Late nineteenth-century African American political thought crystallized around the tensions between survival, accommodation, and activism. Booker T. Washington responded to pervasive racial violence and social exclusion by advocating radical individualism and moderation as tools for Black uplift. Washington emphasized vocational training, economic self-sufficiency, and strategic alliances with white elites. In contrast, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that structural change and political agitation were necessary to contest entrenched inequality. Readers can now compare these two approaches, understanding how Washington sought pragmatic, incremental gains while Du Bois pursued systemic, ideological, and organizational transformations through civic leadership and the NAACP. These contrasting strategies illustrate the spectrum of political thought available to African Americans under Jim Crow. Beyond Washington and Du Bois, thinkers like T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Lucy Parsons expanded the scope of African American political theory by integrating class, gender, labor, and epistemological concerns in their analysis. Fortune emphasized the material roots of racial inequality and the politics of property and labor, teaching readers to analyze oppression through economic and spatial frameworks. Wells foregrounded truthfulness and the antilynching movement, demonstrating how moral exposure and narrative could confront white supremacist violence. Cooper introduced a standpoint theory that centered Black women’s perspectives, while Parsons advanced anarchist and collective approaches linking joy, labor, and autonomy. Together, these thinkers reveal to readers that resistance requires diverse strategies, extending beyond individual uplift to systemic critique and community solidarity.

In 1785, Immanuel Kant argued that ‘One may assume whatever system one wants, this much is still certain: that the currently existing races could no longer go extinct if all their mixing with each other were prevented.’ Kant thus came out strongly against ‘racial mixing.’ A little over a century later, in 1912 the German national parliament debated the introduction of race codes in the German colonies. While the German government had not instituted segregation ordinances in the colonies, individual colonial governors did so on their own. These actions led to parliamentary debates which revealed that by 1912 almost all political groups – except for the German Social Democrats – subscribed to the tenets of scientific racism. This wide-reaching consensus meant that racist concepts, among them that ‘miscegenation’ – racial mixing – should be prohibited, were publicly debated and reified by one of the most important political institutions in the German public sphere. This chapter traces the idea of race in theory and practice from Kant’s times to the end of the First World War delineating its growing prominence in Germany before and after the country’s acquisition of colonies.

The racial wealth gap, risks of housing displacement and lack of affordability that we see in unequal racial terms today has clear roots in urban renewal policies of post-WWII America. This chapter examines how the massive urbanization of Blacks in American cities as a result of the Great Migration led to race-conscious policies at the federal and local levels, entrenching segregation as a national policy and dictating the economic terms of Black-identified neighborhoods ever since. Urban renewal was a grand racial bargain. It destroyed hundreds of vulnerable communities at the same time other U.S. policies created generational wealth for non-Blacks through policies we call the American Dream. This chapter shows the decades-long accumulation of economic harms called “racial bargaining” as an example of systemic racism by modern U.S. governments.

This chapter argues that racial reckoning may mean something more to Black people than either awareness or accountability for racial inequality—it may mean material wellbeing. It tells the little-known story of 21st century Black migration away from traditional Back-identified urban spaces and suggests that these movements teach us a lot about the ingredients of racial reckoning according to Black households themselves. Millions have moved. The original research discussed here shows three trends rooted in affordability: involuntary displacement, local movement in search of better options and relocation by the most mobile for a reset of opportunities. Though some questions remain, the evidence of exodus shows how important local, state and democratic conditions are to a sense of Black wellbeing—and probably most Americans’.

This chapter investigates how the African American autobiography is in itself a unique subgenre within the genre of nonfiction. It explores how the African American autobiography intricately weaves together intensely personal elements of the authors’ lives with the larger forces of historical changes. The specific autobiographies that I discuss were works that were published between the 1940s and 1960s, a time bookended by World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. These texts are Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks, and Ezra Bells’ American Daughter. This essay explores how these writers’ lives, dreams, and dreams deferred are largely defined by their identities as Americans of color in a racially stratified America.

This chapter circulates through LA’s infamously fragmented and sprawling form, deploying fiction and poetry as itself a body of literature that functions as a kind of spatial theory in its own right, while simultaneously enabling affective understandings of space. Murphet takes to the freeway, the city’s signature spatial symbol, and finds its promise of connectivity a failed one. In the literature Murphet explores, the freeway acts to atomize and segregate communities – reifying and compounding racial and social marginality. The Watts Writers Workshop, Nina Revoyr, and Thomas Pynchon map the neighborhoods of South Central LA; Helena María Viramontes navigates the Eastside barrios; and Karen Tei Yamashita situates LA’s internal networks (and disconnections) within transnational flows of capital and labor.

