Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

From Jesus to J-Setting details the experiences of Black people with diverse sexual identities from ages eighteen to thirty years old. The work examines how the intersection of racial, sexual, gender, and religious identities influence self-expression and lifestyle modalities in this understudied, often hidden population, by exploring how racial, sexual, and religious dynamics play out. Voices in the book illuminate a continuum of decisions-from more traditional (i.e., Black church participation) to nontraditional (i.e., dancing known as J-Setting and spirituality)-and the corresponding beliefs, values, and experiences that emerge under the ever-present specter of racism, homophobia, heterosexism, and for many, ageism. Drawing upon sociology, sociology of religion, black studies, queer studies, inequality, stratification, and cultural studies, Sandra Lynn Barnes explores the everyday lives of young Black people with fluid sexual identities and their everyday forms of individual as well as collective resistance.

Bodies out of Place asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be, it is just performed in more-nuanced ways. Barbara Harris Combs argues that racism is dynamic, so new theories are needed to help expose it. The Bodies-out-of-Place (BOP) theory she advances in the book offers such a corrective lens. Interrogating several recent racialized events-the Central Park birding incident, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, sleeping while Black occurrences, and others-Combs demonstrates how the underlying belief that undergirds each encounter is a false presumption that Black bodies in certain contexts are out of place. Within these examples she illustrates how, even amid professions to color-blindness, fixed attitudes about where Black bodies belong, in what positions, at what time, and with whom still predominate. Combs describes a long historical pattern of White pushback against Black advancement and illuminates how each of the various forms of pushback is aimed at social control and regulation of Black bodies. She describes overt and covert attempts to push Black bodies back into their presumed place in U.S. society. While the pushback takes many forms, each works to paint a narrative to justify, rationalize, and excuse continuing violence against Black bodies. Equally important, Combs celebrates the resilient Black agency that has resisted this subjugation.

In Liberal White Supremacy, Angie Beeman argues that white supremacy is maintained not only by right-wing conservatives or stereotypically uneducated working-class racial bigots but also by progressives who operate from a liberal ideology of color-blindness, racism-evasiveness, and class elitism. This distinction provides insight on divisions among progressives at the local level, in community organizations, and at the national level, in the Democratic Party. By distinguishing between liberal and radical approaches to racism, class oppression, capitalism, and social movement tactics, Beeman shows how progressives continue to be limited by liberal ideology and perpetuate rather than dismantle white supremacy, all while claiming to be antiracist. She conceptualizes this self-serving process as "liberal white supremacy," the tendency for liberal European Americans to constantly place themselves in the superior moral position in a way that reinforces inequality. Beeman advances what she calls action-oriented and racism-centered intersectional approaches as alternatives to progressive organizational strategies that either downplay racism in favor of a class-centered approach or take a talk-centered approach to racism without developing explicit actions to challenge it.

Grounded in ethnographic research over five years in Palestinian villages near Bethlehem, Olive Growing in Palestine follows the lives of four families and fifty other individuals involved with olive growing as a form of resistance. Providing a counterpoint to Eurocentric studies of daily lives and labor, Simaan shares perspectives from Global South scholarship, which offers alternate analysis of why people do what they do and how they respond to adversity. The book focuses on two questions. First, how has Israeli settler colonialism affected olive farmers' daily lives? And second, how do olive farmers respond to the restrictions on their daily activities imposed by structures and policies that aim to divorce them from their land and trees? Olive Growing in Palestine explores a collection of values and action that shape, and are shaped by, the daily lives of these farmers: Sutra (doing for being), 'Awna (doing for belonging), and Sumud (doing for belonging and becoming). These values recalibrate and expand our understanding of Global South knowledge and practice. That recalibration gives communities, activists, and scholars new tools to counter global forces of ethnic-based discrimination, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and the human-made climate crisis.

The Souls of Jewish Folk argues that late nineteenth-century Germany's struggle with its "Jewish question"-what to do with Germany's Jews-served as an important and to-date underexamined influence on W.E.B. Du Bois's considerations of America's anti-Black racism at the turn of the twentieth century. Du Bois is wellknown for his characterization of the twentieth century's greatest challenge, "the problem of the color line." This proposition gained prominence in the conception of Du Bois'sThe Souls of Black Folk (1903), which engages the questions of race, racial domination, and racial exploitation. James M. Thomas contends that this conception of racism is haunted by the specter of the German Jew. In 1892 Du Bois received a fellowship for his graduate studies at the University of Berlin from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen. While a student in Berlin, Du Bois studied with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists. What The Souls of Jewish Folkasks readers to take seriously, then, is how our ideas, and indeed intellectual work itself, are shaped by and embedded within the nexus of people, places, and prevailing contexts of their time. With this book,Thomas examines how the major social, political, and economic events of Du Bois's own life-including his time spent living and learning in a latenineteenth-century Germany defined in no small part by its violent anti-Semitism-constitute the soil from which his most serious ideas about race, racism, and the global color line sprang forth.

