what is race relations essay

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c 1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

How to see race

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure.

by Gregory Smithsimon   + BIO

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation .

O ccasionally there are historical moments when the creation of race and its political meaning get spelled out explicitly. The US Constitution divided people into white, Black or Indian, which were meant to stand in for power categories: those eligible for citizenship, those subjected to brutal enslavement, and those targeted for genocide. In the first census, each resident counted as one person, each slave as three-fifths a person, and each Indian was not counted at all.

But racialisation is often more insidious. It means that we see things that don’t exist, and fail to recognise things that do. The most powerful racial category is often invisible: whiteness. The benefit of being in power is that whites can imagine that they are the norm and that only other people have race. An early US census instructed people to leave the race section blank if they were white, and indicate only if someone were something else (‘B’ for Black, ‘M’ for Mulatto). Whiteness was literally unmarked.

A brief aside on the politics of typography, in case you’re wondering: throughout this article I leave ‘white’ as is, but I capitalise ‘Black’, as well as ‘Indian’ and ‘Irish’. Why? Well, as the writer and activist W E B DuBois said in the early 20th century, during the decades-long campaign to capitalise ‘Negro’: ‘I believe that 8 million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.’ I could argue that I don’t capitalise white because ‘white’ rarely rises to the level of a cultural identification – but the real reason I don’t is because race is never fair, so it’s fitting for inequality be written into the words we use for races.

Putting whiteness under inspection shows how powerful race is, despite the instability of racial categories. For decades, ‘whiteness’ was an explicit standard for citizenship. (Blacks could technically be citizens, but enjoyed none of the legal benefits. Asians born outside the US were prohibited from becoming citizens until the mid-20th century.) Eligibility for citizenship – painted as whiteness – has remained a category since its inscription in the Constitution, but those eligible for membership in that group have changed. Groups such as Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews were popularly defined as non-citizens and non-white when they first arrived, and then became white. What we see as white today is not the same as it was 100 years ago.

Thomas Nast’s cartoons are notorious in this regard. His caricatures of Irishmen and Blacks are particularly shocking because they are a type we no longer see today. Working-class Irishmen are represented as chimpanzees in crumpled top hats and curled-up shoes. Their faces have a large dome-shaped upper lip surrounded by bushy sideburns:

Figure 1: Thomas Nast’s racist caricatures. In the second image, from 1876, Southern Blacks and Irish Democrats are compared politically and graphically, and found to be of equal weight. Inevitably, any publication that called itself the ‘Journal of Civilization’ did the contemptible boundary work of determining who was and was not civilised. Public domain

At times, Nast partnered the Irishman with an equally offensive image of a Black American, with big ‘Sambo’-style lips, perhaps a large rump and clunky bare feet. Today, few Americans have an image in their minds of what an Irish American should look like. Unless, perhaps, they meet a man named O’Connor with red hair, Americans today rarely think to themselves: ‘Of course! He looks Irish.’

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . Not all white people look the same

But Nast was not only sketching nasty caricatures of Irishmen; he was doing so in a way that would appear believable to his audience. In a similar example of invisible ethnicity, 15 per cent of Americans in 2014 reported German heritage. This ethnic group is widespread and numerous. So let me pose a simple question: what do German Americans look like? One in seven Americans are German American; how many of the German Americans you meet have you identified that way? Even more so than later immigrant groups such as Italian, Irish or Jewish, German is invisible.

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . It’s not the case that all white people look the same. My parents are both of predominantly Irish heritage. One summer, my family was travelling and had a layover in Ireland long enough for us to see the city of Dublin for the first time. We had not left the airport before my seven-year-old son said what I was already thinking: ‘Everybody here looks like grandma and grandpa!’ My family, according to my seven-year-old, looked like people from Ireland.

A few years later, I was to meet a French colleague at a busy Paris train station at rush hour, but neither of us knew what the other one looked like, and there were hundreds of people. I tried to guess which of the women entering, exiting, waiting, smoking, texting and milling about was the person I was to meet, but to no avail. Then I turned, and from a block away, through a crowd of hundreds, a woman waved directly at me. She had picked me out. I had been vaguely aware, before then, that no matter how familiar I got with Paris, I stood out on the subway: I might feel perfectly French riding the train, reading the advertisements in French and understanding the conductor, but when I got home and looked in the mirror, I knew my face was different from the diverse visages I saw in public.

Later I asked my colleague, and she said she knew I wasn’t French. How so? I asked. She scrutinised me. ‘ La mâchoire .’ It was your jaw, she said, with a satisfied smile. Until that day, I never knew there was such a thing as an Irish chin, but I had one. And no doubt, if Nast ever met my earliest American ancestors on the street, he’d know they looked Irish too. We don’t see Irish anymore, we don’t recognise it, we no longer caricature it. But we could.

T he racial category of Asian is just as unstable and entangled with political power as whiteness is. The US census started counting ‘Chinese’ back in 1870 (with no other category for people from the continent of Asia). Around the same time, the census started counting a similarly excluded group, American Indians, which the Constitution had designated as ripe for expropriation. Tellingly, Indian racial categories were unstable from the start: after not being counted at all, Indians were then included but tallied in the ‘white’ column – except in areas where there were large numbers of Indians, where they became their own category.

For Asians, as Paul Schor points out in his fascinating history Counting Americans (2017), the US government counted Chinese and Japanese but still left the rest of Asia blank, adding ‘Filipino, Hindu, and Korean’ in the 20th century. For something so clearly created by people, lists of racial groups are never comprehensive and typically ill-defined. Looking across the Eurasian continent, the US government today is still vague about where white ends and Asian begins. People in the US who were born east of Greece and west of Thailand are often unsure which boxes to check in the US census every 10 years. Like storm-borne waves or wind-blown sand dunes, race is a daunting obstacle that shifts and changes.

During the Second World War, China was a US ally, while Japan was an enemy. The US military decided it necessary to identify racial differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. In a series of cartoon illustrations, they tried to educate American soldiers about what to look for – what to see – in order to distinguish a Japanese solider who might be trying to blend in among a Chinese population.

Figure 2: US propaganda for soldiers sought to disseminate physical differences between Chinese and Japanese people. Public domain

Today, the ‘How to Spot a Jap’ leaflets are an offensive novelty – used either to illustrate the history of racist stereotyping or sold on postcards as ironic curiosities. But they can also be examined in another way. In The Civilizing Process (1978), the sociological theorist Norbert Elias studied books on manners from the European Renaissance to understand the process of the creation of what he called habitus . Manners that we see as utterly natural and inevitable today, like not blowing one’s nose at the table, or eating off the serving spoon, or belching or farting in public, are, in fact, socially constructed and learned behaviours.

At the historical moment at which they were introduced, books of manners were required to teach what is today utterly obvious to adults. They make for incredible reading. In his chapter ‘On Blowing One’s Nose’, for instance, Elias quotes a ‘precept for gentlemen’ that matter-of-factly explains: ‘When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.’ ‘Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat.’ ‘It is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth.’ Some of the recommendations are as poetic as they are graphic: ‘Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.’ It appears that actions that seem completely natural had to be taught explicitly.

Genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics

The ‘How to Spot a Jap’ flyers were printed to serve much the same function as the manners books that Elias studied. They tried to create and implant a racial habitus that distinguished the Japanese from the Chinese. That Second World War poster looks offensive today – crude, reductionist, insulting – and it is. We think that recognising such ridiculousness makes us less racist than the people who made it. It doesn’t. It merely means that we have different racial categories than in 1942.

Chinese and Japanese people look no more ‘similar’ or ‘different’ from one another than Irish Americans do from French Americans. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences as a matter of statistical distribution, but only that what we think we know about race has to be learned, and that what people ‘know’ and ‘see’ as salient and obvious changes over time. Most Americans cannot distinguish a white American of Irish origin versus one of French origin walking down the street, yet they hardly need pamphlets explaining what to look for to tell if someone is white or Black. If the distinction between Japanese and Chinese had remained as significant in the US today as it was to US soldiers during the Second World War, many people would see it as similarly self-evident.

On-the-street racial distinctions don’t have to be ‘perfect’. People often don’t recognise the author Malcolm Gladwell as Black, although he is; other times whites are mistaken for Blacks. For the purposes of making or unmaking a racial difference, genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics. The same two groups can be visibly different racially or indistinguishable racially, depending on the political context and power relations by which they’re categorised.

F rancis Galton was a pioneer in modern statistics. But he was also a eugenicist. Among other things, Galton became notorious for photos in the late 19th century that purported to reveal the ‘Jewish type’. At the time, people believed that Irish, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese or German denoted races. When Jews were a race, people thought that they could tell who was Jewish by looking at them. Today, many Jewish people recoil at the idea that there is a Jewish ‘race’, and find the suggestion that there is a Jewish ‘look’ inherently racist. At various times, then, the US Army, Thomas Nast and the father of the statistical method of regression analysis all believed that there were visually distinct and observable races that many Americans today would be generally unable to identify – certainly not with the level of certainty they’d feel with respect to racial categories such as Caucasian, African American, Latino or Asian.

I suspect that a visitor from a planet without race would have a very difficult time slotting anyone on Earth into the racial categories we use today. If they were asked to group people visually, there is no statistical possibility that they’d use the same set of arbitrary boxes, and even if these categories were described for them in detail, they would probably not sort actual people in the same way as the modern US does.

That we think we see race naturally, when in fact it’s socially constructed, is the third eye through which we see the world. The census prediction that the US will be majority minority is less a conclusion than a question: ‘What future will immigrants of colour build in the US?’ The answer involves not just changes that transpire between one group and another, but changes to the membership of those groups and their symbolic meaning. In response to demographic shifts, the very boundaries of whiteness are likely to shift, as indeed they’ve done before.

In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa

In The History of White People (2011), Nell Irvin Painter argues that the idea of ‘whiteness’ has expanded several times to include more and more people. First came the Irish and previously ‘suspect’ non-Protestants, who ‘gained’ whiteness in the late 1800s. The next great expansion of whiteness came with the social upheaval and physical relocation of both servicemen and migrating industrial workers during the Second World War. In the war economy, groups including Italians, Jews and Mexicans became upwardly mobile, and sought to present themselves in allegiance with Anglo-Saxon beauty ideals (the only Jewish Miss America was crowned in 1945) – all of which helped to recast them as ‘white’. The narrative of white inclusivity continued from the Roosevelt era into the postwar period. Finally, intermarriage eventually dissolved previous notions of racial boundaries. Few white Americans could claim a single national race (Swedish, German, French) with any confidence, and whiteness could no longer sustain the idea of nation-based races. For Painter, this most recent change closed the book on any scientific basis for race, and helped to make the US a country where people are much more mixed, across old racial boundaries, than ever before.

