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In recent decades, sociological studies of black males and of black masculinity in America unfolded with great rapidity. In the 1960s, sociological studies of black males gained currency. Much of their focus has been on the problematic state of black males in education, employment, family life, peer and social relations, and within criminal justice systems. That tradition moved from employing a social problems lens for researching black men to documenting how their efforts in these and other spheres of life reflect creativity and efficacy as much as malaise and despair. Emerging several decades later in sociology, black masculinity studies began with an emphasis on how black males contended with hegemonic masculinity. This tradition moved to explore how sexual, socioeconomic, and other variations in the black male experience elucidated vulnerability as a common feature of that experience, as well as to more extensive visions of black masculinity. New research questions stand before both traditions that constitute the twenty-first-century agenda.

Reviewing A Scholar Denied and placing W.E.B. DuBois among the sociological canon.

Erving Goffman's attention to the concept of framing provided modern sociology with a critical means for expanding explorations of the cultural terrain of meaning-making. Frame analysis concerns the manner in which individuals perceive and respond to particular events and circumstances. Since Goffman's introduction of the term, the concept of framing has been expanded considerably in sociological inquiry. What Goffman and many of his adherents may not have imagined, however, is that frame analysis serves as a useful tool for improved comprehension of how low-income individuals interpret and present images of their social reality. By drawing from literature that makes use of frame analysis in sociological subfields somewhat removed from research on race and poverty and incorporating data from low-income African American men who reside in Detroit, this article explores how these concepts can enrich and advance sociologically grounded cultural inquiry into poverty and argues that scholarly approaches to considering the agency of the poor can be revised and enriched.

In his criticism of scholarly and public utilization of the term underclass, Herbert Gans helped to initiate new and more complex thinking about both the kinds of people that constitute America's most disenfranchised urban constituency and the ways in which more privileged Americans have striven to make sense of them. In forwarding his criticism of the term, Gans helped establish a template for ethnographic and qualitative explorations of America's urban poor that breaks with a rigid and vulgar social problems framing and, instead, invites more provocative and more accurate assessments of the agency of such people. In doing so, he has encouraged recent efforts to offer new framings of this population, which have facilitated new cultural projects in qualitative studies of the African American urban poor. This article briefly reviews Gans's criticism of the term underclass, and then elucidates how that criticism relates to some contemporary scholarly efforts to consider people who would be characterized as underclass as more complex cultural actors—and, indeed, who often are more complicated social beings—than is implied by the label underclass.