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"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's well-known characterization of the twentieth century's greatest challenge, "the problem of the color line", is actually haunted by the specter of the German Jew. What The Souls of Jews? asks readers to take seriously, then, is how our ideas, and indeed intellectual work itself, is shaped by and embedded within the networks of people, places, and prevailing contexts of its time. The major social, political, and economic events of Du Bois's own life - including his time spent living and learning in a late nineteenth century Germany defined in no small part by its violent antisemitism - comprises the soil from which his most serious ideas about race, racism, and the global color line spring forth"--

Through a case study of an ongoing diversity initiative at Diversity University (DU), a public, flagship university in the U.S. South, the author's research advances understanding of the discursive relationship between neoliberalism and contemporary racial ideology. As part of a larger ethnographic project, the author draws on more than ten years worth of diversity discourse at DU to illuminate diversity's economization: the process whereby specific formations of economic values, practices, and metrics are extended toward diversity as justification for DU's efforts. The analysis responds to three questions: (1) How is diversity economized by the organization? (2) How is this economization articulated through organizational discourse on diversity? and (3) How does the economization of diversity potentially reconfigure race and racial subjectivities? The findings reveal three interrelated processes that facilitate diversity's economization: diversity as investment, diversity metrics, and diversity as affective labor. Together these processes congeal and convert multicultural principles and practices into economic ones. Consequently, diversity's economization recasts nonwhite racial subjectivity as human capital for DU and its white publics, minimizing and entrenching existing racial inequality in the process.

Despite record investment in diversity infrastructure, racial inequality persists in higher education. This article examines, through a case study of diversity's articulation process, how diversity is defined, organized, and implemented within an American public flagship university. My findings reveal what I characterize as a diversity regime: a set of meanings and practices that institutionalizes a benign commitment to diversity, and in doing so obscures, entrenches, and even intensifies existing racial inequality by failing to make fundamental changes in how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed. My concept of a diversity regime helps explain how and why organizational commitments to multiculturalism and diversity often fall short in practice. The concept of a diversity regime also helps us better understand the underlying processes that perpetuate racial inequality.

Sociologist James M. Thomas (JT) examines how public and scientific accounts of racism draw upon medical and psychological models, and how this contributes to our understandings of racism as a medical, rather than social, problem.

AbstractSince its publishing in 1997, Charles Mills's The Racial Contract has changed the way in which sociologists think about and practice the study of race and racism. Nevertheless, it is my belief that this work has not received its rightful place among other canonical works within the field. This article, then, is an attempt to show the utility and creativity within which this work has been used by a number of scholars within the critical race discourse. For it is this body of work that holds the most promise for not only opening new doors in the study of race and racism, but also for liberating us from the racial contract under which we live.

A tale of two plantation museums: The Whitney exclusively focuses on the lives of enslaved people, while McLeod is designed to be inclusive of the lives of enslaved and free people, both black and white.

Preface and acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Psychopathology and difference from the nineteenth century to the present -- The long, slow burn from pathological accounts of race to racial attitudes as pathological -- Hatred and the crowd : World War I and the rise of a psychology of racism -- The holocaust and post-war theories of antisemitism and racism -- Race and madness in mid-twentieth-century America and beyond -- The modern pathologization of racism -- Conclusion: the specter of science in twenty-first-century racial discourse -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the authors

A critical examination of affective labour based on ethnographic fieldwork. It traces the centrality of affective labor in enabling and constraining prevailing norms and practices of race, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality across multiple spatial contexts.

AbstractOn 25 January 2017 then‐President Trump issued Executive Order 13,767 "Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvement" which designated dozens of new miles of barrier construction in Hidalgo County and surrounding municipalities in the Texas Rio Grande Valley (RGV). In response, a multitude of political organizations known as the No Border Wall Coalition (NBWC) mobilized in an effort to demilitarize their communities. Our analysis focuses on three organizations within the NBWC—the RGV Sierra Club, Texas Civil Rights Project, and the South Texas Human Rights Center. These organizations, and others, are calling for an end to encroaching physical walls, a proliferation of surveillance technologies, and an expansion of military‐police enforcement personnel. Using a triangulation of qualitative methods, we identify three campaigns of resistance used by the NBWC: protecting the environment, defending landowner rights, and preventing migrant deaths. Our analysis reveals how each of these campaigns helps bring together a diverse set of political organizations and interests into a collective web and narrative structure, and underscores the common formation of what we designate as a multitude. We show how this multitude transforms RGV communities "from below," as the NBWC reckons with environmental degradation, the suspension of civil and political rights, and humanitarian harms.

Militarization on the US–Mexico border has intensified in America's post-9/11 War on Terror, while America's War on Drugs has escalated militarization in America's urban core. This infusion of military weapons and tactics along the border and within America's urban core produces devastating effects on communities of color. Yet, to date, few critical race scholars attend to the Wars on Terror and on Drugs as two sides of the same coin. This article serves as a bridge between US–Mexico border studies and critical race studies vis-à-vis a theorization of a thickening military-police assemblage birthed by the War on Drugs, and intensified by the War on Terror. To delineate this assemblage, we respond to two key questions: how and to what degree has the US–Mexico border served as a staging ground for US (para)military and surveillance strategies at home and abroad? and how do discourses on America's urban core compare and contrast with those on its southern border? We draw upon the cases of Esequiel Hernández, Jr. and Michael Brown, two teenagers whose lives were taken by this assemblage, to frame these questions. Our analysis reveals material, symbolic, and affective links between America's militarization on the southwest border and within its urban core.

AbstractSince the early 1960s, there has been a movement among activists, scholars, and policymakers to redefine racism as a psychopathological condition, identifiable and treatable through psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. This development reflects, and is reflected by, the popular framing among mass media and ordinary social actors of racism and racist events as individual pathology rather than as a social problem. This shifting perspective on racism, from a social problem and a system to an individual pathology, has increasingly become a part of academic and psychiatric discourse since Jim Crow. In this article, we have two aims: first, to trace the emergence of "psychopathological racism"; second, to illustrate the relationship between "psychopathological racism" and "colorblind racism" in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the psychopathological view of racism compliments colorblindness in that larger structural issues are dismissed in favor of individual pathos. Furthermore, psychopathological explanations for racism dismiss socio-political contexts, eschewing the contributions of well over fifty years of social scientific research in the process.

Law enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border region has significantly changed since the 1970s. Currently, Latinas/os make up more than half of the agents who patrol the southern border region. The Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley, in particular, has transformed from a predominantly Anglo police establishment to one with a heavy presence of Mexican American agents within local and federal agencies. Though responsible for managing the flows of bodies, narcotics, and would-be terrorists from illegally crossing into the United States, the institutional and social vestiges of this region's racialized past continues to inform practices of agents in the field, including those of Mexican American descent. In this article, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork, participant observations, and in-depth qualitative interviews with enforcement agents situated in the Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley to investigate what we describe as a phenomenology of racial power among enforcement agents, or the tethering of power, subjectivity, and embodied racialized practices in their day-to-day lives.