Perhaps this mixing means that the US is finally warming to multiracial identity. But if that is indeed happening, it’s not because of demographics, but because of the tireless efforts of activists who continue to fight racism and racial segregation. Movements for racial justice succeed not simply because of demographic shifts but because racial privileges cannot justify themselves in the face of an organised alternative. Many countries have been minority white yet held on to whiteness; to the extent that whiteness meant citizenship, these were states that were ruled by a minority and oversaw the hyper-exploitation of a much larger part of the country. In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa, or Brazil, or Guatemala, where a small light-skinned group has enjoyed privileges at the expense of many more who are excluded.

The path to justice therefore involves attacking the prerogative to categorise people in order to justify their exploitation or colonisation. That means acknowledging and challenging the basis of racial categories. It’s not about a token embrace of multicultural colour: it’s about power, and power is far too wily for us to expect it to stand still and be overtaken by demographic change. We need to confront the force of racial privilege no matter who inhabits the privileged caste at any given moment. It’s no good imagining that innate human diversity will render the system powerless.

T he US shift towards majority non-whiteness is not destiny, but it is an opportunity. Painter notes that when external conditions change, it becomes possible to imagine different racial hierarchies. The geographical and social remixing of the Second World War cooked down the diverse European identities in the US into a single racial category of ‘white’. Likewise, Asian immigrants occupied one role when Asian immigration was largely working class, West Coast, limited in numbers, and male, as it was at the end of the 19th century. But the racial constraints on Asian Americans shifted when immigration law came to favour professionals, and brought middle- and working-class people, women and men, in larger numbers than before to more US cities.

Using shifting social situations to upend racial hierarchies is not just about challenging racism, but race itself. This doesn’t mean the disingenuous denial of race when racism still very much exists, but a collective challenge to its right to determine our lives. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks to take away the police’s prerogative to use violence against African Americans with no legal sanctions; success would undermine an important means of maintaining racial segregation and inequality. What would it mean, once and for all, to bury the shameful, misplaced pride some white people have for the South’s role in the Civil War, and acknowledge instead the irredeemable mistakes of their forefathers? What would it mean to frankly acknowledge each nation’s racial past, and think about what reparations would set us on a path to greater prosperity? Race is neither inevitable nor something we can wish away. Instead, we must take advantage of the instability in what we perceive, and redistribute the power that perpetuates race.

Race never stays still. As the sociologist Richard Alba pointed out in The Washington Post last month, the prediction that the US will be majority non-white by 2044 relies on a definition of race that is static, and doesn’t acknowledge the surprising reality that people’s races change. Nearly 10 million people listed their racial identification differently on the 2010 census than they had in 2000. Alba criticises the census for ‘binary thinking’ which counts anyone with Hispanic heritage as Hispanic, and through a quirk in the census questions, effectively ignores any other racial identity that they could claim. ‘[A] majority-minority society should be seen as a hypothesis, not a foreordained result,’ Alba wrote, of the 2044 claim. This is important, because when it comes to fighting racism, we can’t rely on demographic shifts to do the work for us. Instead, if we recognise that race looks solid but is shifting, we can find additional ways to destabilise the structures of racial inequality.

Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it. The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.

This Essay is adapted from Cause … And How it Doesn’t Always Equal Effect (2018) by Gregory Smithsimon, published by Melville House Books.

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Subscribe to governance weekly, abigail thernstrom and at abigail thernstrom senior fellow, manhattan institute stephan thernstrom st stephan thernstrom.

March 1, 1998

• 16 min read

Let’s start with a few contrasting numbers.

60 and 2.2. In 1940, 60 percent of employed black women worked as domestic servants; today the number is down to 2.2 percent, while 60 percent hold white- collar jobs.

44 and 1. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbor; today the figure is 1 percent.

18 and 86. In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a friend who was black; today 86 percent say they do, while 87 percent of blacks assert they have white friends.

Progress is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past half-century. And thus it’s news that more than 40 percent of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class. Forty-two percent own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75 percent if we look just at black married couples. Black two-parent families earn only 13 percent less than those who are white. Almost a third of the black population lives in suburbia.

Because these are facts the media seldom report, the black underclass continues to define black America in the view of much of the public. Many assume blacks live in ghettos, often in high-rise public housing projects. Crime and the welfare check are seen as their main source of income. The stereotype crosses racial lines. Blacks are even more prone than whites to exaggerate the extent to which African Americans are trapped in inner-city poverty. In a 1991 Gallup poll, about one-fifth of all whites, but almost half of black respondents, said that at least three out of four African Americans were impoverished urban residents. And yet, in reality, blacks who consider themselves to be middle class outnumber those with incomes below the poverty line by a wide margin.

A Fifty-Year March out of Poverty

Fifty years ago most blacks were indeed trapped in poverty, although they did not reside in inner cities. When Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944, most blacks lived in the South and on the land as laborers and sharecroppers. (Only one in eight owned the land on which he worked.) A trivial 5 percent of black men nationally were engaged in nonmanual, white-collar work of any kind; the vast majority held ill-paid, insecure, manual jobs—jobs that few whites would take. As already noted, six out of ten African-American women were household servants who, driven by economic desperation, often worked 12-hour days for pathetically low wages. Segregation in the South and discrimination in the North did create a sheltered market for some black businesses (funeral homes, beauty parlors, and the like) that served a black community barred from patronizing “white” establishments. But the number was minuscule.

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Beginning in the 1940s, however, deep demographic and economic change, accompanied by a marked shift in white racial attitudes, started blacks down the road to much greater equality. New Deal legislation, which set minimum wages and hours and eliminated the incentive of southern employers to hire low-wage black workers, put a damper on further industrial development in the region. In addition, the trend toward mechanized agriculture and a diminished demand for American cotton in the face of international competition combined to displace blacks from the land.

As a consequence, with the shortage of workers in northern manufacturing plants following the outbreak of World War II, southern blacks in search of jobs boarded trains and buses in a Great Migration that lasted through the mid-1960s. They found what they were looking for: wages so strikingly high that in 1953 the average income for a black family in the North was almost twice that of those who remained in the South. And through much of the 1950s wages rose steadily and unemployment was low.

Thus by 1960 only one out of seven black men still labored on the land, and almost a quarter were in white-collar or skilled manual occupations. Another 24 percent had semiskilled factory jobs that meant membership in the stable working class, while the proportion of black women working as servants had been cut in half. Even those who did not move up into higher-ranking jobs were doing much better.

A decade later, the gains were even more striking. From 1940 to 1970, black men cut the income gap by about a third, and by 1970 they were earning (on average) roughly 60 percent of what white men took in. The advancement of black women was even more impressive. Black life expectancy went up dramatically, as did black homeownership rates. Black college enrollment also rose—by 1970 to about 10 percent of the total, three times the prewar figure.

In subsequent years these trends continued, although at a more leisurely pace. For instance, today more than 30 percent of black men and nearly 60 percent of black women hold white-collar jobs. Whereas in 1970 only 2.2 percent of American physicians were black, the figure is now 4.5 percent. But while the fraction of black families with middle-class incomes rose almost 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1970, it has inched up only another 10 points since then.

Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work

Rapid change in the status of blacks for several decades followed by a definite slowdown that begins just when affirmative action policies get their start: that story certainly seems to suggest that racial preferences have enjoyed an inflated reputation. “There’s one simple reason to support affirmative action,” an op-ed writer in the New York Times argued in 1995. “It works.” That is the voice of conventional wisdom.

In fact, not only did significant advances pre-date the affirmative action era, but the benefits of race-conscious politics are not clear. Important differences (a slower overall rate of economic growth, most notably) separate the pre-1970 and post-1970 periods, making comparison difficult.

We know only this: some gains are probably attributable to race-conscious educational and employment policies. The number of black college and university professors more than doubled between 1970 and 1990; the number of physicians tripled; the number of engineers almost quadrupled; and the number of attorneys increased more than sixfold. Those numbers undoubtedly do reflect the fact that the nation’s professional schools changed their admissions criteria for black applicants, accepting and often providing financial aid to African-American students whose academic records were much weaker than those of many white and Asian-American applicants whom these schools were turning down. Preferences “worked” for these beneficiaries, in that they were given seats in the classroom that they would not have won in the absence of racial double standards.

On the other hand, these professionals make up a small fraction of the total black middle class. And their numbers would have grown without preferences, the historical record strongly suggests. In addition, the greatest economic gains for African Americans since the early 1960s were in the years 1965 to 1975 and occurred mainly in the South, as economists John J. Donahue III and James Heckman have found. In fact, Donahue and Heckman discovered “virtually no improvement” in the wages of black men relative to those of white men outside of the South over the entire period from 1963 to 1987, and southern gains, they concluded, were mainly due to the powerful antidiscrimination provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With respect to federal, state, and municipal set-asides, as well, the jury is still out. In 1994 the state of Maryland decided that at least 10 percent of the contracts it awarded would go to minority- and female-owned firms. It more than met its goal. The program therefore “worked” if the goal was merely the narrow one of dispensing cash to a particular, designated group. But how well do these sheltered businesses survive long-term without extraordinary protection from free-market competition? And with almost 30 percent of black families still living in poverty, what is their trickle-down effect? On neither score is the picture reassuring. Programs are often fraudulent, with white contractors offering minority firms 15 percent of the profit with no obligation to do any of the work. Alternatively, set-asides enrich those with the right connections. In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the main effect of the ordinance was a marriage of political convenience—a working alliance between the economically privileged of both races. The white business elite signed on to a piece-of-the-pie for blacks in order to polish its image as socially conscious and secure support for the downtown revitalization it wanted. Black politicians used the bargain to suggest their own importance to low-income constituents for whom the set-asides actually did little. Neither cared whether the policy in fact provided real economic benefits—which it didn’t.

Why Has the Engine of Progress Stalled?

In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged. Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30 percent of black families still live below the poverty line. “There are those who say, my fellow Americans, that even good affirmative action programs are no longer needed,” President Clinton said in July 1995. But “let us consider,” he went on, that “the unemployment rate for African Americans remains about twice that of whites.” Racial preferences are the president’s answer to persistent inequality, although a quarter-century of affirmative action has done nothing whatever to close the unemployment gap.

Persistent inequality is obviously serious, and if discrimination were the primary problem, then race-conscious remedies might be appropriate. But while white racism was central to the story in 1964, today the picture is much more complicated. Thus while blacks and whites now graduate at the same rate from high school today and are almost equally likely to attend college, on average they are not equally educated. That is, looking at years of schooling in assessing the racial gap in family income tells us little about the cognitive skills whites and blacks bring to the job market. And cognitive skills obviously affect earnings.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the nation’s report card on what American students attending elementary and secondary schools know. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects. A study of 26- to 33-year-old men who held full-time jobs in 1991 thus found that when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites. But when word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed. Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests.

