W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the way Black Americans understand the racial world and their place within it shapes their connections to national identity differently from those of White Americans. This article juxtaposes Du Bois’s theory of racialized subjectivity with Identity Theory’s constructs of prominence and change to examine differences in attachment to American nationhood during a turbulent period of American politics: the Trumpism era. Using data from three waves of the American National Election Studies (2012, 2016, 2020), this study examines the extent to which White and Black Americans viewed their national identities as important before, during, and after Trump’s first presidential administration. I employ “racial identity prominence” as a nuanced measure of race to illustrate a phenomenological element of American national identity that differentially shapes attachment. The findings reveal that the Trumpism period catalyzed significant identity change between 2012 and 2020. Moreover, the degree to which White and Black Americans connected to their national identity across the three election years largely depended on the subjective importance they assigned to their racial identity—that is, their racial identity prominence. The White American archetype was reinforced, as Whites with strong attachment to their racial identity also expressed strong national identity. Interestingly, Black Americans also expressed strong ties to their national identity during this period, particularly those with a strong racial identity. Still, the question of how White and Black Americans envision the country and their place in it remains complex.

Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the city of Chicago, we find that racial meanings and categories played a central role in efforts by developers and community members to characterize, support, and challenge the casino project. Comparing public interactions across three different communities, we argue that developers deployed a shifting array of discursive strategies—territorial ascription, multiculturalism, colorblind racialization, and a more novel variety of racial equity claims—to mobilize the unique geographic and organizational characteristics of their proposed projects as assurances of racial equity. We identify three distinct discourses that organized the racial equity claims of developers and community members: Black-led capitalism, racially representative capitalism, and spatially connective capitalism. We conclude that while community members actively contested developers’ claims and called for greater specificity concerning beneficiaries, they did not challenge the capitalist logic that merely redistributing the benefits of development among owners and workers—however racialized—could bring about racial equity.

Black fathers’ sentiments about the child support and custody (CSC) system reflect an understanding that the CSC overwhelmingly supports mothers at the expense of, and even against, Black fathers. Consequently, Black fathers may develop a sense that their voices and circumstances within the CSC system—along with other federal, state, and county-based health and human service programs—are considered inconsequential. In this context, we argue that this embodies what we term Black personhood denied. Drawing from two sample groups of Black fathers derived from two discrete research projects, we use the self-reported narratives and perspectives of Black fathers in the CSC system to qualitatively foreground how their experiences demonstrate the systematic denial of their voices and agency. Secondarily, we explore how their CSC experiences contribute to their understanding and perceptions of race and gender; specifically, how they think civic institutions (e.g., family court, law enforcement, human service sector, etc.) view and treat Black men/fathers relative to women/mothers. Lastly, we explore how perceptions of differential treatment according to their race and gender impacts other areas of their lives.

This study explores how community-based marking affects the school experiences of Christian, Hindu, and Sikh minority students in urban Pakistan. The analysis treats community-based marking as a racializing process: descent, religion, and inherited occupational association together fix group position as natural, heritable, and unalterable by individual achievement in a setting where phenotype is not the principal basis of classification. The study draws on thirty-eight semi-structured interviews at two purposively selected urban sites and uses social marking theory to compare how community identity is inherited and how that inheritance shapes educational experience across three minority groups. The study included thirteen Christian, thirteen Hindu, and twelve Sikh participants. Student and young adult accounts (n = 20) form the core evidence; parents, teachers, and community leaders provide contextual and institutional perspectives. Five structurally analogous patterns emerged across communities: 1) inherited community-based marking that functions regardless of individual family background through descent–occupation stigma for Christian students and religion-linked attribution for Hindu and Sikh students; 2) adult non-intervention and institutional silence; 3) peer social distancing enacted through spatial practices; 4) normalized exclusion, in which students know of exclusionary boundaries but adjust their daily practices to avoid them because credible institutional alternatives are lacking; and 5) the use of education as a constrained response strategy. The findings rest on interpersonal and discursive evidence from students who persisted in education at two urban sites. By specifying how racial boundaries are produced and reproduced without phenotype, the study extends comparative racialization scholarship beyond the Western racial binary and identifies the school as an ordinary institutional site of racial formation.

