Recent scholarship has significantly advanced social scientific understanding of the socioeconomic consequences of skin tone and ethnoracial identity in several Latin American countries. We update and extend this literature by conceptualizing colortocracies as countries that exhibit a preference for Whiteness as evidenced by lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher levels of socioeconomic status than their darker-skinned counterparts. Specifically, we test the preference for Whiteness hypothesis using data from the 2018 Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)—a nationally representative dataset covering approximately 90% of the Latin American population (about 578 million people) across sixteen countries. We find strong evidence that wealth-based colortocracies are three times as prevalent throughout Latin America as occupational-based colortocracies. Interviewer-rated skin tone is a stronger predictor of inequality than self-designated racial categories, but the magnitude of its strength is far greater when predicting wealth than occupational status. We conclude that the extent to which colortocracies (e.g., preference for Whiteness) exist in Latin America simultaneously depends on the outcome measure and the country under consideration. We document this cross-national variation and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

The Bahá’í Faith was founded in 1863 in Persia and first publicly mentioned in the United States at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. Growing throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, the germinal American Bahá’í communities established different periodicals with varied foci. The first American Bahá’í periodical to fall under the full aegis of American Bahá’í administrative control was the magazine, World Order (1935-1949). Bahá’ís and non-Bahá’ís published within it and, while not the explicit focus, made many attempts to merge, reconcile, debate, and apply Bahá’í scriptural imperatives and Bahá’í-informed perspectives to the social and spiritual problems of racial prejudice, inequality, segregation, and disunity. But their vast heterogeneity, and sometimes strange, divergent, and contradictory stances on the very definition of “race” together gesture toward the need to understand how, why, and which strategies and logics functioned to mutually constrain and enable the American Bahá’í discursive articulation of the “race” concept. Toward that end, I map the landscape of such discourse with attention to how race was simultaneously understood as both a “cultural” marker and a category like “caste”. I thus explore these discursive uses as they developed against the backdrop of the Great Depression, eugenic race science and its backlash, Aryanism in World War II, and the continued debate over Jim Crow, racial equality, and the scientific and religious connotations of the category of “race” itself.

Scholars rightly argue that partiality towards one’s children hinders justice and that some expressions of partiality constitute illegitimate conferrals of advantage. Some have extended this critique to elite educational experiences as a form of unjust advantage conferral. In this paper, I argue that for Black parents, the pursuit of elite educational experiences for their children may function as legitimate partiality and advantage conferral. I motivate my argument in the corrective capability of elite education, both its ability to redress past exclusion and its potential to protect Black people from some societal disadvantage, as well as the operationalization of Blackness that suggests that educational advantage conferral might promote racial advancement. Ultimately, I argue, the provision of elite education for Black families remediates past injustices while mitigating present disparities in ways that redistribute opportunity towards educational justice.

This paper compares Harry Haywood’s, James S. Allen’s, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s interpretations of Reconstruction and its relationship to their political and social projects. By comparing their approaches, we gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between race and democracy, the political significance of Reconstruction, and reading Black history. The difference between their readings of Reconstruction was in Allen and Haywood’s belief in a Marxist, stagist teleology and Du Bois’s belief in a more open, contingent temporality. Allen’s and Haywood’s stagist approach attempted to complete Reconstruction’s unfinished revolution by establishing the right to self-determination. Skeptical of the revolution needed for self-determination, Du Bois instead proposed that Black people should follow Reconstruction through economic cooperation. Black people would create a consumer cooperative movement that would help them secure democratic control within the confines of segregation. However, Haywood’s and Allen’s approach critiques the faulty non-violent presupposition within Du Bois’s program.

Comparing the coverage by The New York Times and two Black newspapers of four episodes of protests about police violence in New York in the late 1990s reveals key differences in the implicit political agendas of the two sources. The New York Times implicitly reinforced dominant political institutions and focused on short-term issues. It emphasized partisan politics as protest motivations, quoted police extensively and often printed material sympathetic to police, and typically portrayed protesters as angry or motivated by politics. Black newspapers emphasized collective resistance to long-term systemic problems with police, moral condemnation of police violence, the connection of current protests with past oppression and struggles, the involvement of youth, and Black immigrants’ growing awareness of anti-Blackness. The findings of this study explain how racialized collective memories and collective identities are formed, sustained, and/or erased in interaction with institutional politics in media discourse.

