By the time you read this issue of the Du Bois Review, it will be nearly a year after the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina swept the Gulf Coast and roiled the nation. While this issue does not concentrate on the disaster, (the next issue of the DBR will be devoted solely to research on the social, economic, and political ramifications of the Katrina disaster), the editors would be amiss if we did not comment on an event that once again exposed the deadly fault lines of the American racial order. The loss of the lives of nearly 1500 citizens, the many more tens of thousands whose lives were wrecked, and the destruction of a major American city as we know it, all had clear racial overtones as the story unfolded. Indeed, the racial story of the disaster does not end with the tragic loss of life, the disruption of hundred of thousands of lives, nor the physical, social, economic, and political collapse of an American urban jewel. The political map of the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana (and probably Texas), and the region is being rewritten as the large Black and overwhelmingly Democratic population of New Orleans was dispersed out of Louisiana, with states such as Texas becoming the perhaps permanent recipients of a large share of the evacuees.

Elections matter. This is perhaps especially true in times of deepening inequality and cultural polarization. Commentators on both sides of the political aisle were in unison on two points: the 2004 presidential election was the most important such contest in a century, and the U.S. electorate has never seemed so sharply divided. The intensity of feeling around the Bush-Kerry contest has solidified in the national consciousness a well understood distinction between “blue states” and “red states.” It has also resulted in the most complete consolidation of conservative Republican control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in history.

Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (1975) criticized government policies requiring goals and timetables from federal contractors in order to implement affirmative action, arguing that this opposed the clear language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aiming at a color-blind society, was unnecessary, and threatened a full-scale Balkanization in employment procedures. It also criticized school busing and nascent programs to require publicly supported housing to reach some statistical goal in proportions of Black and White. In time, the author changed his position, as indicated in the introduction to the 1987 edition of Affirmative Discrimination. In particular, he saw the virtue and necessity of race preference in admission to institutions of higher education, recognizing the degree to which slavery and discrimination had placed blacks in a unique position of disadvantage, and the imperative for a democratic society to incorporate in its leading institutions all major elements of the population.

Necrolinguistics refers to linguistic-death-in-life, a situation in which languages are incarcerated, leaving folk in linguistic limbo. It names the process by which people come to lack the ability to use at least one language well, and includes those who are tongue-locked because their languages are incarcerated in one or more ways. In illustrating how and why the linguistic experience of Black folk inspires the term necrolinguistics, examples from slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and neocolonialism are provided to document the reality of linguistic-death-in-life. The main assumption of this study is that we can investigate the humanism of institutions belonging to any epoch, regime, or society through its linguistic posture and practice. It is noted that many sub-Saharan African languages are on death row, with many of its speakers stranded in semilingualism (or plummeting linguistic competence), peculiar kinds of monolingualism, or a kind of unilateral bilingualism, asymmetrical bilingualism. Each of these states is elaborated using examples: a native American, “White Thunder” (semilingualism); Jacques Derrida, a Franco-Maghrebian Jew (discordant monolingualism); and the august personality of Léopold Sédar Senghor (unilateral bilingualism). But the paper ends on a bright note, recognizing that, though the linguistic muzzle muffles Black culture and humanity, the resilience of Black folk is evident through their development of patois, pidgins, and creoles.

Walter White, the blond, blue-eyed Atlantan, was a voluntary Negro, that is, an African American who appears to be White but chooses to live in the Black world and identify with its experiences. He joined the NAACP national leadership in 1918 as assistant secretary and became secretary in 1931, serving at this post until his death in 1955. His tenure was marked by an effective public antilynching campaign and organizational stability and growth during the Depression years and by controversy over his leadership style. For him, posing as a Caucasian—and then telling all who would listen about his escapades—had three interrelated purposes. First, he developed inside information about mob psychology and mob violence, publicity of which was critical to the NAACP's campaign against lynching. Second, White hoped to show Whites in particular the fallacy of racial stereotyping and racial categorization. Third, by emphasizing the dangers he courted—and even embellishing on them—he enhanced his racial bona fides at key times when his Black critics called into question his leadership.