Other research suggests much the same point. For instance, the work of economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy has demonstrated the increasing importance of cognitive skills in our changing economy. Employers in firms like Honda now require employees who can read and do math problems at the ninth-grade level at a minimum. And yet the 1992 NAEP math tests, for example, revealed that only 22 percent of African-American high school seniors but 58 percent of their white classmates were numerate enough for such firms to consider hiring them. And in reading, 47 percent of whites in 1992 but just 18 percent of African Americans could handle the printed word well enough to be employable in a modern automobile plant. Murnane and Levy found a clear impact on income. Not years spent in school but strong skills made for high long-term earnings.

The Widening Skills Gap

Why is there such a glaring racial gap in levels of educational attainment? It is not easy to say. The gap, in itself, is very bad news, but even more alarming is the fact that it has been widening in recent years. In 1971, the average African-American 17-year-old could read no better than the typical white child who was six years younger. The racial gap in math in 1973 was 4.3 years; in science it was 4.7 years in 1970. By the late 1980s, however, the picture was notably brighter. Black students in their final year of high school were only 2.5 years behind whites in both reading and math and 2.1 years behind on tests of writing skills.

Had the trends of those years continued, by today black pupils would be performing about as well as their white classmates. Instead, black progress came to a halt, and serious backsliding began. Between 1988 and 1994, the racial gap in reading grew from 2.5 to 3.9 years; between 1990 and 1994, the racial gap in math increased from 2.5 to 3.4 years. In both science and writing, the racial gap has widened by a full year.

There is no obvious explanation for this alarming turnaround. The early gains doubtless had much to do with the growth of the black middle class, but the black middle class did not suddenly begin to shrink in the late 1980s. The poverty rate was not dropping significantly when educational progress was occurring, nor was it on the increase when the racial gap began once again to widen. The huge rise in out-of-wedlock births and the steep and steady decline in the proportion of black children growing up with two parents do not explain the fluctuating educational performance of African-American children. It is well established that children raised in single-parent families do less well in school than others, even when all other variables, including income, are controlled. But the disintegration of the black nuclear family—presciently noted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan as early as 1965—was occurring rapidly in the period in which black scores were rising, so it cannot be invoked as the main explanation as to why scores began to fall many years later.

Some would argue that the initial educational gains were the result of increased racial integration and the growth of such federal compensatory education programs as Head Start. But neither desegregation nor compensatory education seems to have increased the cognitive skills of the black children exposed to them. In any case, the racial mix in the typical school has not changed in recent years, and the number of students in compensatory programs and the dollars spent on them have kept going up.

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What about changes in the curriculum and patterns of course selection by students? The educational reform movement that began in the late 1970s did succeed in pushing students into a “New Basics” core curriculum that included more English, science, math, and social studies courses. And there is good reason to believe that taking tougher courses contributed to the temporary rise in black test scores. But this explanation, too, nicely fits the facts for the period before the late 1980s but not the very different picture thereafter. The number of black students going through “New Basics” courses did not decline after 1988, pulling down their NAEP scores.

We are left with three tentative suggestions. First, the increased violence and disorder of inner-city lives that came with the introduction of crack cocaine and the drug-related gang wars in the mid-1980s most likely had something to do with the reversal of black educational progress. Chaos in the streets and within schools affects learning inside and outside the classroom.

In addition, an educational culture that has increasingly turned teachers into guides who help children explore whatever interests them may have affected black academic performance as well. As educational critic E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has pointed out, the “deep aversion to and contempt for factual knowledge that pervade the thinking of American educators” means that students fail to build the “intellectual capital” that is the foundation of all further learning. That will be particularly true of those students who come to school most academically disadvantaged—those whose homes are not, in effect, an additional school. The deficiencies of American education hit hardest those most in need of education.

And yet in the name of racial sensitivity, advocates for minority students too often dismiss both common academic standards and standardized tests as culturally biased and judgmental. Such advocates have plenty of company. Christopher Edley, Jr., professor of law at Harvard and President Clinton’s point man on affirmative action, for instance, has allied himself with testing critics, labeling preferences the tool colleges are forced to use “to correct the problems we’ve inflicted on ourselves with our testing standards.” Such tests can be abolished—or standards lowered—but once the disparity in cognitive skills becomes less evident, it is harder to correct.

Closing that skills gap is obviously the first task if black advancement is to continue at its once-fast pace. On the map of racial progress, education is the name of almost every road. Raise the level of black educational performance, and the gap in college graduation rates, in attendance at selective professional schools, and in earnings is likely to close as well. Moreover, with educational parity, the whole issue of racial preferences disappears.

The Road to True Equality

Black progress over the past half-century has been impressive, conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding. And yet the nation has many miles to go on the road to true racial equality. “I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories, but as I look around I see that even educated whites and African American…have lost hope in equality,” Thurgood Marshall said in 1992. A year earlier The Economist magazine had reported the problem of race as one of “shattered dreams.” In fact, all hope has not been “lost,” and “shattered” was much too strong a word, but certainly in the 1960s the civil rights community failed to anticipate just how tough the voyage would be. (Thurgood Marshall had envisioned an end to all school segregation within five years of the Supreme Court s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Many blacks, particularly, are now discouraged. A 1997 Gallup poll found a sharp decline in optimism since 1980; only 33 percent of blacks (versus 58 percent of whites) thought both the quality of life for blacks and race relations had gotten better.

Thus, progress—by many measures seemingly so clear—is viewed as an illusion, the sort of fantasy to which intellectuals are particularly prone. But the ahistorical sense of nothing gained is in itself bad news. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all our efforts as a nation to resolve the “American dilemma” have been in vain—if we’ve been spinning our wheels in the rut of ubiquitous and permanent racism, as Derrick Bell, Andrew Hacker, and others argue—then racial equality is a hopeless task, an unattainable ideal. If both blacks and whites understand and celebrate the gains of the past, however, we will move forward with the optimism, insight, and energy that further progress surely demands.

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June 6, 2024

William H. Frey, Chiraag Bains, Andre M. Perry, Robert Maxim, Manann Donoghoe, Carol Graham

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Nicol Turner Lee

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The dictionary's definition of race

Each of the major groupings into which humankind is considered (in various theories or contexts) to be divided on the basis of physical characteristics or shared ancestry.

The notion of race is a social construct designed to divide people into groups ranked as superior and inferior. The scientific consensus is that race, in this sense, has no biological basis – we are all one race, the human race. Racial identity , however, is very real. And, in a racialized society like the United States, everyone is assigned a racial identity whether they are aware of it or not.

Race as Social Construction

​The dictionary’s definition of race is incomplete and misses the complexity of impact on lived experiences. It is important to acknowledge race is a social fabrication, created to classify people on the arbitrary basis of skin color and other physical features. Although race has no genetic or scientific basis, the concept of race is important and consequential. Societies use race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression.

American Anthropological Association  states that "the 'racial' worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent." To understand more about race as a social construct in the United States, read the AAPA  statement on race and racism .

Learn more about race as it relates to human genetics In the Teaching Tolerance report, “Race Does Not Equal DNA” 

What is Racial identity?

• Racial identity is externally imposed: “ How do others perceive me? ”
• Racial identity is also internally constructed: “ How do I identify myself? ”

Understanding how our identities and experiences have been shaped by race is vital. We are all awarded certain privileges and or disadvantages because of our race whether or not we are conscious of it.

Race matters. Race matters … because of persistent racial inequality in society - inequality that cannot be ignored. Justice Sonya Sotomayor United States Supreme Court

Developmental models of racial identity

Many sociologists and psychologists have identified that there are similar patterns every individual goes through when recognizing their racial identity. While these patterns help us understand the link between race and identity, creating one’s racial identity is a fluid and nonlinear process that varies for every person and group.

Think of these categories of Racial Identity Development [PDF] as stations along a journey of the continual evolution of your racial identity. Your personal experiences, family, community, workplaces, the aging process, and political and social events – all play a role in understanding our own racial identity. During this process, people move between a desire to "fit in" to dominant norms, to a questioning of one's own identity and that of others. It includes feelings of confusion and often introspection, as well as moments of celebration of self and others. You may begin at any point on this chart and move in any direction – sometimes on the same day! Recognizing the station you are in helps you understand who you are.

What is ideology?

Ideology is a system of ideas, ideals, and manner of thinking that form the basis for decision making, often regarding economic or political theory and policy

No One is Colorblind to Race

The concept of race is intimately connected to our lives and has serious implications. It operates in real and definitive ways that confer benefits and privileges to some and withholds them from others.  Ignoring race means ignoring the establishment of racial hierarchies in society and the injustices these hierarchies have created and continue to reinforce.

• READ: “ Children Are Not Colorblind: How Young Children Learn Race ,” by Erin N. Winkler, Ph.D.

Understand More About the Dangers of Ignoring Race

Read this article, “ When you say you 'don't see race,' you’re ignoring racism, not helping to solve it. ”

Reflection:

• What are some experiences or identities that are central to who you are? How do you feel when they are ignored or “not seen”?

• The author in this article points out how people often use nonvisual cues to determine race. What does this reveal to us about the validity of pretending not to see race?

Either America will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States W.E.B. DuBois

RACISM = Racial Prejudice (Unfounded Beliefs + Irrational Fear) + Institutional Power 

Racism, like smog, swirls around us and permeates American society. It can be intentional, clear and direct or it can be expressed in more subtle ways that the perpetrator might not even be aware of.

Racism is a system of advantage based on race that involves systems and institutions, not just individual mindsets and actions. The critical variable in racism is the impact (outcomes) not the intent and operates at multiple levels including individual racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and structural racism. 

• Interpersonal racism ​ occurs between individuals and includes public expressions of racism, often involving slurs, biases, hateful words or actions, or exclusion.

Source: Adapted from Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center, and Racial Equity Tools by OneTILT

Breaking the Silence Silence on issues of race hurts everyone. Reluctance to directly address the impact of race can result in a lack of connection between people, a loss of our society’s potential and progress, and an escalation of fear and violence. Silence around other issues of identity can also have the same negative impact on society. Silence on race keeps us all from understanding and learning. We can break the silence by being proactive - by learning, reflecting and having courageous conversations with ourselves and others.

VIDEO: Watch below as Franchesca Ramsey discusses racism on MTV’s Decoded (warning: adult language):

Take a moment to reflect

Let's Think

• How are you thinking about your own racialized identity after learning more about race?

• Ask a friend who has a different racial identity than yours to discuss how cultivating a positive sense of racial identity about yourself and others can interrupt racism at every level (personally, socially, and institutionally)?

