https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/dubois-review

Du Bois Review, Cambridge, MA (2024)

11/18/2024

You can now read more than 5,000 open access Political Science and International Relations articles from Cambridge University Press journals including the American Political Science Review, Review of International Studies, International Organization, the European Political Science Review, Political Analysis, the British Journal of Political Science, and many more.

https://cup.org/4hLhJqV

Whether you study theory or public policy, methods or populism, we have it covered.

11/18/2024

New from DBR:
Examining the Racial and Gendered Impacts of Police-Initiated Contacts on Help-Seeking
- Heather Zaykowski and Aria Massoudi

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X2400016X

It is well known that marginalized communities of color, particularly young Black men, are more likely to experience police-initiated contact that other groups. Research suggests that these events contribute to legal cynicism, or the belief that the law and its agencies are ineffective, unwilling to help, and untrustworthy. In turn, cynical orientations limit one’s willingness to call the police to help. However, recent work on marginalized women suggests that despite holding cynical attitudes towards the police, their immediate needs for safety and services supersede these beliefs. The current study examines the racialized and gendered linkages between police-initiated contact and help-seeking outcomes (reporting crime, calling for an emergency, and seeking help from police for non-emergencies).

Using data from the Police Public Contact Survey (from the Police Public Contact Survey–2020) results indicate that Black and Hispanic participants were less likely than White participants to seek help. However, Black and Hispanic women were more likely than their male counterparts for calls for help regarding a crime or disturbance. Across all outcomes, police-initiated contact was associated with higher rates of help-seeking. Perceived illegitimacy of street stops reduced the odds of reporting crimes to the police. However, perceived traffic stop illegitimacy was not related to help-seeking. Police initiated contacts and perceptions of legitimacy did not moderate the relationships between demographic variables and help-seeking outcomes. Implications for theories on legal socialization and the impact of police-initiated contacts on help-seeking are discussed.

📷: Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

11/14/2024

The Fall 2024 issue of DBR is now available.
All articles are or until Dec 31.
http://cup.org/3URjuZM

In the Fall 2024 issue (21.2) Tony N. Brown and colleagues evaluate the mental health significance among Black adults of Obama’s 2012 re-election; Sebastian Jackson explores in*******al intimacy in twentieth-century South Africa; Allen Heffner looks at racialized differences in impression management among job seekers; and Jauhara Ferguson examines American identity among U.S. Black Muslims.

Other themes in the issue include the impact of skin tone on perceived levels of attraction; Black American centrality in the age of the Black European renaissance; debt as racialized violence and how women resist; and quantitative inquiry in the early sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois.

11/12/2024

New from DBR:
The Weight of It All: An Analysis of Help-Seeking Behavior Among Black and White College Women

-Makeiva Jenkins and Justine Tinkler

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000158

Sociologists often interpret racial differences in help-seeking behavior in the United States as stemming from differences in cultural capital, an implication being that those who hesitate to seek help lack understanding of how important it is for success. In this paper, we draw on the work of W. E. B Du Bois and research on gender and racial stereotypes to show that it is not a lack of understanding about the importance of help-seeking, but rather, Black women’s double consciousness that underlies their reluctance to seek help relative to White women. Through twenty-nine in-depth interviews with Black and White college-aged women, we investigate how they make meaning of two competing ideals: the need to be seen as a strong woman and the need for help and social support. We identify a discourse around gender stereotypes for White participants and intersectional stereotypes for Black participants. Where Black and White women experience a consciousness born out of their marginalization relative to men, comparing how they differently navigate stereotypes about strong women reveals the analytic power of Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. First, the “veil” reveals the racialized gender stereotypes Black women worry they might confirm by seeking help. Second, Black women’s sense of “twoness” means they more often than White women saw their help-seeking behaviors as reflecting negatively on their broader community. Finally, consistent with Du Bois’s point that “second sight” brings awareness but not liberation, we find that even though Black women were hyperaware of the disadvantages of not seeking help, they tended more often than White women to reach a breaking point before seeking it.

