Shayla C. Nunnally

BLACK AMERICANS AND LATINO IMMIGRANTS IN A SOUTHERN CITY: Friendly Neighbors or Economic Competitors? 1

Dramatic demographic changes are occurring in the United States, and some of the most dramatic changes are occurring in the South from Latino immigration. Latinos, by and large, are an entirely new population in the region. How are Black southerners reacting

Racial Homogenization and Stereotypes Black American College Students’ Stereotypes About Racial Groups

Using data from an original survey with a localized convenience sample of Black college students, the 2004 Black American Socialization and Trust Survey (BASTS), this article examines whether Black American college students view other racial groups in stereotypic ways. Results of BASTS suggest that, despite some stereotypic views of racial groups, there is limited support for extreme subscription to either positive or negative stereotypes of racial groups. However, certain positive and negative stereotypes are more evident for specific racial groups. Respondents tend to think about Blacks, Asians, and Latinos in more positive ways than Whites and people in general.

Black elites and Latino immigrant relations in a southern city: do black elites and the black masses agree?

The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse as a function of immigration, both legal and illegal, from Asia, Mexico, and Latin America. Latinos are the fastest growing population, and in 2000, Latinos replaced African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. Although much of the media and scholarly attention has focused on demographic changes in traditional Latino immigrant destinations such as California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, the rapid growth in Latino populations is occurring across the nation. The South has undergone a particularly dramatic alteration in terms of racial composition, with six of seven states tripling the size of their Latino populations between 1990 and 2000. This settlement of Latinos in the South is no more than ten to fifteen years old, and new immigrants from Mexico and Latin America are settling in states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee (Durand, Massey, and Carvet 2000). They bring ethnic and cultural diversity to areas previously defined exclusively as black and white. Not only have new Latino populations migrated to urban and suburban locations in the South, they also have settled in small towns and rural areas, reinforcing projections of the “Latinization” of the American South. Examples of these “New Latino Destinations” (Suro and Singer 2000) include cities such as Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, Greensboro-Winston Salem, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; and Greenville, South Carolina.

(Dis)Counting on Democracy to Work: Perceptions of Electoral Fairness in the 2008 Presidential Election

Allegations of voting irregularities in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections seemingly compromised the integrity of the electoral outcomes. Because elections inform voters and provide them with information to be used in future elections, one can speculate that voters also can learn to fear electoral unfairness in future elections. This article examines how Blacks, Whites, and Latinos assessed prospects for voting irregularities in the 2008 presidential election. Using public opinion data from the National Politics and Socialization Survey, the analysis discerns whether there are racial differences in perceptions of voting irregularities. It tests the influence of trust in national government, ethics about the importance of the vote, and group consciousness (for Black respondents, specifically) in determining fear of voting irregularities. Results indicate generalized fear of voting irregularities, without racial differences. Political distrust enhances fear of voting irregularities. Blacks’ racial consciousness enhances fear of voting irregularities in the 2008 presidential election.

(Re)Defining the black body in the era of Black Lives Matter: the politics of blackness, old and new

ABSTRACT As a social construction, race has been defined differently for various racial groups. The construction of the “black body,” over time, has been fraught with societal, scientific, biological, and educational conceptualizations about the members, who comprise this group. These racial ideas have challenged the humanity, rights, and sociolegal incorporation of “black” persons into American society. In order to grapple with contemporary understandings of the “black body,” we should assess the historical discourses, public policies, and vast contexts, over time, for which the “black body” has struggled to assert its equality and liberation. Through the analysis of unconventional political contexts, such as African-American education, and particularly, historically black institutions, such as historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) and Jim Crow black public high schools, (African)American political development can understand how race influenced the political decisions affecting the democratic experiences, agency, and responses of black Americans to their groups’ racial construction and treatment. Such studies can move black sociopolitical experiences beyond historical lore and situate them within the contemporary context of Black Lives Matter’s arguments, politics, and public policy interests.