For concerned citizens:

• Try this exercise to recognize the everyday opportunities you may have that can promote racial equity: Exercise on Choice Points .
• Activity: Try this group activity for talking about race effectively

For Families and Educators: Here are some ways to address race and racism in your classroom:

• Teaching young children about race: a guide for families and teachers
• Tipsfor talking to children about race

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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.

Further Reading

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Historical Archives

Reflections on race: essays from the archives.

Dan Gediman

Gediman explores the 'This I Believe' archives.

Dan Gediman, executive producer of the current This I Believe series, says listening to essays from the 1950s helped him "understand the courage required for blacks and whites to follow the moral compass in their souls." Nubar Alexanian hide caption

1950s Essays on Race

I was born in 1961 and raised in suburban Boston. For me, racism and segregation were stories in the news but not something I had any direct experience with. In my neighborhood, there were two black families, and I went to a largely integrated school all the way through high school. I don't recall hearing any of my friends, nor indeed any of the other kids at school, refer to any of the black kids in a demeaning or insulting way.

Years later, as an adult, I moved to Louisville, Ky., where I still live. Like many American cities, Louisville had its urban race riots in the 1960s and protests over forced busing in the 1970s. But by the time I moved there in the mid-1980s, that unrest was largely a thing of the past.

So racism isn't something I've had much direct contact with in my life — until I encountered a dusty, old book called This I Believe, which was an anthology of essays from a popular program on CBS radio in the 1950s. The book, and audio recordings I found later, featured the stories of people, black and white, who had lived through dramatically different times than I had. There was an essayist who told of his grandfather, who was a slave. Another mentioned his grandfather fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

And I realized that even with all the history books I had read and all the documentaries I had seen, I really had no idea what it had been like to live in America during the Jim Crow era. Yet in listening to these powerful statements of belief, I heard history come to life: people living in segregation talking about segregation.

"Forty-six years ago, I was born a Negro in America," Harry McAlpin begins. "For this, of course, I was not responsible, though I am proud of it."

When he wrote his essay, McAlpin was an attorney in Louisville. He had been a distinguished newspaperman and the first African-American journalist to attend a White House press conference during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. McAlpin continues:

It takes a great deal of patience to accept the customs of some sections and communities, to try to fit into the crossword puzzle of living the illogic of a practice that will permit me to ride on the public buses without segregation in seating but deny me the right to rent a private room to myself in a hotel ... or the illogic of a practice which will accept me and require me to fight on the same battlefield, but deny me the right to ride in the same coach on a train.

The stories McAlpin and other This I Believe essayists told gave me a much better understanding — at a visceral, gut level — of what it was like to be an African-American in the 1950s. Even though life for many blacks hadn't changed much since Reconstruction, there was hope that the burgeoning civil rights movement would improve race relations in the United States — maybe not immediately, but in the years to come.

"I look at my children now and know that I must still prepare them to meet obstacles and prejudices," says Jackie Robison, the first black to play Major League Baseball:

But I can tell them, too, that they will never face some of these prejudices because other people have gone before them. And to myself I can say that, because progress is unalterable, many of today's dogmas will have vanished by the time they grow into adults. I can say to my children: There is a chance for you. No guarantee, but a chance.

Even with the day-to-day indignities of racism, some black Americans saw the occasional sign of progress. Billy Eckstine was a popular jazz and pop vocalist in the 1940s and '50s. His big band nurtured the early careers of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Eckstine explains:

Recently, I made my first tour of the deep South in many years. As a Negro entertainer, I had some misgivings about the tour. But instead of supporting the wholesale segregation and bigotry of the past, I found people were genuinely interested in bettering their attitudes. They recognized the errors of the past and were anxious to correct them. A policeman in Alabama stopped me on the street one day and asked, "How they treating you down here?" When I told him I had no complaints, he replied, "That's good, we're trying hard." ... It proved to me once again that there is a basic goodness in all people. Warmth and decency don't belong to any one race. ... I don't kid myself that it's easy to accept everyone as a friend. My faith in people has been shaken at times by the cruelty and thoughtlessness of some individuals. ... But human dignity has never failed to win whenever it came to a showdown. That's why I have unfailing faith in the future.

Not all African-Americans in this period were as hopeful as Billy Eckstine and Jackie Robinson, whose fame gave them advantages other blacks likely didn't share. The experiences of Will Thomas may have been more common to the times. Born in Kansas City, Thomas traveled the country earning money at jobs ranging from newspaper writing to boxing. By 1946, though, Thomas had become so disgusted with how he had been treated that he decided to renounce his citizenship and move his family to Haiti, where he hoped they would escape racial prejudice. Thomas admits:

When I reached this point, I had become an unbeliever in both God and country, for it seemed to me that racial segregation, and all that it implied, was as rigid on the spiritual as on the temporal plane. ... I had condemned my country and my religion because I had only viewed what seemed wrong in both. ... But when I was able to remove the blinds of my own prejudice, it became clear that these failures, these flaws in church and state, were human failures, human flaws, and not mere self-willed bigotry. And that within each, there were and always had been many who had worked and fought for what was right. I think the core of my earlier bitterness had been the conviction that I had been denied my birthright of human dignity. But I know now that is something which cannot be given or taken away by man.

Blacks weren't the only people considering their place in society. There are quite a few This I Believe essays from the 1950s that feature white Americans talking about race relations. One story came from Amy Vanderbilt, the author of the bestseller Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette. Vanderbilt recalls:

When my eldest son was a little boy, we were on a Fifth Avenue bus. He kept turning around to smile at someone I couldn't see. When we got off, this person did, too, and I saw that she was an elderly Negro. "Your little boy likes me," she said with some surprise. "He don't seem to notice any difference in me at all, like I was his own grandmother. How's that?" "Because," I replied, "he's never been taught by the grown-ups around him that there is a difference." Children uncoached in prejudice and class-consciousness enjoy people for what they are. As they mature, our society soon sets them right as to their place in it. More often than not, they accept this place without question, and thereby shut themselves off from warm human contact with many of their fellows.

In listening to these essays, it became clear that many white people — or at least the ones Murrow invited to appear on his "This I Believe" series — sincerely wished that circumstances would improve for African-Americans. But few whites had as much power to actually effect change as President Harry S. Truman. The grandson of slave owners, Truman desegregated the armed services in 1948. Many people believe that to be one of the first major successes of the civil rights movement. He recorded his "This I Believe" essay in 1953 shortly after leaving office, and he used his statement to call Americans to action:

I believe that our Bill of Rights must be implemented in fact. It is the duty of every government — state, local or federal — to preserve the rights of the individual. I believe that a civil rights program, as we must practice it today, involves not so much the protection of the people against the government, but the protection of the people by the government. And for this reason we must make the federal government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans. I believe that we should remove the last barriers which stand between millions of our people and their birthright. There can be no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry, or religion, or race or color. I believe that to inspire the people of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy, and to restore hope to those who have already lost their civil liberties, we must correct the remaining imperfections in our own democracy. We know the way — we only need the will.

The period when these essays first aired was a time of tremendous fear and upheaval for whites and blacks alike. The Supreme Court was releasing its decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and a black teenager named Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. It was a time that challenged people to walk the talk of their supposed religious and political beliefs, rather than continue to accept the status quo they were born into. This was part of the history lesson that Louisvillian Harry McAlpin taught me in the conclusion of his essay for This I Believe :

It takes a great deal of courage to put principals of right and justice ahead of economic welfare and well being, to stand up and challenge established and accepted practices, which amount to arbitrary exercise of power by petty politicians in office or by the police. Trying to live up to my beliefs often has subjected me to both praise and criticism. How wise I have been in my choices may be known only to God. I shall continue to pray, therefore, a prayer I learned in the distant past, which I now count as my own: "God, give me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

By airing essays like this on national radio, Edward R. Murrow and his producers were encouraging Americans to reconsider long-held laws and social customs. By bravely stating their beliefs in such a public forum, the essayists were giving voice to a growing movement for civil rights in the country. Listening back to these old This I Believe programs more than 50 years later has helped me understand the courage required for blacks and whites to follow the moral compass in their souls.

Dan Gediman is executive producer of This I Believe.

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Book contents

• The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Development of Sociology
• Part II Sociological Theory
• Part III Sociological Research Methods
• Part IV Culture and Socialization
• Part V Social Structure and the Organization of Society
• Part VI Social Inequality and Diversity
• Chapter 23 Sociological Perspectives on Economic Inequality
• Chapter 24 The Sociology of Race and Ethnic Relations
• Chapter 25 The Sociology of Gender
• Chapter 26 The Sociology of Sexuality
• Chapter 27 The Sociology of Disability
• Part VII Social Institutions
• Part VIII Social Problems and Deviant Behavior
• Part IX Locality, Geography, and the Environment
• Part X Social Change

Chapter 24 - The Sociology of Race and Ethnic Relations

from Part VI - Social Inequality and Diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2017

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• The Sociology of Race and Ethnic Relations
• By Adalberto Aguirre,
• Edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen
• Book: The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology
• Online publication: 21 September 2017
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316418376.025

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• On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart
• 2. Views of race relations

Table of Contents

• 1. Demographic trends and economic well-being
• 3. Discrimination and racial inequality
• 4. Achieving racial equality
• 5. Personal experiences with discrimination
• 6. Views of community, family life and personal finances
• Acknowledgments
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There’s no consensus among American adults about the state of race relations in the U.S.: 48% say race relations are generally bad, and 44% say they are generally good. Similarly, when asked about the amount of attention paid to race and racial issues in the country these days, about as many say there is too much (36%) as say there is too little (35%) attention, while 26% say there is about the right amount of attention paid to these issues.

Overall, relatively few Americans think race relations are headed in a positive direction. Only 19% say race relations are improving, while about four-in-ten say they are getting worse (38%), and a similar share say things are staying about the same (41%). Those who already think race relations are bad are particularly likely to say things are getting even worse.

And there is no widespread agreement on how to make things better. When asked about the best approach to improving race relations, 55% of Americans say it’s more important for people to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common, while fewer (31%) say the focus should be on what makes each group unique.

Opinions on these fundamental questions about race relations– where we are, how they can be improved, and how much attention the issue warrants – are sharply divided along racial lines. Blacks and whites are also divided in their views of Obama’s handling of race relations. Among whites, about as many say the president has made progress toward improving race relations (28%) as say he has made things worse (32%). In contrast, 51% of blacks say Obama has made progress on this issue; just 5% believe he has made race relations worse.

Blacks and Hispanics more likely to say race relations are bad

Views about the current state of race relations vary considerably across racial and ethnic lines. While whites are about equally likely to say race relations are good (46%) as to say they are bad (45%), the assessments of blacks and Hispanics are decidedly negative. About six-in-ten (61%) blacks say race relations in this country are bad, while 34% say they are good. Similarly, far more Hispanics say race relations are bad (58%) than say they are good (37%).