Policing has become a popular topic of inquiry in social science literature, but much of this attention has been confined to traditional forms of policing, focusing on state and municipal police departments or, in the case of schools, have focused on disciplinary policies. In seeking to expand the contours of what the scholarly community defines as police, we focus our attention on the origins of K-12 school policing. Specifically, using a multi-modal historical approach, we provide a history of when and why police were stationed in schools in cities throughout the United States. Focusing on the sequencing of events, we show that when the dominant White status quo is challenged by the movement of Black people into formerly White dominated areas and demands are made for education equity from those groups, the state responds by bolstering fears of violence from Black youth and implementing punitive state structures in the form of placing police officers in schools.

One way to understand the trajectories and outcomes of immigrant political incorporation is to examine changes in political participation across immigrant generations. Yet, patterns of political participation other than voting among Asian Americans across immigrant generations, particularly beyond the second generation, remain understudied. In addition, little empirical research has examined the mechanisms that generate the differences in the extent of political participation across immigrant generations. This study investigates whether, and to what extent, observed patterns of political participation across length of residence among first-generation immigrants and across successive immigrant generations can be accounted for by indicators of social integration, particularly engagement in political discussion with family and friends and involvement in civic organizations in the community, net of marriage patterns and other sociodemographic characteristics. Using data from the 2008 National Asian American Survey, the analysis focuses on the six largest Asian American groups: Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. An overall political participation index is constructed by counting five dichotomous indicators of nonvoting political activity—campaigning, making political donations, contacting government officials, working with others to solve a community problem, and protesting—in the last twelve months. Descriptive results show that political participation increases with length of residence among first-generation immigrants and across immigrant generations, but tapers off in the third generation. Multivariate analyses indicate that these generational differences in the number of political activities are largely explained by variation in social integration, with the exception of recent immigrants with fewer than ten years of residence. Overall, the findings highlight social integration as a key mechanism of political incorporation among Asian immigrants and their descendants.

This article re-conceptualizes American federalism as a racialized institutional order by advancing the theory of racialized dual sovereignty. Conventional federalism scholarship treats conflicts between state and federal authority as race-neutral disputes over jurisdiction, yet American political development demonstrates that sovereignty conflicts intensify when state actions threaten Black citizenship and political participation. This reframing is necessary because traditional constitutional jurisprudence cannot fully explain the seemingly divergent outcomes in Shelby County v. Holder and Allen v. Milligan, two decisions issued by an ideologically similar Supreme Court. The article introduces the concept of the racially charged state, defined as a subnational unit in which historical legacies of racial domination and institutional design make race the central axis of political conflict, with Alabama serving as a paradigmatic case. It argues that federal intervention operates as threshold-based recalibration: when racially exclusionary state practices threaten democratic legitimacy, federal institutions intervene selectively to stabilize the system while permitting substantial subnational inequality. The findings illuminate federalism’s dual role in enabling democratic backsliding and institutional resilience.

This article applies Critical School Finance theory to analyze the $543.9 billion in U.S. school district debt as a mechanism of racialized wealth extraction. Using the framework’s five core concepts—dispossession, kleptocracy, extraction/super-expropriation, racial capitalism, and inequality—we examine how debt systematically transfers educational resources from predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income students to financial institutions and bondholders. Case studies of Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA reveal how districts serving students of color carry disproportionate debt burdens, divert billions from instruction to debt service, and experience compounding educational disadvantages. We argue that school debt is not neutral fiscal management but represents organized theft that reproduces racial inequality across generations, demanding transformative rather than incremental reform.

Scholars agree Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness represents a crucial contribution to the social psychology of racism literature. His theory describes three constructs: 1) the veil, 2) second sight, and 3) two-ness. The veil symbolizes the structure producing racial stratification; second sight taps knowledge of the veil through racial consciousness at the group or community level; and two-ness indicates Blacks’ feelings of identity tension arising from second-class citizenship. This extended research note describes development and validation of multiple-item survey measures of the perceived veil, second sight, and two-ness. Using data collected online in early 2024 from a national sample of 2,008 Black adults via the Prolific platform, common factor analyses suggest latent variables explain correlations among eight items indicating the perceived veil, six items indicating second sight, and five items indicating two-ness. Reliability analyses provide strong to modest support for the three constructs’ internal consistency. In the Discussion, we offer directions for future research utilizing these multiple-item survey measures.