.

Predictor Variables.

Statistical Analyses

Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences in Eighth-Grade Academic Outcomes

Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences in Eighth-Grade Non-Academic Outcomes

Conclusions

Supporting Information

Acknowledgments

Author Contributions

Race, Trauma, and Social Justice

APA Journals Article Spotlights

Calls for papers

APA Journals special issues and sections

Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing

Login Alert

Article contents

This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref .

Save article to Kindle