Roughly half or more of black adults across demographic groups express negative views about the current state of race relations. Among whites, views are also fairly consistent across gender, age, education and income groups, but opinions divide along political lines. About six-in-ten (59%) white Democrats say race relations in the U.S. are generally bad, while about a third (34%) say they’re good. In contrast, white Republicans are about evenly divided between those who say race relations are bad (46%) and those who say they’re good (48%). Among white independents, 49% offer positive assessments, while 39% say race relations are bad.

Overall, views of race relations are more positive now than they were a year ago. In May 2015, following unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died while in police custody, far more Americans said race relations were bad (61%) than said they were good (34%), according to a CBS News/New York Times poll. At that time, whites (62%) were about as likely as blacks (65%) to say race relations were generally bad.

Even so, the public’s views of race relations are more negative now than they have been for much of the 2000s. Between February 2000 and May 2014, by double-digit margins, more said race relations were good than said they were bad. By August 2014, after the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, opinions had changed significantly: 47% described race relations in the U.S. as generally good and44% as generally bad.

Views of the state of race relations were particularly negative after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. In May 1992, about seven-in-ten (68%) Americans, including 67% of whites and 75% of blacks, said race relations were generally bad.

Few say race relations are improving

About one-in-five (19%) Americans say race relations in the U.S. are getting better, while about four-in-ten (38%) say they are getting worse and about as many (41%) say they are staying about the same.

Those who say race relations are currently bad are particularly pessimistic: 54% say race relations are getting even worse, and 35% don’t see much change. Only one-in-ten of those who say race relations are bad believe they are improving. These views are shared about equally by whites, blacks and Hispanics who offer negative assessments of the current state of race relations.

Among those who say race relations are good, three-in-ten say they are getting better and roughly half (48%) say they are staying about the same; 21% say race relations are getting worse. Whites who say race relations are currently good offer a somewhat more negative assessment of where the country is headed on this issue than do blacks and Hispanics who say race relations are good. About a quarter (24%) of whites who say race relations are good believe they are getting worse, compared with 15% of blacks and Hispanics who feel that way.

More say focus should be on what different groups have in common

Far more Americans say that when it comes to improving race relations, it’s more important for people to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common (55%) than say it’s more important to focus on the unique experiences of different racial and ethnic groups (31%).

This is particularly the case among whites, who are about twice as likely to say the focus should be on what different groups have in common (57%) rather than what makes different groups unique (26%). Hispanics also share this view by a margin of 54% to 37%.

Blacks are more evenly divided: 44% say it’s more important for people to focus on what makes different racial and ethnic groups unique, while roughly the same share (45%) say the focus should be on what different groups have in common.

For the most part, the views of blacks and whites about the best approach to improving race relations do not vary considerably across demographic groups. For example, across educational groups – from those with a high school diploma or less to those with a bachelor’s degree – blacks divide in roughly the same way on this question, and the same is true across educational groupings for whites.

There are significant age gaps, however, when it comes to opinions about focusing on differences vs. similarities. Among white adults, those younger than 30 are more likely than older whites to say that, when it comes to improving race relations, it’s more important for people to focus on the unique characteristics of each group; about four-in-ten (41%) whites ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with 27% of whites ages 30 to 49 and about one-in-five of those ages 50 and older (21%).

Age is also linked to black adults’ views about the best approach to improving race relations, although, among this group, the divide is between those younger than 50 and those who are 50 or older. Among blacks ages 18 to 49, more say the focus should be on what makes each racial and ethnic group unique (54% among those ages 18 to 29 and 50% among those ages 30 to 49). Among older blacks, particularly those ages 65 and older, more say the focus should be on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common.

Blacks and whites differ over the amount of attention paid to race and racial issues

When asked if they think the amount of attention paid to race and racial issues in our country today is too much, too little or about right, Americans are divided: 36% say there is too much and about as many (35%) say there is too little. Roughly a quarter (26%) say the amount of attention paid to these issues is about right.

Blacks’ and whites’ views on this issue are in sharp contrast. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues (58% vs. 27%). And while only 22% of blacks say there is too much focus on race, 41% of whites say this is the case. Among Hispanics, half think too little attention is paid to race and racial issues, while 25% say too much attention is paid to those issues and 23% say it is about the right amount.

For whites, views about the amount of attention given to race and racial issues are strongly linked to partisanship. About six-in-ten (59%) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to these issues these days; just 11% say there is too little attention, and 26% say the amount of attention is about right. In contrast, about half of white Democrats (49%) say not enough attention is being paid to race and racial issues, while 21% say the amount is too much and 28% say it is about right. Still, white Democrats are far less likely than black Democrats (62%) to say too little attention is being paid to these issues.

Whites’ opinions about how much focus there is on race and racial issues in the country today are also linked to age. Whites who are younger than 30 are far less likely than older whites to say there is too much focus on race; about a quarter (23%) of whites ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with at least four-in-ten whites ages 30 to 49 (42%), 50 to 64 (44%) and 65 or older (48%). There are no significant demographic differences among blacks on this question.

Most say Obama at least tried to improve race relations

In the days following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, voters were somewhat optimistic that the election of the nation’s first black president would lead to better race relations. Today, as Obama finishes his second term, about a third (34%) of Americans say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations, and about three-in-ten (28%) say the president has tried but failed to make progress in this area. A sizable share (25%) say he has made race relations worse, while 8% say Obama has not addressed race relations.

Assessments of Obama’s performance on race relations vary considerably along racial and ethnic lines. About half (51%) of black Americans think the president has made progress toward improving race relations; 34% say he tried but failed to make progress. Very few blacks say Obama made race relations worse (5%) or that he didn’t address the issue (9%).

Among whites, however, about a third (32%) say the president has made things worse when it comes to race relations; 28% say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations and 24% say he tried but failed. Hispanics’ assessments of Obama’s performance on race relations are not as negative as those of whites, but are also not as positive as those offered by blacks. Roughly four-in-ten (38%) Hispanics say the president made progress toward improving race relations, and about as many (36%) say he has tried but failed to make progress; 13% of Hispanics say he has made things worse. About one-in-ten (9%) blacks and 7% of Hispanics say Obama has not addressed race relations.

Among blacks, opinions about Obama’s handling of race relations vary primarily along educational lines. While about half of black Americans with some college (52%) or with a high school education or less (54%) say the president has made progress toward improving race relations, fewer among those with a bachelor’s degree (40%) say Obama has had success in this area. Still, at least eight-in-ten black Americans across educational attainment say the president has at least tried to make progress toward improving race relations, even if he hasn’t necessarily succeeded.

Assessments of Obama among whites are strongly linked to partisanship and ideology. About six-in-ten (63%) white Republicans say the president has made race relations worse, a view that is shared far more widely by white Republicans who describe their political views as conservative (71%) than among Republicans who say they are politically moderate or liberal (44%). In contrast, about half (52%) of white – and black (55%) – Democrats, including somewhat similar shares of those who are liberal and moderate or conservative, say the president has made progress toward improving race relations.

Far more blacks than whites say they talk about race-related topics with family, friends

For blacks, far more than for whites, conversations about race are fairly commonplace. Overall, about a quarter of Americans say they often talk about race relations or racial inequality with friends and family, far less than the share saying they talk about the presidential election campaign (59%) or the economy (45%) with the same frequency. 16 About a quarter (27%) say immigration is often a topic of conversation with friends and family.

Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say the topics of racial inequality and race relations often come up in conversations with friends and family. About four-in-ten black adults say racial inequality (41%) and race relations (38%) are frequent topics of conversation, compared with about one-in-five whites. Among Hispanics, about three-in-ten (31%) say they often talk about racial inequality and about a quarter (26%) say they often talk about race relations.

In contrast, about the same shares of whites (46%), blacks (46%) and Hispanics (42%) say they often talk to friends and family about the economy, while Hispanics are more likely than the other two groups to say immigration is a frequent topic of conversation for them (37% vs. 27% of whites and 16% of blacks).

Blacks and whites offer different assessments of their interactions with people of the other race

Most whites who have some daily contact with people who are black describe their interactions as mainly positive. Blacks give a somewhat less positive assessment of their contact with whites. Fully 70% of whites who have a least a little bit of contact with blacks characterize their interactions as very friendly. Black adults are 20 percentage points less likely to describe interactions with whites that way: half of those who have at least a little contact with whites in their daily life describe these interactions as very friendly, while about four-in-ten (41%) would call them “somewhat friendly.” Relatively few in either group would go so far as to call their interactions “unfriendly” (2% among whites and 7% among blacks).

The survey also asked Hispanics about their interactions with people who are black. Among the 86% of Hispanics who have any amount of contact with blacks, 60% say these interactions are generally very friendly; 27% say they are somewhat friendly, and 9% describe their interactions with blacks as unfriendly. About one-in-eight (13%) Hispanics say they have no contact with people who are black. Hispanics who have a lot of contact with blacks are far more likely than those who have some or only a little contact to say these interactions are very friendly; about three-quarters (73%) of Hispanics who have a lot of contact with blacks say this is the case, compared with 58% of those who have some contact and 45% of those who have only a little contact with people who are black.

Overall, 66% of blacks say they have a lot of contact with whites, while 20% have some contact, and 12% have a little contact; just 2% of blacks say they have no contact at all with people who are white. Not surprising, since blacks are a far smaller share of the population, far fewer whites (38%) say they have a lot of contact with people who are black, while 35% say they have some contact and 20% say they have only a little contact; 6% of whites say they have no contact with blacks. Southern whites (50%) are far more likely than whites in the Northeast (36%), Midwest (33%) and West (29%) to say they have a lot of contact with people who are black.

Roughly a third of blacks say they feel very connected to a broader black community

About eight-in-ten (81%) black adults say they feel at least somewhat connected to a broader black community in the U.S., including 36% who feel very connected. About one-in-five say they don’t feel too (12%) or at all (6%) connected to a broader black community in the U.S.

Blacks across demographic groups, including men and women, young and old, and across education and income levels, are about equally likely to say they feel very connected to a broader black community. However, those with less education and lower incomes are more likely than those with a bachelor’s degree and annual family incomes of at least $30,000 to say they don’t feel too or at all connected. About one-in-five blacks with only some college (18%) or with a high school education or less (20%) feel disconnected from a broader black community, compared with 11% of black college graduates. And while 22% of blacks with family incomes below $30,000 say they don’t feel too or at all connected to a broader black community, fewer among those with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 (13%) or higher (12%) say the same.

