Du Bois Review-Social Science Research on Race最新文献

In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

This study investigated the mental health significance of Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election among Blacks. Upon his re-election, we hypothesized Blacks would either feel symbolic empowerment or relative deprivation. They would feel symbolic empowerment because a man who identifies as Black won re-election to the nation’s highest office. His second victory should generate optimism, given his status as a historic first. Alternatively, they would feel relative deprivation because The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 curtailed what Obama could achieve. More important, he withered when afforded opportunities to challenge White supremacy and championed individual responsibility. Using a quasi-experimental design with nationally representative survey data from the 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we predicted Blacks’ preelection and postelection poor mental health days. We found no time period main effects. However, Black men with less than a college degree experienced 1.11 more poor mental health days postelection whereas Black men with a college degree or more experienced 2.93 fewer poor mental health days postelection. These findings support relative deprivation theory.

Americans generally celebrate the abstract principle of diversity, but research suggests that they have a comparatively lower (1) favorability towards policies that promote diversity and (2) sense of personal closeness with others from diverse backgrounds. The current study analyzes nationally representative survey data to assess such “principle-policy gaps” and “principle-personal gaps” in Americans’ diversity attitudes. We find that these attitudinal gaps indeed exist and are substantial in the general population. We also consider how individual-level factors relate to these attitudinal gaps. Following common findings in previous research, we find that participant racial identity and political partisanship have statistically significant relationships with these attitudinal gaps. But our overall findings illustrate that principle-policy gaps and principle-personal gaps in diversity attitudes are fairly substantial and prevalent across Americans who vary by race, politics, and several other individual-level factors. We consider our findings in the current social and political context, and we discuss directions for future inquiry.

W. E. B. Du Bois provides a thesis on Black masculinity formation that includes primary traits of this social identity and dynamics that can engender or stymie its development. Yet his framework does not directly reference sexual minorities. This study considers whether and how Du Bois’s framework on masculinity is germane to the experiences of young Black people with diverse sexual identities by assessing whether they recount similar tropes and features. The analysis is theoretically informed by a New Millennium Du Boisian Mode of Inquiry and a qualitative analysis for 168 young Black persons who reside in the South. Three themes emerge that adopt, amplify, and adapt dimensions of Du Bois’s thesis and demonstrate that key aspects of his framework resonate with Black persons excluded from his original work. Despite nuanced sexual identities, it was common for individuals to espouse Du Bosian tenets associated with Black masculinity such as a protector/provider trope, respectability, racial pride, educational attainment, economic mobility, and self-help as well as concerns about racism. These findings inform research on expectations about masculinity into which many men are generally socialized as well as possible hierarchies among intersecting social identities.

W. E. B. Du Bois is widely regarded as the foundational Black social scientist in the United States. He lived during a historical period when social science was predominantly considered the creation and domain of White scholars. In primary sociology texts, Du Bois is typically mentioned in passing, often as the sole Black social scientist acknowledged in social science historiography. At the other end of the spectrum, many Black social scientists today begin their exploration with Du Bois, recognizing his brilliant and groundbreaking contributions. However, both of these approaches seemingly imply that there were no notable Black social scientists before Du Bois. This paper aims to challenge that assumption by examining early nineteenth-century Black social science through the lens of James McCune Smith. Despite being a close friend to prominent figures like Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, and Alexander Crummell, McCune Smith has been relegated to a historical footnote in most accounts, except in a few recent notable works.

Research finds that individuals of dark complexions are more likely to face prejudice or be discriminated against in a variety of contexts. Referred to as colorism, skin-tone-based discrimination has major implications for various life outcomes. Research on social interactions suggests that lighter skin tones are associated with a higher level of physical attractiveness, which is of particular interest for this study. This study uses quantitative survey data collected from undergraduate and graduate students from across the United States to explore the relationship between colorism, gender, and perceived physical attraction via a modified version of Harvey, Tennial, and Bank’s In-Group Colorism Scale (ICS). Analyses measured the relationship between a participant’s own skin tone, which was self-assessed via comparison to images modeled after make-up swatches, and results on a subscale of the ICS which measures attraction to lighter skin tones. Our results suggest that gender has a significant impact on perceived physical attractiveness, with male-identifying participants placing more weight on the significance of skin tone when determining physical attraction. Implications for future research and translational implications are also discussed.

In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.

Much sociological attention has focused on Black identity within the United States. Less attention, however, has been given to understanding how immigrant and native-born streams of U.S. Black Muslims articulate American identity. In this study I ask: how do second-generation Black American Muslims and indigenous Black American Muslims compare in the ways they narrate connections among race, American identity, and Islam? Using data from thirty-one in-depth interviews with Black Muslims living in Houston, TX, I find that racial double-consciousness complicates American identity for respondents. While indigenous Black American respondents critique racist U.S. histories and structural inequities, I argue that in certain spaces Muslim identity reinforces American identity. For second-generation respondents, however, American identity is reinforced through embracing immigrant status. This study extends Du Boisian double-consciousness by making a case for “layered double-consciousness.” I argue that layered double-consciousness better explains how Black Muslims perceive their racial, religious, and national identities across macro levels within the context of the United States and meso levels within the Muslim American community.

The stigma faced by unemployed Americans places a toll on their wellbeing and decreases their life chances. While all unemployed Americans are subject to stigmatization, the stigma levied on Black Americans may be particularly potent due to racializing stereotypes that associate Blackness with the undeserving poor, including the inability to obtain employment. Given the social and economic challenges Black people face, research elucidating the racial complexities of unemployment stigma is needed. Through in-depth open format face-to-face interviews of unemployed individuals residing in urban and suburban areas, this study produces an alternative perspective on how impression management techniques are connected to both internalization and mitigation of unemployment stigma. This study contributes to employment, race, and stigma literature by providing a theoretical frame that synthesizes Du Boisian and dramaturgical concepts to conceptualize an “unemployed worker-self.” Through this framing, I find variations across race and community type in impression management techniques executed by unemployed people. I conclude with suggestions for future research and potential applications for the theoretical frame developed in this study.

A New Du Boisian Sociology has recently clarified, elevated, and synthesized Du Bois’s sociological contributions. We argue that more systematic and detailed study of Du Bois’s research methodologies, with an eye towards their contemporary applicability, can further strengthen this body of scholarship. Here we begin this effort with sustained attention to Du Bois’s use of quantitative data and methods during a productive and illustrative period around the turn of the twentieth century (1898–1902). This adds a level of depth and specificity to a subset of existing Du Bois scholarship that has more generally noted quantitative inquiry as one aspect of Du Bois’s social-scientific approach of mixed-methods triangulation. We detail how and why Du Bois developed an inductive, theoretically generative approach to his research on race. This orientation appears, at first glance, to be a misfit for contemporary quantitative sociology, which is currently skewed towards deductive theory testing and causal inference. We demonstrate that Du Bois’s quantitative methodology invites sociologists to return to exploratory, descriptive, and theoretically generative quantitative research based on creative syntheses of primary and secondary data that span generations and levels of institutional and geographic aggregation. Such data can, among other possibilities, assess within- and between-race comparisons and intersections of race with factors including class, gender, age, place, and time. Our study also enters Du Bois, as historical precedent, into current debates regarding quantification’s productive role, if any, in social science research on race/racism and other axes of systemic inequality.