This article investigates why deeply entrenched racial inequality persists into the post-civil rights era in the United States. It challenges individual-level explanations that assume persistent racial inequality is the result of either White bigotry, which is diminishing, or the failure of Blacks to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. We propose an alternative explanation for durable racial inequality. Contemporary color lines, we argue, result from the cumulative effect of racial discrimination and exclusion, a process in which Whites accumulate racial advantages to the detriment of African Americans and Latinos. These cumulative inequalities are produced and sustained by competition between racial groups to acquire and control jobs and other resources, and by institutional practices and public policies. Individual choice in the form of intentional racism has little to do with the persistence of racial inequality. Our analysis suggests that Americans' current understanding of the concept of equality of opportunity is out of sync with the realities of durable racial inequality, and needs to be revised.

This exploratory study makes a contribution to the literature on antiracism by unpacking the cultural categories through which everyday antiracism is experienced and practiced by extraordinarily successful African Americans. Using a phenomenological approach, we focus on processes of classification to analyze the criteria that members of the African American elite mobilize to compare racial groups and establish their equality. We first summarize results from earlier work on the antiracist strategies of White and African American workers. Second, drawing upon in-depth interviews with members of the Black elite, we show that demonstrating intelligence and competence, and gaining knowledge, are particularly valued strategies of equalization, while religion has a subordinate role within their antiracist repertoire. Thus, gaining cultural membership is often equated with educational and occupational attainment. Antiracist strategies that value college education and achievement by the standards of American individualism may exclude many poor and working-class African Americans from cultural membership. In this way, strategies of equalization based on educational and professional competence may prove dysfunctional for racial solidarity.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, administrators at the University of Texas at Austin reluctantly decided to admit undergraduate African American students for the 1956 academic year, thus making the University of Texas the first southern school to integrate. While nominally accepting the decision, University of Texas administrators would do as little as they could to help Black students, and they did whatever they could both easily and legally to integrate less than fully. For example, after a faculty committee chose African American Barbara Smith to play the romantic lead in a school opera opposite a White male, the University of Texas president removed her from the production just days before she was to appear, after several White legislators objected and threatened to withhold the University's appropriations. This incident reflected not only the difficulty southern states faced when deciding how—and whether—to fully comply with the Court's mandate in Brown, but also how difficult it was for public universities to achieve full and equal integration in the face of “passive” resistance. Those in power at the University of Texas did, in fact, desegregate their school, but their policies ensured that the University would remain segregated in other meaningful ways. What happened at the University of Texas is instructive in showing how racial equality was never embraced as wholeheartedly as most Americans seem to think. Administrators were able to construct a fantasy of integration, all the while enacting racial policies made through “silent covenants” that ensured that policies conformed to priorities set by the Texas legislators and their White constituents.

The theory of stereotype threat was developed to account for persistent minority underachievement in American colleges and universities. It hypothesizes that members of minority groups underperform academically because of unconscious fears of living up to negative group stereotypes. While evidence pertaining to stereotype threat has been positive, it mostly comes from small experimental studies of selected undergraduate subjects at a few universities. In this paper we test the theory of stereotype threat on a large, representative population of college and university students. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students at twenty-eight academic institutions, we construct scales to measure stereotype threat and use them to predict grades. We uncover a clear process of disidentification in response to minority stereotyping and show how it, along with other theoretically specified mechanisms, undermines the grade performance of minorities.

Despite considerable examination, scholars have yet to definitively establish the relationship between a legislator's racial background and his or her legislative activities. We assess the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation by discerning whether Black members of the U.S. House are more likely to promote group interests in their varied capacities as elected officials than are similarly positioned non-Black legislators. Our empirical tests utilize the most appropriate econometric models and techniques to analyze data from four Congresses spanning two distinctive districting regimes and incorporating several elements of representational behaviors. The findings are clear: Black members represent group interests more vociferously than non-Black members, including liberal non-Black Democrats from similar districts. Moreover, because Black members do not receive electoral benefits for engaging in such behavior, these legislators have policy-based motivation for representing Black interests. These results have profound practical implications for minority political representation and the future of identity politics.

This study examines how dimensions of family structure, specifically marriage and parenthood, influence authority attainment among men and women of different racial and ethnic identities. Using survey data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality, we reach several empirical conclusions. First, the link between family structure and authority attainment is much stronger for women than men, and it revolves more strongly around marriage than parenthood. Second, while marriage decreases White women's odds of holding positions of higher authority, it increases these odds for Black women and Latinas. Third, this “marital bonus” for Black women is most pronounced in predominantly White work settings, allowing them to “play against” stereotypes of group members as single mothers. Fourth, and by contrast, the “marital bonus” for Latinas is strongest in predominantly Latina workplaces, suggesting that Latinas must conform to strong cultural expectations for marriage if they are to gain authority in ingroup work settings. These findings help to illuminate how race, ethnicity, and gender intersect to produce unique linkages between family structure and individual opportunities for organizational power.