Over the last several years, we have experienced a surge in bystander videos of incidents of police brutality directed largely at Black men. Public outrage surrounding police action continues to increase. As public discourse around police brutality and racial inequality largely centers on specific events, there is less information within the public discourse about systemic racism and how race and racism pervade every single aspect of American life. The ways in which Black people are often treated by law enforcement is reflective of larger historical racial inequities and injustices that extend far beyond the criminal justice system and intersect with how Black people access housing and occupy public spaces. Imprisoned focuses on contemporary systemic racism as it relates to the ways in which our criminal justice system intersects with our housing system to create a matrix of inequality. To illustrate the systemic nature of racism in American policing and communities, this book highlights the policies and practices that were put in place during slavery and after Reconstruction that connect to instances of structural racism in contemporary America. This book demonstrates how foundational policies in American history continue to work to the detriment of Black Americans-tying the racist foundations of America to discrimination in our criminal justice system and neighborhoods.

For activists working for racial justice for decades, the year 2020 stood out from the rest. More people seemed to care about racism than ever before. Due to this unprecedented surge, was anything more accomplished than in prior efforts? Through interviews with uprising participants (a mix of first-time protesters and seasoned veterans; from both large cities and smaller towns), participant observation from three U.S. cities, and secondary data sources on U.S. and global 2020 protest actions, Eileen O'Brien documents what exactly was different about 2020 from a boots-on-the-ground vantage point. Participants in the uprising drew a sense of meaning being part of something larger than themselves and were able to grieve racist violence collectively during a lockdown. They also created beautiful protest art out of plywood made necessary by white supremacist counter-protesters' destruction of local businesses. They toppled Confederate monuments and felt that sentences like Derek Chauvin's murder conviction or the three killers of Ahmaud Arbery on federal hate crime charges were rare victories only made possible through their activism. Later, many went back to business as usual after 2020, broader societal antiracist changes proved elusive, and backlash was swift. Yet, cross-racial interest convergence occurred for a brief antiracist moment, and "the struggle itself was redemptive."

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image-one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In this book, however, George Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present.

In 2004 France banned Muslim women from wearing veils in school. In 2010 France passed legislation that banned the wearing of clothing in public that covered the face, mainly to target women who wore burqas. President Emmanuel Macron has stated that the hijab is not in accordance with French ideals. Islamophobia in France takes many forms, both explicit and implicit, and often appears to be sanctioned by the governing bodies themselves. These cultural biases reveal how the Muslim population acts as a scapegoat for the problematic status of immigrants in France more generally. Islamophobia in France is an English translation of Abdellali Hajjat and Marwan Mohammed's Islamophobie: Comment les e'lites franc¸aises fabriquent le "proble`me musulman." In this groundbreaking book, Hajjat and Mohammed argue that Islamophobia in France is not the result of individual prejudice or supposed Muslim cultural or racial deficiencies but rather arose out of structures of power and control already in place in France. Hajjat and Mohammed analyze how French elites deploy Islamophobia as a state technology for contesting and controlling the presence of specific groups of postcolonial immigrants and their descendants in contemporary France. With a new introduction for U.S. readers, the authors unpack the data on Islamophobia in France and offer a portrait of how it functions in contemporary society.

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries offers a fresh perspective on class, race, and revolution in the United States. Drawing on more than forty hours of interviews with former members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Scott and Katz-Fishman share the rich story of the League, including the women and students. That story includes the history of the automotive industry in Detroit, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and the wildcat strike that sparked the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). The authors describe the rise of the League from 1968 to 1971. They explore the centrality of struggle and political education as the League split and a section of League comrades moved into revolutionary organizations and social movement spaces, many of which remain active today. League comrades share their analysis of the current moment and staying the course of revolutionary struggle.

As a lifelong resident of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Eric Gamino has always been curious why some U.S.-born Latinos were indifferent toward Latino immigrants, especially since both groups lived within the same majority Latino-origin community—the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (RGV). Enforcing Order on the Border offers a personal, ethnographic examination of Gamino's life as a resident of the RGV coupled with his experience as a police officer for two different police departments in the region. Gamino reveals how the concept of race functions within a predominantly Latino-origin community. Gamino unpacks the interplay between local police, federal immigration officials, and civilians as they encounter immigration. Enforcing Order on the Border illustrates how institutional practices such as immigration enforcement occur on the South Texas—Mexico borderlands as collaborative eff orts between local police and the U.S. Border Patrol from an institutional perspective. Consequently, this collaborative eff ort in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands creates a distinctive method of policing, which he tellingly refers to as “Constitution-free policing.” Gamino provides a unique perspective on how the concept of race in a predominantly Latino-origin community complicates intraracial/intraethnic relations on the South Texas—Mexico borderlands.

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws establishing racial segregation are unconstitutional, declaring "separate is inherently unequal." Known as a seminal Supreme Court case and civil rights victory, Brown v. Board of Education resulted from many legal battles that predicated its existence. Marisela Martinez-Cola writes about the many important cases that led to the culmination of Brown. She reveals that the road to Brown is lined with "bricks" representing at least one hundred other families who legally challenged segregated schooling in state and federal courts across the country, eleven of which involved Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American plaintiffs. By revealing the significance of Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American segregation cases, Martinez-Cola provides an opportunity for an increasingly diverse America to be fully invested in the complete grand narrative of the civil rights movement. To illustrate the evolution of these cases, she focuses on three court cases from California, including these stories as part of the "long civil rights movement," and thus expands our understanding of the scope of that movement along racial, gender, and class lines. Comparing and discussing the meaning of the other court cases that led to the Brown decision strengthens the standing of Brown while revealing all the twists and turns inherent in the struggle for equality.