Black campus leaders say their careers can be deeply rewarding, even as they are taxing. So why are Black employees so sharply underrepresented at the top ranks of the higher education ecosystem? Emma Whitford investigates this question in an article from Inside Higher Ed.

Vanessa Lopez-Litttleton and her collaborators write that in higher education, power structures, including anti-Black racism, perpetuate whiteness and thwart the full capability of human potential for Black Americans. The aggregate impact of anti-Black racism, a specific form of racism, potentiates the marginalization of Black Americans.

W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay "The Souls of White Folk" was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others—a kind of racial contempt. Raúl Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune.

Race is a social construct. Racism is a social phenomenon. We know this, and by extension, we may limit our thinking about the impact of racism to our social world. However, there is a preponderance of evidence that connects race and racism to unequal health outcomes. The reality is that our social conditions have a pronounced impact on physiology and health. This article explores the multiple mechanisms by which racism can negatively impact health outcomes in the United States.

In this article by sociologists Jingqiu Ren and Joe Feagin, the authors examine the intersectional locations of Asian Americans facing hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic by assessing the racial, gender, and related symbolism involved in many attacks on those wearing face masks. They propose identification and formation of a broader coalition of Asian Americans with those who share comparable social intersectional locations and identities.

Ninochka McTaggart and Eileen O’Brien approach the discussion of racism from a novel and innovative viewpoint by focusing on majority group advantage, or white privilege. The book first explores the construct of race and the definition of white privilege and then examines the ways in which white privilege manifests in economy, education, criminal justice, and especially within media and pop culture.

While Americans have heard much about white rural Appalachia in recent years, Gone Home, winner of the ASA's 2019 Race, Gender, Class section book award, foregrounds black Appalachian lives, providing a critical corrective to the whitewashing of Appalachia. Using more than 150 oral history interviews, Brown tells stories of African Americans living and working in coal towns, showing the shifting nature of collective identity and struggles over labor and representation. Appalachia is much more diverse than many have realized, and this examination of race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region provide rich context for our current historical moment.

Forty years ago, Langdon Winner asked, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Despite decades of theoretical and empirical indications that they do, we still find comfort in the myth that the things we create are void of politics. This is especially true for diagnostic tools and algorithms. After all, science is objective and apolitical, isn’t it? And digital algorithms certainly cannot be biased. So when we combine the two, we are guaranteed objective analysis and assessment, right? (Spoiler Alert: No). This article explores the racial bias built into algorithms used to assess healthcare needs. For a deeper dive into the intersection of race and technology, check out The New Jim Code.

In an era of mass incarceration in the United States, neighborhood context plays a significant role in demographic patterns of imprisonment. This paper examines the pre-prison neighborhood environment of racial and ethnic groups within the Massachusetts prison admission population. The data include over 12,000 prison records of individuals sentenced to state prison for a criminal offense between 2009 and 2014. Findings indicate significant spatial variation across racial groups: The most disadvantaged pre-prison neighborhoods exist in small cities outside of Boston.