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

11/11/2024

New from DBR:
Africa in Du Bois’s Internationalist Thinking

-Navid Hassanzadeh

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000146

This article addresses the recent interest in Black Internationalism in the history of political thought and related fields by engaging with a portion of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1868–1963) work. It examines in particular how Du Bois treats Africa in his published and unpublished writings from the 1910s to the 1940s in light of the challenges of world war and continued imperial expansionism in the global South. I argue that through a rhetorical framing of problems on the continent, and by situating Africa in relation to global economic problems as well as the goal of long-lasting peace, Du Bois comes up with novel approaches to war and empire, as well as solutions to the problems that they pose. I conclude by reflecting on how he can contribute to debates on Black Internationalism today.

Image: 1922 Map of Africa via Wikimedia Commons.

11/05/2024

New from DBR:
Racial Capitalism in an Ethnic Minority Border Region: Husbandry Development in Altay Prefecture, Xinjiang, China
-Yao Qu

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000109

In the social, historical, and political context of Xi Jinping’s China, particular forms of racialization and racial capitalism have emerged in Altay Prefecture, the homeland of ethnic Kazakhs on China’s northwest border. This study examines the husbandry industry in Altay Prefecture to elucidate how Xi’s China has built a mode of racial capitalism through the management of Kazakh land, ethnicity, and culture. Within the framework of a case study, I employ document collection and participant observation methods to gather data that are then interpreted through critical policy analysis. The research shows that Kazakhs have been racialized based on their mobile pastoral traditions, enslaved in the “debt economy,” and exploited through husbandry policies and programs. The particular ways in which husbandry has been restructured and assimilated into Chinese industrial production chains exploit and reproduce the Kazakh-Han hierarchy and segregation. This close look at racial capitalism in Altay sheds light on the operations of Xi’s ecological civilization and war on poverty policies in an ethnic minority border region and discusses how they align with the broader geopolitics of the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

11/05/2024

New from DBR:

U.S. Residents’ Current Attitudes toward Immigrants and Immigration: A Study from the Life In Hampton Roads Survey
- Daniel K Pryce

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000171

Immigration is a fiery topic in U.S. society, as it generally brings to a boil native-born citizens’ disparate attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. While immigration has its fierce supporters and opponents alike, the topic provides fodder for politicians who use it to stoke the fear of an impending “immigrant invasion” among citizens. This is why scholars must regularly undertake empirical studies to assess community members’ views about immigrants and immigration in U.S. society. To add to the contemporary immigration debate, I analyze data from a random sample of 610 respondents who reside in the seven cities that make up the Hampton Roads region of Southeast Virginia (this region has approximately 1.5 million people). The results show that younger people, the more highly educated, and males were of the opinion that immigration is generally good for the Hampton Roads economy. Moreover, participants who did not believe that immigration increased crimes rates or that recent immigrants will take jobs away from Hampton Roads residents agreed that immigration is generally good for the Hampton Roads economy. Finally, respondents who were pleased with the quality of life in both their neighborhood and city believed that immigration has a positive impact on Hampton Roads’ economy. The implications of my findings for scholars, elected officials, community members, public policy, and future research are discussed.

11/02/2024

Harvard specialists in history, sociology, government, political theory, and psychology exchanged views during recent symposium.

10/31/2024

New from Du Bois Review:

How the Struggle for Public Health in the Jim Crow South Reflected & Reinforced Systemic Racial Health Inequality

- Cheryl Elman, Kathryn M. Feltey, Barbara Wittman, Corey Stevens & Molly B. Hartsough.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000092

The twenty-first century COVID-19 epidemic revealed a U.S. public health system that countenanced health inequities and a U.S. public that resisted disease containment policies. This crisis, however, was only the most recent chapter in a longer struggle in the United States to institutionalize public health. We focus on two early twentieth-century public health campaigns in the American South, the unhealthiest U.S. region at the time. Black southerners—denied basic health, political, economic, and social rights under a rising Jim Crow regime—self-organized health services networks, including through the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the Negro Organization Society of Virginia, and the Moveable School (1890s–1915). Around the same time, a philanthropic project, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (RSC, 1909–1914), seeded state-level public health agencies in eleven southern states, thereby installing public health in a top-down manner. We use archival data sources to explore key similarities and differences in the public health concerns and coalition-building approaches of each campaign and southern resistance to their efforts. We find Black-led campaigns often blurred the color line to form coalitions that provided services to the underserved while tackling environmental health risks at the community level. In contrast, RSC affiliates in southern states, as directed by RSC administrators, provided health services as short-term public dispensaries. Services reached Black and White communities willing to participate but in a manner that did not overtly challenge Jim Crow-era practices. Southern resistance to public health expansion persisted under each approach. The legacies of these struggles remain; the political-economic and ideological forces that limited public health expansion while marginalizing Black community health efforts reverberate in public health inequities today.