On March 25, 1994, the Boston Police Department executed a “no-knock” raid that ended in the death of Reverend Accelyne Williams, a seventy-five-year-old retired Black Caribbean minister. Acting on a faulty tip, a thirteen-member SWAT team stormed into the wrong Dorchester apartment, wrestled Williams to the ground, and triggered a fatal stress-induced heart attack. His death became a defining tragedy in Boston’s history of police violence and raised urgent questions about accountability. This article situates the Williams case within the broader history of Black Boston’s freedom struggle against police civil rights violations from the early twentieth century to the 1990s. Through a controlled case comparison of four major incidents, we analyze how moments of police brutality became catalysts for Black political mobilization, ministerial activism, and community resistance. The study addresses three central questions: How does the Williams case fit within the trajectory of Boston’s racial justice struggles? How do such incidents illuminate the city’s persistent racial inequality and segregation? And what can these histories teach us about the broader U.S. movement to “police the police”? Drawing on original archival research, we demonstrate that police abuses have consistently spurred waves of organized resistance in Boston, shaping both local and national debates on civil rights. We identify key historical breaks, continuities, and paradoxes in the struggle for accountability, showing how the demand to “police the police” has long been central to Black political life.

Africa-West migration is on the increase. For many young Nigerians, emigration is a goal that must be achieved by any means possible, regardless of the realities in receiving countries. With exposure to new environments, migrants can identify with their home culture, assimilate the lifestyles of the host country, or find a middle ground. This study examined the patterns of self-identification among Nigerian migrants and their understanding of the complex concept of “immigrant integration.” The study explores the (dis)connections between migrants’ self-identification and their viewpoint of immigrant integration. The study analyzed thirty qualitative interviews with sixteen Nigerian migrants in the United States (US) and fourteen in the United Kingdom (UK). The study employed a thematic analysis approach and utilized NVivo (version 14) to manage the data, finding that most participants reported a stronger allegiance to Nigerian culture than to the host country, with their justifications primarily revolving around food, social life, and citizenship. Others identified fully with the host country, primarily because of unpleasant experiences in their country of origin. Using W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness,” the study reveals that, despite an overwhelming identification with their country of origin, most participants conceived of immigrant integration as assimilation—a process of “sinking,” “learning,” “assimilating,” and “adopting” the culture of the host country. The study suggests that migrants’ identity and identification are inherently fluid. The disconnect between self-identification and the understanding of integration is attributed to the framing of immigrant integration by host governments and migrants’ urge for a positive migration experience in the host country.

The racial segregation of schools is commonly cited as the foundational injustice of the U.S. education system and an ongoing impediment to educational equality. For liberal experts and reformers, school segregation is defined as a pattern of racially separate schools serving either White students or students of color. This paper argues that this prevailing understanding of the school segregation issue is intellectually inadequate and politically limiting. Drawing on a case study of Chicago’s movement for racial educational justice in the 1960s, I show that this simple framing of the issue initially gained prominence as an alternative to the more radical and contextualized critique of urban school segregation articulated by local Black grassroots activists. In contrast with official liberal discourse and reform proposals, Black urban activists in the early 1960s challenged school segregation as a set of educational policies and practices that render schools both separate and unequal, locking Black students out of more privileged White schools and contributing to the uneven development of schools across the racial divide. By recovering this suppressed grassroots critique of urban school segregation, this paper calls for a broader theorization of contemporary school segregation as dynamic and relational rather than a static statistical pattern that simply compounds the existing concentration of disadvantage within segregated neighborhoods.

This article explores the theory of racial whitening’s role in the political attempt to reshape the national collective in the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930) to explain the theory’s origins and characteristics and suggest its international relevance. It is argued that this theory—which proposed that Brazil could modernize through interracial marriage and mass European immigration—was not a Brazilian or Latin American peculiarity but was aligned with a transformist strand of previous scientific racialism. The main novelty came from wide political resonance, not intellectual newness. In addition, the article demonstrates that racial whitening oriented the First Republic to construct ambiguous, yet effective, structures of discrimination, aimed at molding the national collective. These structures seem to have anticipated the transformation of racial relations elsewhere, preceding the global shift in the justification of institutional racism from biological to cultural bases after 1945. The article then underscores the importance of understanding historical dependencies and subtle mechanisms through which racism can be perpetuated, especially in societies that claim to be racially progressive.