This chapter explains how white supremacy evolved and adapted after the US Civil War and the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. Rather than weakening, white power structures found new ways to maintain racial hierarchies through scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics. These scientific frameworks provided intellectual justification for continued oppression while appearing objective and dispassionate. The period saw the rise of immigration restrictions, voter suppression, and systematic segregation across English-speaking societies, all designed to preserve white political and economic power. New “race perils” reflected white anxieties about demographic change, while eugenics aimed to protect racial “purity” through sterilization programs and anti-miscegenation laws. Particularly significant was the denial of capital accumulation to nonwhites through housing discrimination, job discrimination, and business restrictions. Although many voices challenged these racist theories and practices as false and cynical, they were consistently overpowered by institutional forces desperate to maintain white supremacy.

When they invested in steamboats, railroads, roads, education, communication routes, and other infrastructure, Feliciana elites advanced the national and global transportation revolution. They used enslaved convict laborers to build railroads and to work on them. Meanwhile, small numbers of immigrants moved there, including German Jews in St. Francisville. They lived alongside free Black residents, a group who also occupied a precarious position. Some free Black people acquired property and exercised limited citizenship rights. This all rested on chattel slavery, and between 1800 and 1860 this region became central to the early republic and cotton production. But in this “Age of Emancipations,” these bondspersons survived, celebrated, and sometimes resisted.

This chapter tests the claims made by proponents of replacement and superdiversity in Europe in the last 170 years. During this period, not only migrations changed, but also the opportunity structure of cities, which find themselves tossed between the nation state ideal of cultural homogeneity and globalisation. Three approaches are applied: 1) comparative (both in time and space); 2) a distinction between central place and network cities; and 3) a much broader (cross-cultural) definition of ‘migration’, including internal, return and circular moves. An overview of the major shifts in migration and mobility patterns to and from European cities leads to a reconsideration of the idea of mobility transition. Although the composition of urban populations changed drastically, cities have managed to adapt to this transition. Migrations and mobilities created a fertile soil for changes and innovations that produced new forms of liveability and resilience. There are also dark sides, including segregation and discrimination, underclass formation, criminality and gentrification that pushes out less wealthy citizens. The ‘superdiversity’ frame should be handled with care, as it tends to underestimate the homogenising force of integration through urban institutions. Accordingly, what social scientists termed the high ‘liquid’ mobility had characterised cities since the Middle Ages.

This chapter documents the development of urban mining centers along the coal frontier of Quảng Yên and their impact on the landscape and its people. It examines the French vision of turning coal towns into orderly landscapes where spatial and racial segregation, as well as medical and hygiene surveillance, could be applied. The architects of these emerging mining towns expected their newly designed urban spaces to stabilize the restless and highly mobile indigenous migrant mining workforce while also protecting the towns’ tiny European population from epidemic diseases and security threats. However, several factors reduced these urban visions to a patchwork of modernity. Racial divides, security and medical concerns, coupled with strained resources, led to the unequal distribution of living space and public resources between the European and indigenous quarters. Infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and plague, spread rapidly across the overcrowded dormitories of mine workers. In addition, crime and illicit activities flourished on the commercial streets of these towns and cities.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of American culture and anti-Indianism. It begins with a discussion of Thanksgiving, Americans’ favorite holiday, from the perspective of Wamsutta Frank James, an American Indian, activist, and leader of the Wampanoag Tribe. For Wamsutta Frank James, Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration but a day of mourning. The use of celebrations such as Thanksgiving to promote myths about US history shows the importance of American culture for Whiteness. The chapter reviews some characteristics and popular myths about American Indians and Alaska Natives, the challenges of defining culture, and culture as a system of people, places, practices, power, and purpose. It examines incorporation, appropriation, assimilation, and segregation as strategies to enforce White cultural hegemony. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on “cancel culture” and the freedom of speech defense. It ends with a discussion of Wamsutta Frank James and reimagining US culture.

During the Jim Crow era, jails were an essential tool for the enforcement of white supremacy. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the long-term goal of the civil rights movement was to destroy the Jim Crow system through a vigilant strategy of nonviolent protest that would fill the jails and shine a light on injustice. King elevated this strategy through his own arrest, incarceration, and subsequent Letter from Birmingham Jail. King’s letter offered a scathing indictment of the gradualist strategy for achieving racial justice in Alabama that had led to unsolved bombings of Black institutions, unfair treatment in the legal system, and police brutality. In response to those who criticized his presence in Birmingham for the march, he wrote that he could not “sit idly by” in Atlanta and continue to be indifferent. “Injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere.”