📷: Showing people hookworm at an RSC dispensary. Waller County, Texas. Rockefeller Archive Center. https://resource.rockarch.org/story/public-health-how-the-fight-against-hookworm-helped-build-a-system/hookworm_rf-photos_b60_f1362_1-1/

10/17/2024

New from Du Bois Review:
Organizing Black Business: The National Negro Business League, 1900–1915

- Adam Chamberlain & Alixandra B. Yanus

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000134

Founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900, the National Negro Business League (NNBL) sought to unite Black business owners, promote entrepreneurship, and develop economic power. Despite its prominence in the early twentieth century, the group declined after Washington’s death in 1915. As a result, little is known about its organizational development. This study uses data on state and local Negro Business Leagues (NBLs), along with active and life members of the NNBL, to better understand the group’s first fifteen years. Analyses reveal that the NNBL’s development reflected closely the social and economic context of early twentieth century Black America. Generally speaking, the NNBL was stronger in states with larger urban Black populations and where the value of Black-owned farms was higher, consistent with the importance of agriculture to Black business during this era. These results both shed light on the NNBL’s early success and suggest avenues for future research on its decline.

📷: The National Negro Business League in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, on August 18, 1909 - Wikimedia commons

10/13/2024

New from DBR on :
Rethinking Historical Sociology: Learning from W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Radical Tradition

- Ricarda Hammer and José Itzigsohn

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000110

For too long, questions of racism and colonialism have not been part of historical sociology’s understanding of modernity. Yet, a new generation of scholars has begun to address this, placing racism and empire at the center of their inquiries. This new generation looks to previously marginalized scholars for guidelines and inspiration. In line with this shift in historical sociology, this paper brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in the Black Radical Tradition to bear on longer-standing analytic and methodological debates: How do these authors allow us to think about theory-building and comparison? What is the goal of explanation? How should we approach archives and sources? Building on these insights, this paper explains how the work of Du Bois and the Black Radical Tradition provides a model for a new historical sociology, and a framework that allows us to see the connections between racism, colonialism, and modernity.

09/19/2024

New from DBR on :
Miscegenation Madness: In*******al Intimacy and the Politics of ‘Purity’ in Twentieth-Century South Africa

- Sebastian Jackson

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000080

In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of in*******al s*x involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/s*x taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, q***r studies, and critical race theory.

📷: detail from http://digilibrary.unisa.ac.za/digital/collection/p21049coll6/id/589/rec/1

09/19/2024

New from DBR on :
Four More Years! or So What?: The Mental Health Significance of Barack Obama’s 2012 Presidential Re-Election among Black Adults

- Tony N. Brown, Quintin Gorman, Jr., Julian Culver & Asia Bento

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000043

This study investigated the mental health significance of Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election among Blacks. Upon his re-election, we hypothesized Blacks would either feel symbolic empowerment or relative deprivation. They would feel symbolic empowerment because a man who identifies as Black won re-election to the nation’s highest office. His second victory should generate optimism, given his status as a historic first. Alternatively, they would feel relative deprivation because The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 curtailed what Obama could achieve. More important, he withered when afforded opportunities to challenge White supremacy and championed individual responsibility. Using a quasi-experimental design with nationally representative survey data from the 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we predicted Blacks’ preelection and postelection poor mental health days. We found no time period main effects. However, Black men with less than a college degree experienced 1.11 more poor mental health days postelection whereas Black men with a college degree or more experienced 2.93 fewer poor mental health days postelection. These findings support relative deprivation theory.

📷: President Obama with full cabinet by Chuck Kennedy. Public Domain.