Blacks who say they regularly attend predominantly black churches are among the most likely to feel connected to a broader black community. Among those who attend religious services at least once a month and who say all or most of the congregants are black, 48% say they feel very connected. By comparison, 35% of black churchgoers who say some or only a few of the people with whom they attend services are black feel the same sense of connectedness.

Overall, 58% of black adults say they attend religious services at least monthly, including 39% who do so at least once a week and 19% who attend once or twice a month; an additional 17% of black adults say they attend a few times a year, while about a quarter say they do so only seldom (13%) or never (11%). By this measure, blacks are significantly more likely than whites to attend religious services regularly; 44% of whites say they attend at least monthly, while 17% say they do so a few times a year and 39% say they seldom or never attend religious services. 17

About six-in-ten (58%) black adults who say they attend church at least monthly report that all or most of the other people attending are black. Three-in-ten say some are black and 11% say only a few or none are black.

About half of blacks have made a financial contribution, attended an event, or volunteered their time to an organization working to improve the lives of black Americans

Blacks who have a strong sense of connection to a broader black community are more likely than those who don’t feel strongly connected to say they are actively involved with groups or organizations that specifically work to improve the lives of black Americans. Overall, about three-in-ten blacks say they have made a financial contribution to (32%), attended an event sponsored by (29%), or volunteered their time to (27%) such a group in the past 12 months. Roughly half (48%) of black Americans say they have done at least one of these activities.

Among blacks who say they feel very connected to a broader black community, about six-in-ten (58%) say they have done at least one of these activities, compared with 45% of those who say they feel somewhat connected and 35% of those who say they feel not too connected or not at all connected to a broader black community.

Looking at each activity, roughly four-in-ten (43%) blacks who feel very connected to a broader black community report having made a financial contribution to a group or organization that works to improve the lives of black Americans in the past 12 months, compared with 28% of those who feel somewhat connected and 22% who don’t feel too or at all connected to a broader black community. Similarly, those who feel very connected are more likely than those who feel somewhat or even less connected to say they have attended an event sponsored by this type of group (38% vs. 27% and 16%, respectively) or have volunteered their time (33% vs. 25% and 19%).

For the most part, involvement with organizations that specifically work to improve the life of black Americans doesn’t vary significantly across demographic groups. But blacks with at least some college experience are more likely than those with a high school diploma or less to say they have made a financial contribution (38% vs. 25%), attended an event (37% vs. 19%) or volunteered their time (36% vs. 16%) to this type of organization in the past 12 months.

• The survey was conducted during the presidential primary election. ↩
• For more on religious beliefs, practices and experiences in the U.S., see “ U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious .” ↩

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BUY THIS BOOK

2007 --> 2007 208 pages. from $22.00

Hardcover ISBN: 9780804753265 Paperback ISBN: 9780804753272 Ebook ISBN: 9780804763233

Stephen Steinberg offers a bold challenge to prevailing thought on race and ethnicity in American society. In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution.

On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of "race relations" obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a "white sociology" that reflects white interests and viewpoints. What happens, he asks, when we foreground the interests and viewpoints of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of racial oppression?

On ethnicity, Steinberg turns the tables and shows that the early sociologists who predicted ultimate assimilation have been vindicated by history. The evidence is overwhelming that the new immigrants, including Asians and most Latinos, are following in the footsteps of past immigrants—footsteps leading into the melting pot. But even today, there is the black exception. The end result is a dual melting pot—one for peoples of African descent and the other for everybody else.

Race Relations: A Critique cuts through layers of academic jargon to reveal unsettling truths that call into question the nature and future of American nationality.

About the author

Stephen Steinberg is Professor in the Department of Urban Studies at Queens College and the Ph.D. Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among his books are The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America and Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy , which received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. He has written articles for the Nation and New Politics .

——Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara

—Thomas J. Sugrue, U. of Pennsylvania, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

"In Race Relations, Stephen Steinberg has written a passionate, personal, and devastating critique of the race relations paradigm, and perhaps more important, of sociology, the academic discipline that foisted that conceptual mystification upon American society By demolishing the race relations paradigm, Stephen Steinberg has made a seminal contribution to the study of race and racial oppression in the United States." –Sundiata Cha-Jua, Vice President of the National Council for Black Studies

— Beyond Chron

— Chronicle of Higher Education

—Frances Fox Piven, Past President, American Sociological Association, author of Why Americans Still Dont Vote, And Politicians Like It That Way

—Eric Lott, author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual

—Charles W. Mills, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of The Racial Contract

—Derrick Bell, Visiting Professor, NYU School of Law, and author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well , and Ethical Ambition

Not My Type

Apryl Williams, with a Foreword by Safiya Noble

Robed Representatives

Taneisha Means Davis

Is It Racist? Is It Sexist?

Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright

Hear Our Stories

Jessica Harris

Language Brokers

Hyeyoung Kwon

The Transition

Daniel Kiel

Race in the Machine

Quincy Thomas Stewart

Forbidden Intimacies

Melanie Heath

The Borders of Privilege

Kara B. Cebulko

Blood and Lightning

Dustin Kiskaddon

Moving from the Margins

Edited by Margaret L. Andersen and Maxine Baca Zinn

American Race Relations as a Social Construct Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Race relations have been a continuous part of the American history, from the horrors of slavery to the melting pot of immigration. Unfortunately, racism has become the focal point of interracial interaction, as any minority population faces challenges in a society dominated by the Caucasian race. Throughout history, racism has undertaken various forms. However, in contemporary times of supposed equality and acceptance, bigotry has become more covert and intractable. *Race relations in modern America are defined by institutionalized racism that has been masked under the means of microaggressions and political ignorance, with the only solution being a massive reform of social values.*

The whole concept of race division is a social construct that has roots in the incriminating injustices of American history. The domination of socio-political and economic structures by the Caucasian race is unparalleled. Despite some progress of past decades in racial equality, with a recent political emergence of the Republican party the tensions are growing again. The politics of aggrieved whiteness, a concept that seeks to maintain a Caucasian hegemony in the social order, has gained traction.

There is a strong political context to this development. Liberalism is associated with profligacy, beholden to minorities. Meanwhile, conservatism seeks to encourage individual values of hard work and, by extension, equality for all. Furthermore, any attempt by the government to recognize racial inequality through policy or welfare programs comes under fire for supposed social injustice that puts whites at a disadvantage.

Consequently, there is fanatical support for forms of repression against racial groups, such as Muslims, illegal immigrants, and urban African-American communities. This approach to politics makes it ultimately impossible to overcome social injustice since any meaningful attempts to make a difference are obstructed by the status quo of white supremacy. Despite this, an average class Caucasian person feels like reverse anti-white racism is the dominant form of racial discrimination (King).

“Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit” (Dickey 7). The racial divide in America is often visible most clearly in urban communities. Certain neighborhoods are a hive of existence for racial groups, as their culture takes root there. While in most of America communities are more mixed, there are still privileged neighborhoods which are predominantly white.

The minority race in an opposing community would experience social unease and even covert discrimination. The racial tension is evident as the communities seek to conserve the status quo of their demographics, creating a sense of tribalism (Vance). Race is a primary factor in the American class structure, which, in turn, instigates social segregation, even if it is unintentional.

There is an entrenched concept of institutionalized racism in the nation which is largely ignored for more easily vilified interpersonal prejudices. There is no consensus or medium where such controversial topics can be discussed, with racial groups radically disagreeing on basic issues and politicians using it as an electorate tool (Blow). Race relations in current society have become a carefully avoided issue filled with superficial illusions to mask its core motives.

In the novel The Underground Railroad , such a phenomenon is accurately described, “But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world…Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach” (Whitehead 143). The pretense of racism not existing in the light of evidence of its devastating consequences has nothing but a derogatory effect to prevent it from being a recurrent issue.

The most typical exemplification of racial issues can be seen in social behavior. Racism exists both in institutions and personal prejudices. However, in most communities, outright racism is condemned or illegal; therefore, people begin to exhibit it covertly.

This happens subconsciously, as the societal way of thought has been embedded into behavior since childhood. Such daily behaviors and verbal interaction is a psychological concept that is essentially a clandestine expression of racism as racial groups are insulted and degraded. These may have a basis in the national origin, education, culture values, criminality, or even competency (Sehgal).

A prominent example, which is also evidence of institutionalized racism, is the recent spike in police violence against African-Americans. The disproportionate police intervention including racial minorities, and, consequently, their imprisonment is unjustifiable. The whole concept of the racial, social construct has pragmatic evidence here, as a racial profile is established around the black community. News and media outlets aid in this by showing a biased perspective of African-Americans as either involved or associated with criminality.

Consequently, society begins to exhibit prejudice and fear, in turn, leading to a conflict based on irrationality, creating a social crisis. Claudia Rankine frankly identifies this concept in her prose, “because white men can’t police their imagination, black people are dying” (135).

With the result of recent elections, racial tensions began to emerge. The new leadership despite its promises to unite the nation has done only the opposite to address issues facing minorities. Polls show that the majority of African-Americans think race relations are at a low point and only getting worse. There are obvious schisms in the perception of social justice amongst races. Obama at one point stated, “we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present” (Sack and Thee-Brenan).

The task to challenge white hegemony which instigates the racial tension begins with an honest conversation. By understanding history and accepting identity, socio-political structures will be morphed to create a truly egalitarian society. Such processes may take generations, but until then, the status quo will persist if people choose to be ignorant to injustice.

Works Cited

Blow, Charles, “ The State of Race in America. ” New York Times. 2017. Web.

Dickey, Colin. Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places . Viking, 2016.

King, Michael. ” Aggrieved Whiteness: White Identity Politics and Modern American Racial Formation. ” Abolition Journal. 2017. Web.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric . Graywolf Press, 2014.

Sack, Kevin and Megan Thee-Brenan. “ Poll Finds Most in U.S. Hold Dim View of Race Relations ” New York Times. 2015. Web.

Sehgal, Priya. “ Racial Microaggressions: The Everyday Assault. ” American Psychiatric Association . 2016. Web.

Vance, James. “ The Racial Conversation We’re Having Today is Tribalistic .” National Review . 2016. Web.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad . Doubleday, 2016.

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IvyPanda. (2020, November 14). American Race Relations as a Social Construct. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-race-relations-as-a-social-construct/

"American Race Relations as a Social Construct." IvyPanda , 14 Nov. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/american-race-relations-as-a-social-construct/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'American Race Relations as a Social Construct'. 14 November.

IvyPanda . 2020. "American Race Relations as a Social Construct." November 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-race-relations-as-a-social-construct/.

1. IvyPanda . "American Race Relations as a Social Construct." November 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-race-relations-as-a-social-construct/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "American Race Relations as a Social Construct." November 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-race-relations-as-a-social-construct/.

What do Americans make of the state of race relations in 2021?

Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing a national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr. in 1983. But the day wasn’t observed in every state until 17 years later. Now, nearly four decades after it became a holiday, there are still Americans who don’t accept the holiday.

In the latest Economist /YouGov poll one-quarter (24%) think Dr. King’s day — celebrated on the third Monday of January, close to his January 15 birthday — should not be a national holiday.

Republicans (35%) are far less likely than Democrats (81%) or Independents (56%) to believe Martin Luther King’s birthday should be a national holiday. In fact, Republicans are more likely to say it should not be a federal holiday (42%). Black Americans (78%) and Hispanic Americans (66%) are much more likely than white Americans (50%) to believe the holiday should be recognized.

Whatever their party identification, most Americans recognize there are real concerns about race in America, that Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech is still relevant today, and that the protests of the Civil Rights Movement had a positive effect on the passage of major civil rights legislation. But Americans divide on whether protests are still necessary today in order to achieve racial equality.

By more than two to one, Black Americans say they are still necessary, but by 47% to 39%, white Americans say they are not. This is the case even though half of white respondents believe that only some – or even less – of Dr. King’s dream of equality has been yet achieved.

For most Americans, race relations remain a problem. When asked about the state of race relations in the United States today, most say they aren’t good, and they haven’t been good for a while. Today, two-thirds of Americans (65%) describe race relations in America as bad, compared to 40% in 2009.

While two in three Americans (64%) believed race relations were good throughout President Barack Obama ’s first term, that changed in the middle of his second term, starting after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and have not improved during Donald Trump ’s presidency. Half (51%) of the public believe race relations have gotten worse in the last four years, including 48% of white Americans and 71% of Black Americans. Racism is seen as a very or somewhat serious problem by more Black Americans (87%) than white Americans (70%).

The public also sees a difference in law enforcement’s treatment of those who took over the US Capitol on January 6 and this summer’s Black Lives Matter protestors. Most believe that the police did not respond to the Capital takeover forcefully enough, and by more than two to one (50% vs 20%) Americans believe law enforcement treated Black Lives Matter protestors more harshly than they dealt with those who stormed the Capitol.

Republicans are less likely to see a distinction in the treatment of the two groups (42%), and when they do, they tend to say those who took over the Capitol were treated more harshly (41%).

Related: One week later, what do Americans make of the Capitol attack?

See the toplines and crosstabs from this week’s Economist/YouGov Poll

Methodology : The Economist survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,500 US Adult Citizens interviewed online between January 10 - 12, 2021. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the US Bureau of the Census, as well as 2016 Presidential vote, registration status, geographic region, and news interest. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all US citizens. The margin of error is approximately 3.6% for the overall sample.

Image: Getty

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What were the main developments in race relations in the US, 1945-1968? #625Lab

• This is generally a really strong essay. I would say however, to avoid saying “in conclusion” in every paragraph, as there really is no need. Only say “in conclusion” in the conclusion. 
• The introduction gives some really key background information and lays out the answer well. The flow of the essay is logical and reads really well. The conclusion is good too because it summarises the essay’s points, and then reopens the question with a quotation from Martin Luther King.
• You may also like:  H1 Leaving Cert History Guide

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: March 27, 2018
• Post category: #625Lab History / History

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• Race Relations

From enslavement and segregation to Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter, these articles will help you understand race relations in America.

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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

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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

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Essay 14: How to Teach the Nadir of Race Relations

Recognizing that inaccurate history often subtly promotes continuing white supremacy, the National Education Association (NEA) commissioned these articles and has posted some of them in slightly different form  at its website . I thank Harry Lawson and others at NEA for the commission, for editorial suggestions, and for other assistance.

From 1890 to 1940, white Americans went more racist in their thinking than at any other time. We call this the “Nadir of Race Relations.” “Nadir” means low point. During the Nadir, the ideology of most whites — their understanding of the social world — went more and more racist toward African and Native Americans. Except for discussing Jim Crow in the South, most U.S. history textbooks don’t treat the Nadir. Authors find it hard to fit into their overall storyline of inexorable progress.

Ask students, “Who was the first black player in organized baseball?” The answer is not Jackie Robinson but perhaps Moses Fleetwood Walker. Then they learn that whites forced African Americans out, as the Nadir set in. Ask, “Who was the first jockey in the National Racing Museum Hall of Fame?” Students discover a fabulous black jockey and also that the Kentucky Derby barred blacks after they won 15 of the first 28 derbies. During the Nadir, in the North as well as the South, whites forced African Americans from skilled occupations like carpentry and unskilled jobs like mail carrier. Three underlying social processes led to the Nadir. First was U.S. policy toward American Indians. Reconstruction laws requiring equal justice toward African Americans did not apply to Native Americans. As a result, when whites found gold on Indian land in Colorado and Dakota, they took it, leading to the final Plains Indian wars. Second was immigrants. Democrats courted their votes, promising them jobs once they drove African Americans from the wharfs, teamstering, and other positions. Instead of quelling Democratic racism, Republicans got mad at the immigrants, eventually supporting nativism and eugenics. Third was imperialism, an ideology from Europe. We bought into it, took over Hawaii, and attacked our Filipino allies in 1899. Students can discover America’s increasing racism after 1890 themselves. In the process, they will realize how events of long ago still affect us. For instance, during the Nadir, textbooks started lying about secession. So this is another opportunity to teach “historiography” — the social influences on history — discussed earlier in the essay on Reconstruction. Historiography prompts critical thinking. Students can learn it as early as fifth grade. Now that many newspapers are on line, students can search one in their state for all articles with “Negro,” characterizing the view of each toward African Americans as positive (+1), neutral (0), or negative (-1). Then they can calculate averages (means) by decade and look for trends. Students can examine old U.S. history textbooks — online or from your collection — to see how their treatments of John Brown, for example, change over time. Did authors consider him idealistic? crazy? During the Nadir, segregation increased everywhere, not just in the South. The Index of Dissimilarity, D, measures segregation. It is mathematical but easy; students can apply it to census data for their city over time. It is also clear: 0 means perfectly integrated, while 100 means complete apartheid. In most cities, D increased from about 45 in 1890 to 70 by 1940. Many smaller communities became sundown towns — all-white on purpose. Cemeteries and colleges became segregated too. For example, after World War I, Harvard still admitted African Americans but no longer let them live in the dormitories. Most colleges have archives, often in the library. High school students can talk with the archivist to learn about race relations over time. After students document that racism sometimes rose and sometimes fell, they can explore why. In the process they learn that racism is a historical product, not “natural.” So are black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods.

Essential Reading

• Loewen, Chapter 10, “The Nadir,” in  Teaching What Really Happened  (NY: Teachers College Press, 2010), suggests other ways to help students see the Nadir for themselves.
• Loewen, Chapter 11, “Using the Index of Dissimilarity to Determine the Extent of Segregation,” in  Social Science in the Courtroom  (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1982), shows how to calculate and use D.
• Leola Bergmann, “The Negro in Iowa,”  Iowa Journal of History and Politics , 1969 [1948], 44-45, analyzed the treatment of African Americans in Iowa newspapers from 1865 to 1900. At first, newspapers told of activities and individuals within the Black community. By the 1890s, almost every story about African Americans concerned crime.
• Loewen, “How To Confirm Sundown Towns,”  tells how to use census data, interviews, etc., to determine if a town has a sundown past.

All essays in the  Correct(ed)  series: Introducing the Series Essay 2: How to Teach Slavery Essay 3: How to Teach Secession Essay 4: Teaching about the Confederacy and Race Relations Essay 5: Confederate Public History Essay 6: Reconstruction Essay 7: Getting History Right Can Decrease Racism Toward Mexican Americans Essay 8: Problematic Words about Native Americans Essay 9: How and When Did the First People Get Here? Essay 10: The Pantheon of Explorers Essay 11: Columbus Day Essay 12: How Thanksgiving Helps Keep Us Ethnocentric Essay 13: American Indians as Mascots Essay 14: How to Teach the Nadir of Race Relations Essay 15: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement Essay 16: Getting Students Thinking about the Future

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Our Fathers Marched With King. Here’s What They Would Say to Activists Today.

By Donzaleigh Abernathy and Avi Dresner

Ms. Abernathy is an actress and the author of “Partners to History: Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and the Civil Rights Movement.” Mr. Dresner is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker and is an executive producer of the forthcoming documentary “The Rabbi & the Reverend.”

On March 9, 1965, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. chose two of the hundreds of men of faith present that day to deliver the prayer that began the march to Montgomery: the Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy Sr., his dear friend and closest associate during the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and Rabbi Israel Dresner, one of Dr. King’s most trusted allies in the Jewish community.

Those men were our fathers.

“You may rest assured our lives are richer because of your visit. May God hasten the day when we will live as brothers in this great land and will know no prejudice because of race, creed, color or previous conditions of servitude,” Abernathy wrote in 1965, praising Dresner, who had just delivered a sermon at Abernathy’s church.

Abernathy died in 1990, and Dresner in 2022. In the years since their deaths, we have often been asked what they would say on issues and events. We believe they would be appalled, as are we, by the explosion of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia we have seen in our time. We know they would march against the rolling back of civil rights and voting rights. Equally painful would be their dismay over the continued erosion of the Black-Jewish alliance.

We have never needed their counsel more than in these past awful months since Oct. 7. Our hearts are broken by the hatred, violence and loss of life in Israel and Gaza.

We believe the lessons of our fathers’ life and work — and, most important, the ways in which they bridged the divides between their communities — offer us a path toward navigating our own divisive era.

When Abernathy and Dresner met in August 1962, it was through the bars of a segregated jail in Albany, Ga. During their years together in the movement, our dads became soul mates.

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Analysis: Race teams unhappier than ever with NASCAR’s latest offer on charter agreement

Drivers make their way through the track during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Sonoma Raceway, Sunday, June 9, 2024, in Sonoma, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Fans watch a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Sonoma Raceway, Sunday, June 9, 2024, in Sonoma, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

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SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — NASCAR avoided one public relations nightmare last week when it granted Kyle Larson a waiver to participate in the playoffs even though he missed the Coca-Cola 600. That piece of goodwill hardly made things sunshine and roses over the weekend at Sonoma Raceway, where teams remained extremely frustrated with NASCAR’s slow pace at coming to a new charter agreement.

Multiple team owners told The Associated Press that NASCAR’s most recent proposal — delivered almost two weeks ago — was one of the worst offers yet from the stock car series sanctioning body.

Among the complaints: The France family, which owns NASCAR as a private company, still won’t budge on making the charters permanent, the series made rollbacks from previous offers and the proposal now includes a provision that would allow the France family/NASCAR to purchase charters, which are at the heart of series’ business model.