Countervailing Forces in African-American Civic Activism, 1973–1994

mation of broad class coalitions that might have championed more egalitarian social and economic policies than American liberals have typically done. Not only, she suggests, does American liberalism often coexist comfortably with ideas and practices of racial exclusion, it often seems to be predicated on these very ideas, illiberal though they seem; only by extruding its most advanced claims to racial equality has American liberalism been able to sustain its long-run political viability. Thus, although Horton’s argument reclaims Hartz’s legacy in placing liberalism at the core of the American political tradition, this is Hartz with a political twist: liberalism is not the natural American condition but rather a political construction, built on an unstable foundation of racial inequality. Horton’s narrative recounts repeated examples of this dynamic: at the end of Reconstruction, when the expansive vision of “anti-caste liberalism” was replaced by the racialist claims of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics; in the Gilded Age, when populism and labor rights foundered on the shoals of cross-racial coalition building; and at the end of the twentieth century, when the inherent contradictions even of the triumphant civil rights movement led once again to a narrowing of liberal vision and the capture of liberal discourse by the political right. The strength of Horton’s history, which is largely secondary, lies not in its revelation of previously little-known events but in its synthetic traversal of a century and a half of liberalism’s fluid encounter with race. The book is not without its frustrations. Its protagonist is an “ism,” which is espoused, voiced, and defined by a bewildering and shifting cast of characters over the course of the narrative. Members of Congress, for example, figure prominently in the articulation of liberalism during Reconstruction. They cede the stage successively to labor leaders and social scientists, movement leaders, and finally to the conservative establishmentarians of the current age. Given this progression, it is not clear how to compare across time the roles of actors so variously located in the American political system in shaping liberal discourse and policy. Unlike Rogers Smith’s Civic Ideals, which treats largely a single institutional field (courts) and a single policy domain (citizenship) over time, Horton’s work ranges widely across the institutional terrain. Thus for Smith, it is easier to attribute causal status to the multiple traditions he elucidates—he has, as it were, held other factors constant. For Horton, however, these factors vary as well, making it harder to discern a clear causal argument and leaving us with a number of unanswered questions. What role has liberalism—in all of its various guises—played in shaping American political development, and how has that connection been imprinted by the persistence of racial inequality? What, finally, is at stake in the debate over whether racial hierarchy is intrinsic to the liberal tradition or external to it, when the consequences of either position are eerily similar and grimly familiar? Horton does not fully answer these questions, but she poses them profoundly and provocatively.

Countervailing Forces in African‐American Civic Activism, 1973–1994 – By Frederick C. Harris, Valeria Sinclair‐Chapman and Brian D. McKenzie

mation of broad class coalitions that might have championed more egalitarian social and economic policies than American liberals have typically done. Not only, she suggests, does American liberalism often coexist comfortably with ideas and practices of racial exclusion, it often seems to be predicated on these very ideas, illiberal though they seem; only by extruding its most advanced claims to racial equality has American liberalism been able to sustain its long-run political viability. Thus, although Horton’s argument reclaims Hartz’s legacy in placing liberalism at the core of the American political tradition, this is Hartz with a political twist: liberalism is not the natural American condition but rather a political construction, built on an unstable foundation of racial inequality. Horton’s narrative recounts repeated examples of this dynamic: at the end of Reconstruction, when the expansive vision of “anti-caste liberalism” was replaced by the racialist claims of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics; in the Gilded Age, when populism and labor rights foundered on the shoals of cross-racial coalition building; and at the end of the twentieth century, when the inherent contradictions even of the triumphant civil rights movement led once again to a narrowing of liberal vision and the capture of liberal discourse by the political right. The strength of Horton’s history, which is largely secondary, lies not in its revelation of previously little-known events but in its synthetic traversal of a century and a half of liberalism’s fluid encounter with race. The book is not without its frustrations. Its protagonist is an “ism,” which is espoused, voiced, and defined by a bewildering and shifting cast of characters over the course of the narrative. Members of Congress, for example, figure prominently in the articulation of liberalism during Reconstruction. They cede the stage successively to labor leaders and social scientists, movement leaders, and finally to the conservative establishmentarians of the current age. Given this progression, it is not clear how to compare across time the roles of actors so variously located in the American political system in shaping liberal discourse and policy. Unlike Rogers Smith’s Civic Ideals, which treats largely a single institutional field (courts) and a single policy domain (citizenship) over time, Horton’s work ranges widely across the institutional terrain. Thus for Smith, it is easier to attribute causal status to the multiple traditions he elucidates—he has, as it were, held other factors constant. For Horton, however, these factors vary as well, making it harder to discern a clear causal argument and leaving us with a number of unanswered questions. What role has liberalism—in all of its various guises—played in shaping American political development, and how has that connection been imprinted by the persistence of racial inequality? What, finally, is at stake in the debate over whether racial hierarchy is intrinsic to the liberal tradition or external to it, when the consequences of either position are eerily similar and grimly familiar? Horton does not fully answer these questions, but she poses them profoundly and provocatively.