05/17/2024

New from DBR on :
Principle-Policy and Principle-Personal Gaps in Americans’ Diversity Attitudes
- Neeraj Rajasekar, Evan Stewart & Douglas Hartmann

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000079

Americans generally celebrate the abstract principle of diversity, but research suggests that they have a comparatively lower (1) favorability towards policies that promote diversity and (2) sense of personal closeness with others from diverse backgrounds. The current study analyzes nationally representative survey data to assess such “principle-policy gaps” and “principle-personal gaps” in Americans’ diversity attitudes. We find that these attitudinal gaps indeed exist and are substantial in the general population. We also consider how individual-level factors relate to these attitudinal gaps. Following common findings in previous research, we find that participant racial identity and political partisanship have statistically significant relationships with these attitudinal gaps. But our overall findings illustrate that principle-policy gaps and principle-personal gaps in diversity attitudes are fairly substantial and prevalent across Americans who vary by race, politics, and several other individual-level factors. We consider our findings in the current social and political context, and we discuss directions for future inquiry.

📷: Photo by Matheus Viana on Unsplash.

05/13/2024

New from DBR on :

Foreshadowing Du Bois: James McCune Smith and the Shaping of Nineteenth Century Black Social Scientists

- Kelly Harris
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000067

W. E. B. Du Bois is widely regarded as the foundational Black social scientist in the United States. He lived during a historical period when social science was predominantly considered the creation and domain of White scholars. In primary sociology texts, Du Bois is typically mentioned in passing, often as the sole Black social scientist acknowledged in social science historiography. At the other end of the spectrum, many Black social scientists today begin their exploration with Du Bois, recognizing his brilliant and groundbreaking contributions. However, both of these approaches seemingly imply that there were no notable Black social scientists before Du Bois. This paper aims to challenge that assumption by examining early nineteenth-century Black social science through the lens of James McCune Smith. Despite being a close friend to prominent figures like Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, and Alexander Crummell, McCune Smith has been relegated to a historical footnote in most accounts, except in a few recent notable works.

📷: James McCune Smith. The Afro-American Press, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

05/13/2024

New from DBR on :
Royalty, Racism, and Risk: An Analysis of Du Bois’s Thesis on Black Masculinity Among Young Black People with Diverse Sexual Identities
- Sandra L. Barnes
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000055

W. E. B. Du Bois provides a thesis on Black masculinity formation that includes primary traits of this social identity and dynamics that can engender or stymie its development. Yet his framework does not directly reference s*xual minorities. This study considers whether and how Du Bois’s framework on masculinity is germane to the experiences of young Black people with diverse s*xual identities by assessing whether they recount similar tropes and features. The analysis is theoretically informed by a New Millennium Du Boisian Mode of Inquiry and a qualitative analysis for 168 young Black persons who reside in the South. Three themes emerge that adopt, amplify, and adapt dimensions of Du Bois’s thesis and demonstrate that key aspects of his framework resonate with Black persons excluded from his original work. Despite nuanced s*xual identities, it was common for individuals to espouse Du Bosian tenets associated with Black masculinity such as a protector/provider trope, respectability, racial pride, educational attainment, economic mobility, and self-help as well as concerns about racism. These findings inform research on expectations about masculinity into which many men are generally socialized as well as possible hierarchies among intersecting social identities.

📷: Jakob Owens. Silhouette of man standing during sunset. Via Unsplash.

03/25/2024

New from DBR on :
Oppressive Even As It Inspires: Approaching Black American Centrality in the Age of the Black European Renaissance

- Laura Visser-Maessen and Jorrit Van den Berk

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X2400002X

In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.

📷: J***y Pitts via Artsy.net
New Europe, London. From the series Afropean, n/a

02/22/2024

New from DBR on :
How American Am I?: Comparing American Identity among U.S. Black Muslims
- Jauhara Ferguson

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000018

Much sociological attention has focused on Black identity within the United States. Less attention, however, has been given to understanding how immigrant and native-born streams of U.S. Black Muslims articulate American identity. In this study I ask: how do second-generation Black American Muslims and indigenous Black American Muslims compare in the ways they narrate connections among race, American identity, and Islam? Using data from thirty-one in-depth interviews with Black Muslims living in Houston, TX, I find that racial double-consciousness complicates American identity for respondents. While indigenous Black American respondents critique racist U.S. histories and structural inequities, I argue that in certain spaces Muslim identity reinforces American identity. For second-generation respondents, however, American identity is reinforced through embracing immigrant status. This study extends Du Boisian double-consciousness by making a case for “layered double-consciousness.” I argue that layered double-consciousness better explains how Black Muslims perceive their racial, religious, and national identities across macro levels within the context of the United States and meso levels within the Muslim American community.

📷: Photo by RDNI stock project on Pexels