When team owners pushed back at NASCAR owning and operating race teams, they said they were sternly informed it is no different from IndyCar, which is owned by Roger Penske, who also fields three cars in that series. It also was noted that NASCAR owns the IMSA sports car series, and one of the teams is owned by chairman Jim France.

Many of the teams feel defeated and fear the showdown is headed toward “take it or leave it offer” from NASCAR. Even though the teams in February voted to hire top antitrust sports attorney Jeffrey Kessler as an adviser, no movement has been made toward pursuing a case; a handful of teams seem reluctant to take any legal action.

There are currently 36 charters that guarantee entry into every race to the 15 teams that hold them. The charters expire at the end of this season and negotiations have been ongoing for several years on a new agreement. The major terms sought by teams include: Making the charters permanent, receiving 45% of traditional media revenue, receiving 33% of new revenue and a guaranteed seat at the table to give teams some governance power.

NASCAR’s latest offer was for charters that are guaranteed for seven years, and an option for another seven years after that. It also included a cost cap and, in addition to the France family being allowed to buy charters, a provision in which NASCAR would allow private equity firms to buy into charters.

“I think there’s still a ton of work to do. Not a little bit of work. Quite a bit. So that’s going to be the priority over the next few months to get this thing a little closer,” Denny Hamlin, co-owner of 23XI Racing, said after NASCAR’s offer was reviewed.

Stewart-Haas Racing announced last month it was shutting down at the end of the season, which put their four Cup Series charters on the market. The very next day, Front Row Motorsports said it had acquired a charter to expand to three teams next season. Front Row did not disclose how it got the charter or how much it spent; Spire Motorsports is believed to have spent $40 million last year when it purchased its latest charter.

At Sonoma, team owners wondered how a purchase price could even been decided upon for Front Row since the current charters will be worthless at the end of the season if no deal is reached. Even SHR co-owner Tony Stewart was baffled by the interest in the team’s four charters amid the uncertainty.

Teams are now worried that Front Row’s announcement is an indication some of the smaller teams are ready to take NASCAR’s offer despite an alliance that all 15 would stick together in negotiations. Yet there is no clear fallback plan.

The teams don’t want to start their own racing league, and believe NASCAR would move on without the likes of Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing or Team Penske if they decided to boycott races. Such a scenario would leave it to fans to decide if the replacements — likely drivers and teams from lower-level series — provide a watchable product.

“It will be interesting to see how it all comes together, but I can speak for my group just saying we’d like to get a deal done sooner than later because certainly it’s hard to plan for the future when we don’t have a charter agreement and right now, we don’t,” Hamlin said on his podcast.

AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president-elect?

Long tied to outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, will Sheinbaum be able to carve out a new path?

Mexico City, Mexico – She is poised to become Mexico’s first female president, after winning a historic mandate in the country’s June 2 election .

But Claudia Sheinbaum faces a challenge: how to distinguish herself from her political mentor, current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.

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Representing the left-leaning Morena party, Sheinbaum campaigned in Lopez Obrador’s image, embracing many of his trademark projects and policies.

But experts say her personal history and past governing experience offer valuable clues about how her tenure in office might differ from Lopez Obrador’s.

“Sheinbaum has always been disciplined and strategic,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a Mexican political analyst. “She’s not going to be as radical as AMLO.”

A mix of academics and politics

The former head of Mexico City’s government, Sheinbaum was born into a family of Jewish heritage, and she initially followed her parents into the field of science.

She studied physics and then energy engineering, pursuing research for her doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States.

But early on, Sheinbaum also mirrored her parents’ commitment to political engagement, becoming involved in student activism. On the campaign trail, she often credits her parents’ involvement in the 1968 student protests as an inspiration for her own work.

“I have always said it: I am a daughter of ’68,” she wrote on social media in April.

Her transition to a political career came under Lopez Obrador’s wing. In a campaign video chronicling her life, Sheinbaum explained that she and Lopez Obrador often participated in the same protests and activist work, but it was only in 2000, a week after he was elected mayor of Mexico City, that she was formally introduced to him during a meeting at her house.

Afterwards, Lopez Obrador called Sheinbaum with a proposition. “He told me, ‘Would you like to be secretary of the environment?’ I told him ‘yes’.”

In the decades since, she has campaigned on Lopez Obrador’s behalf, while forging her own academic and political career, including as mayor of Tlalpan.

In 2018, she became the first woman elected to lead Mexico City, a high-profile position often seen as a launchpad for future presidential bids. She resigned from the post in June 2023 to seek her party’s presidential nomination.

In the shadow of a popular president

From the moment the Morena party tapped her as its nominee last September , Sheinbaum was the frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race.

But her campaign was buoyed in large part by the popularity of the outgoing president.

The online survey company Morning Consult has consistently ranked Lopez Obrador among the most popular heads of state currently in power, after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi — a fact he is known to repeat in his daily news conferences.

But Mexican presidents are limited to a single six-year term, and Lopez Obrador is therefore barred from running in the 2024 race.

The circumstances surrounding his 2018 election were historic, though — and they continued to cast a shadow over this year’s race.

Born in the often-overlooked southern state of Tabasco, Lopez Obrador was something of an underdog in 2018, having lost the two previous presidential races. Critics dismissed the then-64-year-old as a populist past his prime.

His victory, however, was ultimately a landslide : Lopez Obrador was the first candidate since Mexico’s transition to democracy to score more than 50 percent of the vote.

By contrast, Sheinbaum’s solid lead in the polls — and her urban, academic upbringing — projected a different public image, distinct from Lopez Obrador’s dark-horse campaign, according to Correa-Cabrera, the political analyst.

“Aside from being a progressive politician, she’s never been distant from the elite,” Correa-Cabrera explained.

“She’s obedient to international institutions and economic systems,” the analyst added, pointing to Sheinbaum’s sunny relationship with Carlos Slim, the wealthiest man in Mexico.

Even Sheinbaum’s leading opponent, Xochitl Galvez, slammed her for her relatively privileged background.

“While you were dancing ballet at 10 years old, I had to work,” Galvez told Sheinbaum during a televised debate on May 19.

Correa-Cabrera also notes that Sheinbaum styles herself more as a pragmatist and less as a firebrand, in contrast to Lopez Obrador. While Lopez Obrador is known to speak off the cuff, for instance, Sheinbaum’s public appearances are more scripted.

Refuting the ‘puppet’ label

Nevertheless, Sheinbaum has long faced criticism that she is “the puppet” — la titere — of the man she hopes to succeed as president.

“I don’t care about those things the opposition says, that mine would be another Lopez Obrador government,” she told the BBC earlier this year.

Lopez Obrador himself addressed the criticisms from the podium at one of his daily press briefings in January.

“There are no puppets with power,” he said, with a nod to Sheinbaum. “No one accepts to be manipulated when they reach public office.”

Still, Sheinbaum has adopted many of Lopez Obrador’s signature moves.

In March, for instance, she released a list of 100 commitments to achieve if elected, her version of a similar list Lopez Obrador released upon taking office, featuring 100 of his top priorities.

Sheinbaum’s list repeats her mentor’s antipoverty rallying cry: “For the good of all, the poor come first.” It also includes the continuation of Lopez Obrador’s controversial Tren Maya or Mayan Train , a $28bn infrastructure project to build a rail line through the Yucatan Peninsula.

Local activists have criticised the project for destroying thousand-year-old Mayan artefacts and archaeological sites, as well as damaging the natural environment .

But Lopez Obrador has defended the project as a means of bringing tourist dollars to impoverished areas, though critics have expressed doubt that the local population will ever see genuine cash flow.

Combatting climate change

Given her career as a scientist, one of the most scrutinised aspects of Sheinbaum’s platform is her stance on climate change.

Her 100 commitments include a goal to “promote renewable energies” through the construction of wind, solar, geothermal and hydrogen-based sources.

And Sheinbaum herself contributed to a 2007 report on climate change that won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

But critics have accused her of embracing her party’s environmental platform, which offers no plan to cut fossil fuel emissions and includes further investments in the state-owned petroleum industry, Pemex.

Correa-Cabrera said Sheinbaum’s “education as a climate scientist” is only one part of Sheinbaum’s identity.

“Her political career is a different thing,” Correa-Cabrera explained. She believes Sheinbaum “is going to be following the guidelines of oil and gas [interests] and of the United States and China” once in office.

However, Adrian Fernandez, director of the Mexico Climate Initiative, thinks the growing threats that climate change presents, especially to Mexico’s agricultural industry, will force politicians like Sheinbaum to tackle the issue more forcefully.

“It’s not a question of hope. I am very sure the next president will shift to address climate change because it is a necessity,” he said.

Security a top concern

Security was also a top concern as Mexican voters prepared to head to the ballot box on June 2.

Tyler Mattiace, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Mexico, voiced scepticism that any candidate would reverse Lopez Obrador’s decision to expand the country’s military, a decision he fears will lead to greater abuses, not greater safety.

“At this point, you can’t really put the toothpaste back in the tube,” he said.

Already, Lopez Obrador has granted the military control over several airports and infrastructure projects. He has also attempted to shift control of the civilian-led National Guard to the army, despite court challenges.

But critics like Mattiace say there are credible allegations that military members often abuse their power — or enter into corrupt relations with cartels and other criminal organisations.

Mexico has seen more than 30,000 murders per year for five straight years. In 2022, the total number of missing people in Mexico surpassed 100,000, a number that Lopez Obrador has publicly disputed.

The majority of those disappearances — approximately 97 percent — are believed to have happened after 2006, when Mexico’s “war on drugs” began, and Mexican military troops were deployed to the streets, setting off a period of heightened conflict in which the military did anything but address violence.

Both Sheinbaum and her rival Galvez promised to address the disappearances , as part of their plan to tackle Mexico’s crime.

“I’m the only one who can show results in security,” Sheinbaum said in the last debate, citing her track record as head of Mexico City’s government.

She has also called the “war on drugs” an “absurd, terrible decision” and promised to address the root causes of crime through social welfare programmes.

But voters like Yolanda Moran Isais, whose son Dan Jeremeel Fernandez Moran went missing in 2008, fear Sheinbaum will continue Lopez Obrador’s habit of downplaying the extent of the disappearances.

Moran Isais leads a group of volunteers who search for the missing in the Mexican state of Coahuila. She expressed disappointment that Sheinbaum refused to meet with a nationwide delegation of mothers leading the search effort.

“What we need from the next president is recognition,” she said. “So far, Claudia Sheinbaum has not even acknowledged us.”

But another searcher, Cynthia Gutierrez from Mexico City, said Sheinbaum might offer hope to the movement. She gave a nod to the prospect of Sheinbaum becoming Mexico’s first female president — not to mention her identity as a mother and grandmother.

“She is a woman,” Gutierrez said. “Maybe she will empathise with our cause.”