This essay observes how race adds value to market exchanges at a fisheries facility in Lisbon, Portugal. I examine scenarios that primarily involved interactions between Portuguese men who sold fish and Cape Verdean immigrant women who purchased it. The scenarios show how race is crystallized in interaction and how differently raced actors co-utilize race to accomplish different ends. When vendors initiated difference recognition for the purpose of promoting a sale, the value of race in that moment was not independent of how Cape Verdean women chose to ratify it. I show how racial knowledge could be mediated through its commodity status, as Cape Verdean women's responses codetermined the political contents of Portuguese men's racial ascriptions. Importantly, the argument is not that subjects independently engaged in the reproduction of their privileged or marginal social status. Rather, the dialectic condition of interaction involved paired forms of engagement that produced difference. An examination of this context helps illuminate when and how race recognition, in public, is identified as neutral or politically charged.

There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support for Black nationalism a function of time? Some scholars note that Black nationalism takes on the character of its material context and that it cannot be easily subsumed into a trans-historical ideology (Reed 2002; Robinson 2001). We indirectly test these hypotheses by examining the relationship between two components of Black nationalism—Black separatism and Pan-Africanism. To test these hypotheses, we analyze data from the 1979–1980 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA). Overall, we establish the determinants of support for Black separatism and Pan-Africanism while distinguishing these ideologies' similarities and differences.

The use of U.S.-oriented racial categories in the 2000 decennial census conducted by the Census Bureau in Puerto Rico provided results that may not accurately reflect social dynamics in Puerto Rico, more generally, and inequality based on race, in particular. This work explores how variations in racial typologies used for the collection of data in Puerto Rico and the methodology used to collect such data produce widely ranging results on racial identification that in turn affect the measurement of the impact of “race” on social outcomes. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how the omission of locally based and meaningful racial terminology from census questionnaires leads to results on racial identification that differ markedly from those found in survey data that include such terminology. In addition, differing strategies to record the racial identification of Puerto Ricans on the island (i.e., self-identification versus identification by others), lead to variations that highlight the changing effect of race on socioeconomic status. Who identifies a person's race affects analyses of how race affects the life chances of individuals in Puerto Rico.

Commentary on the Following Publications

McWhorter, John H.,Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. New York: Free Press, 2000, 285 pages, ISBN 0 684 83669 6, $24.00.

McWhorter, John H.,Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority. New York: Gotham Books, 2003, 264 pages, ISBN 1 59240 001 9, $25.00.

Samuel P. Huntington,Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 448 pages, ISBN: 0-684-86668-4, Cloth, $27.00.

Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters, eds., Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, 448 pages, ISBN: 0-87154-436-9, Cloth, $39.95.

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 400 pages, ISBN: 0-691-12429-9, Paper, $19.95, and 0-691-07471-2, Cloth, $49.95.

Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, 336 pages, ISBN: 0-691-11405-6, Cloth, $37.95.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003, 496 pages, ISBN: 0-8078-2778-9, Cloth, $34.95, ISBN: 0-8078-5616-9, Paper, $19.95.

Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press, 2004, 210 pages, ISBN: 0-814-736-580, Cloth, $60.00, ISBN: 0-814-736-70X, Paper, $20.00.

Pedro A. Noguera,City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2003, 187 pages, ISBN: 0-8077-4382-8, Cloth, $50.00, and 0-8077-4381-X, Paper, $19.95.

Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scoveronick.The American Dream and the Public Schools. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 301 pages, ISBN: 0-19-515278-6, Cloth, $35.00.

David Tyack,Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 237 pages, ISBN: 0-674-01198-8, Cloth, $22.95.

Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom,No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003, 334 pages, ISBN: 0-7432-0446-8, Cloth, $26.00, and 0-7432-6522-X, Paper, $15.00.

Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002, 304 pages, ISBN: 0-456-04393-3, $27.50.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002, 248 pages, ISBN: 0-8070-0976-8, $24.00.

Mark Chaves, Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 291 pages, ISBN 0-674-01284-4, Cloth, $29.95.

Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 263 pages, ISBN 0-520-23394-8, Cloth, $50.00, Paper, $19.95.

Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, 271 pages, ISBN 0-520-23795-1, Cloth, $50.00, Paper, $19.95.